The news cycle is coming at us at a whiplash pace and the pandemic is about to have its two-year anniversary. It is exhausting to keep up the daily fight for our democracy and the vigilance for staying safe. We have an administration passing bills to help better people’s lives yet the airwaves are filled with stories about papers being flushed down White House toilets.

Thursday night, over 100 members of the Markers For Democracy-Downtown Nasty Women-Wednesday Group and Team Min communities as well as new friends gathered on Zoom to hear from David Pepper, former Chair of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind The Lines.

With Senators Manchin and Synema indicating that they are not budging on filibuster reform, Congressional voting rights legislation seems moribund.

Happy and healthy new year to the entire Markers For Democracy community. We are sure that we are not alone in saying not just goodbye but good riddance to a year that began with an insurrection and ended with an unprecedented COVID surge. May 2022 be just a little bit easier for all of us.

As we approach the last two weeks of 2021, we can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the sudden reality that the Omicron variant is overtaking the U.S. quickly and that we are about to enter year three of the pandemic with no clear end in sight.

It has been a brutal week. Many of us are still reeling from the chilling Supreme Court oral argument that spells the almost certain decimation of Roe v Wade. In Oxford, Michigan there was another tragic school shooting by a teenager. And we continue to lose over 1,100 people a day in the U.S. to Covid and that is before we know the impact of the new Omicron variant discovered this week and already circulating in our country.

We are almost two weeks out from the results of the November 2nd elections and while there have been many headlines declaring that Youngkin’s win in Virginia spells disaster for Democrats in 2022, we have had a few days to see that it isn’t that simple.

As we approach election day 2021, no matter the outcome, we are reminded that tending to our democracy is a daily exercise and that important elections don’t just happen every four years. In this 2021 cycle, the Markers community wrote postcards late into the night before the last mailing deadline this week.

There are two weeks until Election Day on November 2nd. We have been writing Postcards To Voters for elections in Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, but there are elections all over the country, including our own backyard.

Climate change has been happening around us for decades, and we've seen growing urgency to address it, particularly among our children and grandchildren, but this year, it became all but impossible to ignore. The heatwave in the Pacific Northwest; wildfires in California with smoke crossing the continent and making the air quality unsafe in the Upper Midwest; historic, devastating floods in Germany, and in our own backyard.

Democrats from around the country helped California defeat the Republican Recall earlier this month by donating, postcarding, phonebanking, and textbanking which woke up California Democrats and convinced them to #VoteNoOnTheRecall. Now we need to step up and make the same effort for Virginia.

Texas's draconian abortion law, upheld by the conservative Supreme Court, requires us to act. We will share ways to protest the Texas law, including rallies and other actions (see some in Action Items below), but we are also spurred to action to make sure that Virginia, with elections for the state legislature and statewide offices, scheduled less than 2 months from now, does not become another Texas.

The emotional testimony this week of the four Capitol police officers was a stark reminder of how close we came to losing our democracy. If you haven’t watched the opening testimony, please take the time to do so.

Since January, multiple states have passed laws restricting the right to vote, and over 400 more voter suppression bills are moving through state houses. We have been reading, talking, and fretting about these bills for months, but something changed this week and it seems that Democrats may finally be sounding the alarm on the danger these laws pose to the most fundamental right of our democracy, the right to vote.

This July 4th weekend, we were struck with the juxtaposition of the usual displays of fireworks and red, white, and blue patriotism with the current assault on the fundamental pillar of our democracy -- the right to vote -- by Republican held state legislatures and the United States Supreme Court.

Tuesday is primary day in NYC. We have spent months meeting the candidates, reading their policy plans, and debating their merits, and finally have arrived at the moment when the election is upon us. If you are a NYC resident and eligible to vote and did not vote early, please vote this Tuesday on Election Day. Spend the next two days text banking, making phone calls, canvassing on the street, and spreading our vast knowledge about the races to everyone you know.

Early voting in the NYC Democratic primary started yesterday and New York is abuzz with everything related to ranked choice voting (RCV). We have spent the last five months doing our part to become educated and informed voters. Markers For Democracy met with 42 of the prospective candidates (yes, I counted them).

We are glad so many of you could join us on Tuesday evening to hear author Thomas Dyja speak about his acclaimed book New York, New York, New York. For those of you who missed the talk, here is the link to the recording. Everyone who watched on Zoom also heard an impassioned plea by Daniel Squadron, Executive Director of Future Now Fund, about the importance of state legislatures for the future of our democracy.

There has been an avalanche of articles again this week again about how we are nearing the end of democracy. With the passing of numerous voter suppression laws, the attempt to nullify the Arizona 2020 election results, and the anticipation of newly gerrymandered voting maps there is fuel to reignite those fears.

The House voted this week to set up an independent commission to explore what happened at The Capitol on January 6th. The rules for the commission incorporated all requests Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader asked to have included. Despite that fact, McCarthy encouraged the Republican members to still vote no.