Septemer 28, 2020
by Matthew Rothschild, Executive Director
(Matt wrote this prayer in preparation for a panel discussion he is participating in by zoom at Congregation Shaarei Shamayim this afternoon, Sept. 28.)
In the spirit of Yom Kippur, I just want to start by asking forgiveness from the generations behind me for the horrible mess that we’re leaving them and for the perilous state of our democracy at this very moment.
It’s been an awful year, there are no two ways around that.
I’m just glad my father, who fought the Nazis, and my mother, who was active in the civil rights movement, were not alive to see the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake and the rise of a virulent far-right and neo-Nazi movement in America.
And, of course, we’ve got this burgeoning pandemic and the ongoing climate catastrophe on our hands.
And on top of all that, we’ve got a President who is, by his own admission, unwilling to promise a peaceful transition of power and who winks and nods at the white supremacists.
It’s all a little mind-boggling, to say the least, and it can be paralytic.
But we can’t let it be.
Now is the time to exercise our rights, while we still have them.
Especially our right to protest, and our right to vote.
Here in Wisconsin, we used to be the state with the second highest voter turnout in the country, behind only Minnesota. But we slipped to fifth in 2016.
Let’s not slip again. Let’s reclaim our reputation as a stronghold of democracy, and let’s have a massive turnout in this election. I’m hoping for 80 percent myself.
We can do that, despite Scott Walker’s Voter ID law of 2011, which was a flagrant act of voter suppression. The chief of staff of Republican State Senator Dale Schultz observed at the time that many Republican state senators were “giddy,” that’s the adjective he used. Why were they “giddy” at the passage of this law? Because they knew it would suppress the votes of Black people and young people.
And we can have record turnout, despite all the fakery and demagoguery about voter fraud with mail-in ballots.
We can have this record turnout because of two things:
Number one: a tremendously organized pro-democracy nonprofit sector that is working overtime to make sure that every eligible voter has what they need to vote.
I’m on a zoom call every Wednesday at noon with many of these groups, including
League of Women Voters of Wisconsin,
Wisconsin Conservation Voters,
Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice,
Lutheran Office of Public Policy in Wisconsin,
All Voting Is Local, Wisconsin,
and the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, among others.
We’re all working together, problem-solving together, messaging together, and organizing together.
The kol mishpoka, as my dad used to say.
And the second reason we’re going to have record turnout is because of you.
I’m sure you’re doing what I’m doing: leaning on people we know who are apathetic or cynical or reluctant voters, and doing everything in our power to encourage them to vote. Much more phone-banking to people who don’t even know who in the world you are, it’s these not-so-random acts of persuasion that are going to carry the day.
It goes by a fancy new name these days: It’s called “relational organizing.”
But it’s a good old-fashioned recipe, and it really works.
We need to convince all our friends and all our relatives to vote,
and we need to help them get and fill out their absentee ballots,
and we need to help them find their polling places,
and we need to volunteer to drive them to early voting,
and we need to volunteer to drive them to the polls on Nov. 3 with masks on.
Whatever it takes.
The stakes are high; they’ve never been higher.
May this new year be a year of justice,
May this new year be a year of peace,
May this new year be a year of democracy.