Season Five, Episode 2: Election, Humanity, and How do we vote when nothing feels right

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.

This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. 

Danielle  (00:26):

Welcome to the Rise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. This is a part two of our season five opener, which was review and recap of the past year, and also engaging some questions around humanity, the election, and how do we see our neighbor? We are going to be hearing from a couple of organizers who have been in my county, Kitsap County for more than a decade. You're going to hear some of their experiences, some of what they've gone through, as well as a few other folks who are giving their response to the questions we posed last week. I've been doing a lot of listening. This isn't an endorsement for any candidate. This isn't a psychological advice, and this isn't a prescription for how you should vote. Voting is a right. It's something we can participate in. It's a way to participate in our system.  

A lot of folks are swinging wildly between two pendulums. There's the thought of my vote doesn't matter and I'm not going to vote, or I'm going to vote for X person as a protest vote. These are all of your rights. You have the right to do. So. I've been thinking a lot about change and what does change mean? How do we want to see change come about, and what does long-term change really look like? I can't speak from an electoral politics standpoint because I'm not an elected official and I don't plan to be anytime soon. I can speak as a person, a mother, a wife, a partner, a colleague, a friend, and a community member. And what I can say is people powered movements are what I have seen from the ground up, bring change in communities. This isn't unlike what happens in our bodies from a psychological experience in my own body. Change doesn't come from merely thinking about it. It comes from the ground up in my body. It comes from addressing the feelings, paying attention to my body, and becoming a more integrated person. I would challenge all of us to look around and what are the people powered movements for social change that we desire, and what are the ways our body is talking to us and how if we listen, will it inform us where we stand on many of these different issues?  

This brings me to another sensitive topic. The topic of how we are feeling, how we are doing in the sociopolitical climate. We're living in these United States. I can say that for myself in my own experience, my anxiety is heightened overall and feelings that I can keep at bay with regular normal coping mechanisms such as exercise. It takes me a little bit more and I have to offer myself a lot more grace in the process. I encourage you no matter where you are, to engage these topics with grace towards your own self, towards your neighbor, towards your family, and towards whoever's in your proximity. We won't get things done overnight. That's not how change works. Change is a process. It is for us as individuals, and it is for us as a collective society. So hang in there. If you need help, get the help you need.  

Maybe it's a mental health counselor, maybe it's a spiritual advisor. Maybe it's your pastor, maybe it's your friend. Maybe it's someone in your community that you look up to, like a mentor, or maybe you just need to sit down with your friends and have a good old fashioned dinner and drinks and put your phones away. Whatever the help you need is, it's important that you seek out that help and that support. The goal isn't to be perfect. It isn't to be fixed. The goal is to be in our process and getting what we need so each day we can show up for ourselves and those in our community. We're going to jump into the conversation and voices from across the country. We are all different and we're not meant to be the same. I hope you find pieces of you in each of their stories.  

Speaker 2 (04:37):

Hi, this is Raquel Jarek and I'm coming to you from Bloomington, Minnesota, which is a suburb in the Minneapolis area. I teach astronomy for work to college students in downtown Minneapolis and am an aerospace engineer and was raised in a very Christian home. And I'm still a practicing Christian in many ways, and I make space for people with different political views in all kinds of moments in my life.