Grab a shovel
A parable about people, politics and pulling together

Let’s try this out as a parable. Once, there was a dirt road. And this road, realistic as it was, was also entirely allegorical, lest my neighbors who live along it figure out I’m talking about them. 

The dirt road had survived many years of traffic – walkers and wanderers, horses, cars, perfectly lovely assholes who never even once tore up the road (nor the once-pristine land alongside it) with their perfectly lovely ATVs. Sure, the dirt road got muddy and rutted from time to time. What dirt road doesn’t? But the neighbors, especially the retired ones with tractors and (more than anyone cared to admit) the youth, tended to put things back to rights. 

Then, a season of rather intense rains came up. “This road is built to weather such storms,” the neighbors said. “Sure, we may notice some weak spots, but we can reinforce them. Besides, we have these sturdy culverts to serve as underpinnings of our democracy – ahem, that is, our road.”

The storm season dried up, as storm seasons do. But then it came back. (It was entirely unconnected to the impossibility of man-made climate change yet possibly, it was rumored, created by a man-made weather machine.) The rains poured more upon the earth than it could handle, and both of the road’s culverts plugged up with sand and other misinformation. 

Water overwhelmed the road in these two spots. It eroded the dirt that had made up the road ever since the Founding Fathers shoveled it there.

Now the neighbors – who, like the road itself, must remain completely allegorical – who lived near the second culvert got to work. Even though, every now and again, their beloved road was traversed by migrants and single mothers and book-learned perfessers, they still whipped out a Bobcat and unplugged the culvert and did their darndest to repair the road. 

However, the neighbors who lived near the first culvert felt paralyzed. That culvert rested on the property of a perfectly lovely asshole, and the neighbors held the perfectly lovely belief that he might shoot them for perfectly lovely trespassing if they so much as eyed the blockage. He was the sort of perfectly lovely asshole who let his perfectly lovely trash blow into his neighbors’ yards, among other perfectly lovely neighborly behaviors. 

It didn’t matter that this perfectly lovely asshole relied on the dirt road as much as everyone else did. No one dared to challenge his perfectly lovely bluster, and he sure didn’t want to see other people benefiting in life when he, himself, was perfectly miserable and afraid deep down inside.

So, with one more rainstorm, the road fell open, and everyone who lived down-road from the culvert was stuck there forever, and no one from the rest of the world could get in, and the neighbors fell into an HBO-grade dystopia.

But maybe the allegoric neighbors aren’t stuck. Maybe they’ll fix the culvert, some way, despite the perfectly lovely asshole and his perfectly lovely gun collection.

I don’t know how the parable ends. Because I don’t get to write the full ending. I’m just one of the neighbors, and there are millions of us.

But I do get one say in what we do with this beautiful dirty ol’ road of ours. Of course there are going to be other storms, other problems. Like those washboard ruts that can jostle a Taurus apart at the bolts – how do those even form? But how we fix the road right now matters. 

Look. I’m not apolitical in my writing – I just don’t talk about politics very much. I stand for things that I think shouldn’t need to be stood up for, which becomes political. I started this piece off thinking I wouldn’t tell you how to vote, or who to vote for – not least of all because that is the damn surest way to get perfectly lovely votes for the other guy, for destructive causes.

But, I can’t. I can’t stay quiet. Holy hell, please vote. Please vote for the sake of the environment, the future, our own damn selves. Please vote.

We’re not debating on the best way to accomplish our goals as a community, a state, a nation. We’re not debating which method of taxation is best for stimulating the economy. We’re deciding whether we want to remain a democratic republic. Whether or not we value compassion. We are basically voting on whether we think people are people, or we think only some people deserve to be people.

This isn’t new. It’s just that now the quiet parts are loud. If this makes me political, so be it: I am voting for treating people like people. So what if I – owing to appearance, lineage and a significant share of unearned privilege, will never have to travel the same dirt roads as they do? If the road gets washed out, we all get stuck. 

I don’t want to hear about imperfect choices. This is life, y’all. So vote. Vote like it’s the last time you’ll get to, so that it’s not the last time you’ll get to.