Did you?
Finally! It’s 2021! We thought it would never get here! It’s going to change everything! Or, god forbid, nothing. But we’ll change. It’s the new year. We always change. Or promise to change. Or threaten to change. It’s a thing with us humans — throwing out last year’s calendar is a signal for us to rethink everything we did in the past 365 calendar days and regurgitate, in every way possible, the times we’ve failed to live up to the promises we might have made on that long ago magic day, January 1, 2020.
For most of us 2020 was a year like no other. Between the insanity caused by Donald Trump and his diabolical mob, and the added horror of a full-blown pandemic — made far, far, far worse by Donald Trump’s insane attempts to pretend a pandemic wasn’t ever going to happen under what he laughingly called ‘his watch’ — some of us were dumbfounded and gaslighted and bamboozled, until nationwide splits became rifts and then faults and then chasms and then fissures, and, to our horror, we could see the depths of fiery…
We’re not the doomed or the damned, we just don’t believe in your gods.
Yesterday someone tweeted, “What do atheists do this time of year?” So far it has six thousand comments, two thousand ‘likes’, and a few hundred retweets. Most of the comments were polite, considering the question, and many of them were funny, but the underlying theme seemed to be ‘Huh??’.
I saw a similar, unanswerable question online recently: “What do atheists believe in?”
When we atheists say we’re non-believers we don’t literally mean we don’t believe in anything. We just don’t believe in deities. (It’s sometimes just a way of saying we’re atheists without the baggage.)
“Atheist” is often written with a capital A, as if it’s an organization and not simply, as the dictionary says, “a disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.” …
Leave science out of it
I didn’t do well in grade school. I always thought I was dumb–and it’s possible I really was–but even after the teacher wrote on my third grade report card, “Ramona needs to work on her concentration. She daydreams too much in class”, I saw my lack of interest in learning the hard stuff as little more than a case of misinterpretation. Daydreaming is nothing more than thinking, and thinking, I knew even then, was good.
My mom, always one to let me believe I might be the most important person on the face of the earth (A terrible burden to place on such young shoulders, I know, but back then I enjoyed the hell out of it), sighed over the hard evidence–the C’s and D’s–and winced when she spotted the notation. She was quiet for a minute and then she said, “Well, honey, you know I would never tell you to give up your daydreams. …
You’re asking too much while they’re doing too little
On the day my father died I was involved in a fender-bender. A boy, a brand-new driver, pulled out of a Hot and Now, so unexpectedly I didn’t even have time to apply my brakes. I was rushing to get through a light about to change and I slammed into his left fender. Literally a fender-bender.
I was beside myself. The nurse who called to tell me it was time said I had better hurry. …
I was that young mother calming our children as our world fell apart
On that day I was up in my sewing room, away from the TV. My four-year-old son was napping, and my 7-year-old daughter was in school. My husband was at work. It was early afternoon.
I heard the back door open and before I could start to the stairs, I could hear my neighbor, Gwen, shouting something, sobbing. I thought something must have happened to her mother, who had been ailing. By the time I got to her she could barely speak. “They shot the president! They shot Kennedy!”
I turned on the TV and we sat watching, hoping, both of us, that he would be okay. This kind of thing just didn’t happen — not in our country, not to this president. We didn’t know, of course, that the top of his head had been blown off. …
And what you can learn from each of them, as different as they are.
There is a rhythm to good writing — a flow that draws you in as smoothly and deliciously as a glide down a meandering brook. It moves along, pulling you from place to place, enticing you to go further, to explore, to feel, to breathe.
Every writer’s goal is to write as well as the writers who inspired her to write. Their writing seems effortless, as if they’re dreaming as they write, completely unaware that someone else is in the room. …
But the nightmare isn’t over
On Saturday, November 7, just before Noon, four days after Election Day, after Pennsylvania’s votes put him over the 270 mark, the election was finally called by both the AP and CNN : Former Vice President Joe Biden beat out the incumbent, Donald Trump, to become President-Elect Joe Biden.
I don’t have to tell you that I was ecstatic. It appeared all week that this would be the outcome but with every passing day the doubts grew. Not that the count would be wrong but that the Trump regime would figure out a way to delegitimize the people’s choice.
As Ari Berman wrote on…
But the election is essentially over.
Hello friends. Today is the day Indelible Ink goes back to our original Creative Nonfiction format. I made the decision back in September to switch our entire publication to All Politics All The Time in order to get our voices out there until after the election, and our writers certainly didn’t disappoint. I’m thrilled with the commitment, the enthusiasm, the emotions, and the insights in the stories we’ve published since then. Wow!
It’s been four days since the election and we don’t have a winner yet — though it looks at this moment as if Joe Biden’s lead will hold. (No secret that I hope so.) There’s nothing more we can do as writers at this end — it’s a matter of counting votes now — so we’re ready to get back to telling our stories and engaging in the personal. …
Are we citizens in charge? This Election will tell.
It’s the morning of the most important Election Day of our lifetimes. I don’t have to tell you. Did you get some sleep last night? Mine was off and on, and every time I work up, I woke up to thinking about Donald Trump. And not in a good way.
I’m sick of thinking about Donald Trump.
On the first day voting was open to us here in Michigan, my husband and I filled out our ballots and voted for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and every Democrat down the ballot. Nobody I know is surprised by that. I want Donald Trump and his GOP enablers out of our lives forever. I want Joe Biden and his team of responsible experts to get in there and get to work. After four years of conscious destruction, this country needs fixing. Much of what we’ve accomplished over the decades has been torn apart. Deliberately. This should never have happened. Trump was a mistake from the get-go, but the Republicans refused to throttle him. …
How our writers see the run-up to the most important moment in our lives.
If all goes well we should know who won the presidency late Tuesday night, or possibly early Wednesday morning. If it goes any longer than that there’s a good chance we’ll be cheated out of another election, most likely by the GOP challenging mail-in votes, as they’re already planning to do.
The only way we can avoid it is to vote as if our lives depended on it, in numbers so vast there will be no question about who won. Our choice here at Indelible Ink isn’t a secret. We’re going Blue all the way. Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Decency and responsibility over….whatever …
