Hot 'Make America Hopeful Again' Summer
Zohran-aissance summer meets hot sapphic romance summer, meets hot single lady summer. And more in this week's good reads.
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who started a viral campaign to take down Mike Lee. Check it out!
Two weeks ago I was riding the bus with my daughter and a friend visiting from out of town, when we passed a polling spot outside. My friend asked about NYC’s mayoral election. As I explained the race between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, I saw a 30-something woman sitting in front of us take notice. She looked twitchy, as though she wanted to turn around and say something.
A few moments later, she did. She turned and said, “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation…” and I braced for an awkward political confrontation.
Instead she gingerly handed us a flyer—she was canvassing not so much for Mamdani but against Cuomo. She had a helpful flyer titled “The Comeback that No One Asked For” listing the legion misdeeds and literal misdemeanors against New York’s former governor.
I clocked her canvas tote bag, her heavily reused Takeya water bottle, her sensible shoes, her cute bangs that were a bit plastered to her forehead because she’d been out on the streets all day. My hackles immediately went down. She was an organizer.
I know that type because I’ve done it, too. The painful awkwardness. The “I’m out here feeling like a used car salesman” feeling, paired with the optimism that made her get out of bed and put on her best shirt from Everlane and hit the streets anyway. I’ve been there.
We had a nice quick chat with this bus organizer, but she was already scanning to see if there was anyone else she could talk to before letting herself go home for the day. An older man got on the bus and sat down across from her, and I felt so cringe for her as she reached out to him with her flyer.
This time, her attempt was immediately rebuffed. She was met with a barrage of hardcore Cuomo support, and she could hardly get a word out against his monologue before chirping, “Okay thanks for chatting, have a good day!” before alighting off the bus.
As we followed her off the bus I wanted to give her a hug, honestly. Instead I walked a little faster to catch up to her and said, “Thank you for doing this! I support you!” Which also made me feel extremely dorky and earnest and a little embarrassed. But that’s exactly how I felt. Grateful that she was doing the work. Because someone has to do it, and it’s sometimes joyous or gratifying, but also uncomfortable and sometimes excruciating.
When we came home later that evening, there was a Zohran Mamdani flyer hanging on our front door. Another organizer had been out and about on this rainy, airless day, getting the word out.
Thanks to these two organizers, my 6-year-old daughter has asked a lot of questions, and was fully aware of the candidates and the stakes for the primary when election day came and I left the house to go do my own (bare minimum) civic duty of voting.
Mamdani’s “joyous” campaign is said to have knocked on over 1 million doors total with 40.000 volunteers, and an additional 700 volunteers coming out in force on the last day alone. Go ahead, watch this video of Mamdani completing his tour of canvassing the entire island of Manhattan with his volunteers and don’t feel anything—I dare you!
The night of the election, the results came out and my out-of-town friend texted me and said: “Somewhere in NYC Our Bus Lady of the Flyers is doing a happy dance!!”
The next morning, my daughter asked who won and we high-fived. Fresh on the heels of the No Kings protests a few weeks earlier, this felt like a move from the defiant to the hopeful for her, and for us.
Like Garrett Bucks, I know I could be wrong about Mamdani. It could go sideways, he could lose. But I’m old enough to remember Obama, and this feels so much like Obama all over again. I first heard about Obama not from slick ads, but from my fellow college grad students who were taking buses to hear him speak, and doing grassroots campaigning for him.
Obama was another impossibly young newcomer (and not bad on the eyes!!), a relatively unknown person of color with a Muslim-sounding name who supported progressive policies to help people (ex. The Affordable Care Act). He also ran on a campaign of hope and change, not fear.
Powerful people brought out the big guns: The Islamophobia, the claims that he seems nice but will “ruin the economy.” (LOL that these same Wall Street guys ACTUALLY crashed the US economy in 2008, not the nice liberal leader guy).
Their biggest charge against him? His belief in hope and change. They literally called him the “Hopey-Changey” guy to mock his campaign.
I’ve seen all this before. It feels like Obama 2.0. Every time someone who actually wants to change things for the better for the little guy comes along, they tell us we can’t have nice things. They try to convince us that the status quo is good for us, not them—or at the very least, changing the status quo would somehow make things worse if we don’t fall in line.
I say, bring back Hopey-Changey. I’m ready for it.
I liked that part of American history a lot better than this one. Make America Hopey-Changey again.
Also: thank you bus flyer lady, wherever you are! (And your 40,000 friends.)
This week in the links:
-My favorite Zohran-aissance reads from this week
-Hot sapphic romance summer (The MR book club read for July, “Atmosphere” by Taylor Jenkins Reid, is one of many blockbuster sapphic romances out this summer—grab it and join us.)
-Hot single lady summer in the Hamptons
And more…
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