July 4th or Independence Day has traditionally been an opportunity to celebrate freedom. Yet last weekend, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs, stripping reproductive freedom from half the population of this country, many felt ambivalent about celebrating freedom.

Many of us have been riveted by the Jan 6th Committee hearings. The professionalism, thoroughness, and detail have exceeded expectations. The magnitude of the crisis we are in as a country has been front and center.

Mass murders happen every day in this country. It is so commonplace that only a handful make it into a day’s news cycle. Our babies are being shot in their elementary schools and our family, friends, and neighbors are being murdered in their houses of worship, at grocery stores, and even at funerals. The shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa recently have shaken many of us to the core.

The past couple of weeks have been difficult in this country where the Supreme Court and Republicans from state legislatures to Congress want to outlaw a woman's access to reproductive healthcare, but an 18-year-old, brainwashed by the rhetoric of racist "replacement theory" that is spewed nightly on Fox News and amplified by Republican politicians, is able to purchase a lethal arsenal and murder members of the Buffalo, NY community at a supermarket.

It has been an awful week. For the moment, it is safe to assume that Roe will be overturned, and abortion regulation will be returned to the states. Many people are exhausted and discouraged and wondering why they are participating in activism and the hard work of saving our rights. But the choice is stark: we can crawl under the covers in defeat, or we can choose to channel our rage into action, following the activists who fought for women's rights over decades in this country's history.

We are close to six months out from the 2022 midterms. The news is filled with negative predictions about a Democratic shellacking. Voting rights, reproductive rights, and transgender rights are fiercely under attack.

As the war in Ukraine continues past the one-month mark, the needless loss of life and human tragedy coupled with incredible Ukrainian bravery still fill our thoughts and leave us with a sense of helplessness that we try to assuage with financial support for organizations feeding and housing the refugees. Here at home this week we have witnessed the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for the historic nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court.

We are two weeks into the war in Ukraine and the stories and images continue to be heartrending. There are no words for the atrocities of bombing maternity hospitals, slaying innocent children, and terrifying a whole country. The scale and brutality of Russia’s invasion leave most of us breathless and the death and destruction drag us deeper into darkness.

The last few days have been consumed with tragedy and horror as Russia has invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine. There are no words to lessen the fear, anger, and sadness we all are feeling. While we watch a democratic country endure an unprovoked siege by an authoritarian bully, we can’t help but think about the fragility of democracy.

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.