Salve November’s Guilty Conscience: NOW

“I just don’t know what I’ll do if I wake up on November 4 and Donald Trump’s won.”

“I’ll die if Trump wins the election. Then move to Canada.”

Thus are the refrains I hear from friends who, in a moment of sympathy-seeking, forget that I am concrete enough — and blunt enough — to earn a diagnosis on the spectrum. Anyone pleading impending guilt finds no safe harbor with me. I simply respond:

“If you think you’ll have a guilty conscience then, you ought to be doing more now.”

They look at me with sheepish disdain. Shrug their shoulders. Protest that, being from Massachusetts, there’s little we can do to save the rest of the country from this nightmare.

Rubbish. In the era of COVID-19, everyone has either got money or time. Money, if we’re still working (and have no place to spend it). Or time, if we’re not working. So we can contribute money: to candidates, to advocacy groups, to get-out-the-vote organizations. Or we can contribute time: calling swing-state voters, writing post cards, pestering that tiny percentage of people who are still undecided. (Though, it’s inconceivable to me that anyone whose even half-awake is still undecided. I suspect anyone taking refuge in that category is being a mischievous disrupter.) If you are not fully committed to being either Blue or Red…