Day 115: Florida Freedom Summer of 2024: This mid-term election is wrongly being seen as an end in itself; this election is not an end but a step from the journey begun when a black man became president of a nation which once envisioned him and his race only as slaves.

These posts were started more than 100 days ago, to create an opportunity to describe not what has gone wrong or what has happened, but what is to come.  There are bound to be lunacies on election night and the mass media will feed on them, in light of the fact that there reportedly are 299 candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen including several seeking to be secretaries of state.  If elected, they could try to control the outcome in their states, in 2024 to validate only approved Republican candidates.

In fact, whatever the outcomes, this election is just a step into the future.  Young people understand that, especially LBGTQ people, transgender people, non-binary people, changing bodies as well as minds,  emerging with genes from people of different races, and backgrounds, infants, who came into a 21^st century in America facing a new world of gun violence, climate change, more floods, hurricanes, storms, fires, and droughts, and other events which were rarer in the previous century.  They have been brought into a world which literally didn’t exist when I and my generation arrived more than 80 years ago.

In the past decade, we all have had to learn together that someone is not he or she, but them, or some other identity which does not begin and end with simple gender definitions.  Oh yes, some of you, like kings and queens trying to protect your white beauties from harmful spinning wheels, you are decreeing we can’t talk about gender or race or sex or any religious beliefs other than Christian.   Remember that your ancestors or their relatives tried to prevent teachers from mentioning Darwin or evolution.  It didn’t work.

Admittedly, Democrats, I mean real Democrats not the Dixiecrats whose company I keep, are getting what we used to call uptight about the mid-terms, because old conservative whites who know their time has come to go, are desperately trying to hold on to the economic and political power they acquired in the last century.  Ironically, no matter the election outcomes, next Tuesday, they won’t be able to declare victory, because it’s all going to be on the line again in 2024.   Like it or not, that’s going to be a real election.

In the meantime, imagine the silliness of a single billionaire trying to control Twitter.  Is Congress going to dumb down Facebook?  Can police brutality be avoided by having body cameras fail or public relations people explain that losing an eye to a K-9 dog isn’t as bad as some people seem to think it is.

It can’t be done.  Talking about community policing isn’t going to change the time honored practice against Driving While Black.  Cops aren’t going to behave better on the streets.

Definitions started to change when young people organized a day in 2017 to March for Their Lives.  So today little more than five years later, Florida legislators have to deal with Michele Rayner-Goolsby, the first queer lady elected to the State House of Representatives who is black. 

They perhaps even have to be introduced to her black wife, Bianca Goolsby.  (See attached.)  Oh, they may prefer to deal with the Republican challenging Representative Rayn Goolsby.  Meet Jeremy Brown.     

·         Jeremy Brown was born in Murray, Kentucky. He served in the United States Army from 1992 to 2012 and reached the rank of Special Forces Master Sergeant. He attended John A. Holmes High School and earned a bachelor's degree from Liberty University. Brown's career experience includes working as a small business owner and a volunteer firefighter/EMT. He has been affiliated with the Oath Keepers, the Special Forces Association, and American Legion Post 138.^[1][2]

But the people won’t put up with Mr. Brown if he doesn’t deliver on provision of the necessities of life for his constituents. The right wing nay-sayers won’t last because it will soon become obvious that they can’t solve real problems, unless they can solve real problems, of health care, student loans, affordable housing, Medicaid, affordable drugs, etc.    (Be assured I am not talking about judges who are another matter entirely and may be lost to the people for decades.)

However, if the elected crazies can deliver the substances their supporters need,  then we will have to put up with their nuttiness, just as they have to deal in the Florida Senate with Shevrin Jones, a senator who happens to be the first openly gay person on that body.

But whatever happens, Rayner-Goolsby and Jones aren’t going back into the closet.  They are elected officials.  They are acting on the will of the people.  And by now, you know when we talk of someone being the first, there are bound to be more like them to come.  Democracy does work, no matter how many election deniers are put in office.

The New York Times reports that Ben Sasse in leaving the U.S. Senate seat to which he was re-elected only two years ago, has questioned whether that body is needed at all.  He is going, but somebody will replace him.     The Senate will go on and once in a while will produce an Affordable Health Care Act, and provide means to limit harmful carbon emissions.

The Presidency will go on, and if a future election is truly stolen, somebody will figure out that perhaps the institution which is not needed is the Electoral College.   I have yet to hear a denier claim that Donald J. Trump got more votes than Joe Biden in 2020.

Please remember, that great white post World War II generation TV anchorman Tom Brokaw called the Greatest generation is almost gone.  My silent generation too is on the way out.  The boomers, the nuclear family with mom, dad, two and a half-children, a dog and a cat, and father knowing best. is a relic of the past.   What is coming is going to be far more diverse, racially and ethnically different, by age, appearance, and beliefs, and consequently far more interesting.

So sit back on election night, smile at the results, and go to bed recognizing that the United States we envision will still be there the next morning—or as soon thereafter as possible.

Gabriel Hillel, for Florida Freedom Summer of 2024