Words of Kindness and Solidarity from Our Chair
I wanted to reach out to all of you in the aftermath of the election.
I know we share many of the same strong feelings right now- disbelief, despair, hopelessness and a very real fear for the future. We are all grieving, and we all need to be kind to ourselves and each other and take time to grieve. I found much to identify with in this article- How to Move through Políticas Despair.
It’s difficult not to beat ourselves up at this moment. But I am in awe at everything that all of you did to help our local candidates. I received a story this morning about one of our new Neighborhood Leaders, Walter. He’s 90 years old and uses a walker, but he reached out to 95 of his neighbors. And so did you. You walked the streets, you knocked on doors, you called and you texted. You staffed the office, volunteered for campaigns, donated, wrote letters. And what you did made a difference. One light in this very dark night is that locally, what we all did mattered. While the final tallies are still coming in, it’s clear that we won most of the local races that we focused on. I look forward to sending out those results.
Wanting to withdraw right now is a valid feeling that I respect. I know some of you will need to take some time for yourselves and step away from political activity for awhile. I understand that, and I support you doing what you need to do to take care of yourselves. But I hope you can return. Local politics will march on, and soon we will have a new batch of candidates that need our support. And we will all need to come together to do what we can to protect our people and our planet from what lies ahead.
“Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. it's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”
― Barack Obama
Please, take care of yourselves first. Then let’s come together to take care of others.
Cris Waller
Chair- Clackamas County Democrats