The Best Thing That Happened This Week: We Voted

In the midst of everything, Philadelphia voted. Photograph
Jessica Kourkounis / Stringer / Getty Images

That was a helluva week, wasn’t it? Exhausting. Enervating. Disheartening. Thrilling. Protests, riots, incendiary rhetoric, stealthy statues, armed vigilantes, governments beating and tear-gassing their citizens … it was hard to know what to make of it all.

Yet all across the city and state on Tuesday, thousands of us hurried to do the one thing, the most important thing, we can do to lead our nation out of its morass of despair: We voted.

We stood up for the rule of law and our right to peaceable protest by filling in little boxes or pushing little levers, at polling places in our churches, our schools, our community centers. It didn’t all go smoothly. But we waited it out, standing in line, masked and socially distanced, to exercise our suffrage. That word’s Latin ancestor means “prayer.” And that’s what every one of our votes — provisional or mail-in or in person, this week and in the future — can be: a prayer for peace and justice for all.