A Presidential Prediction

If it happens, this is what I think *could* come next.

First of all, in case there was any doubt, our official endorsement is:

(Her campaign site is sold out of this tee, but lordy there are others.)

Hoo boy, it’s been a tight race. And now it’s October, which could lead to any number of surprises. And it looks like it could take awhile to get the actual election results, and that’s not counting the wave of lawsuits that a certain candidate will unleash to try and fuck with everything if he isn’t the winner.

But if/when we can get Madam President installed in the White House, I predict that we will see something unprecedented arise in our culture, something I’m calling, “The Kamala Effect.”

She. She will lead the highest-ranking teams of US experts in everything from military might to foreign policy strategy, not to mention countless Federal agencies that are responsible for issues big and small that affect our daily lives.

She will have to make objectively tough decisions in real time, the kind that carry the biggest possible consequences. She’ll face brutal opposition from the other party, and from world leaders who think women shouldn’t hold any kind of power whatsoever.

No one in US history has ever seen a woman do these things before, let alone a woman of color. Those two things are astounding, but equally so is the fact she is middle-aged. Up until now, the social and cultural invisibility of our population has been treated as a given. Kamala could change that. The Kamala Effect, as I see it, could bring increased attention to all of us, our entire overlooked, underserved, underestimated population. It could even lead to an unprecedented surge of middle-aged women stepping into positions of power for the first time, as we see ourselves reflected in She Who Resides At the White House. The thought of this makes me giddy in a way that I haven’t felt since…. you know.

But running alongside this particular quality of excitement is its dark shadow, a force so deep and ancestral that I’m guessing you already know it intuitively. I felt it leading up to 2016, but somehow this time around it feels even bigger, more vivid and menacing.

It’s the weight of all that extra scrutiny, all the heavy glopping gender gizz that gets sprayed on women who dare to step into public leadership and do the hardest work. Especially for Black women, who often have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously, this phenomenon can have serious consequences that alter the course of careers (and by extension, lives). The fact that Kamala is a woman in midlife adds yet another layer of it.

Of course this phenomenon has been present at every stage of her campaign, but if she takes power and The Kamala Effect takes hold, the world will get to see it play out in real time, on the biggest global stage, as a woman does what was once thought impossible for women to do.

Fear is powerful but it can’t predict the future, unless we allow it to do so. It weakens, even withers, in the face of courageous women who won’t back down. It shouldn’t require so much fucking courage to occupy the highest office in the land, but it does, at least at this moment in history. There will likely be times when it’ll be hard to watch The Kamala Effect in action, because of all the shadow shit that gets dredged up along with it. I don’t want us to be triggered, but I also don’t want us to miss the opportunity to call it out, to point at it and say This is the same shit that we deal with every fucking day! and then do everything in our power to change it.

Hopefully Kamala has all the professional and personal support that she needs lined up and ready to go. In any case, she is more than competent, more than qualified to do the job, and let’s not forget that midlife women are gritty as fuck, as anyone who bothers to look deeper into our lives can plainly see. I’ll tell you something from my own personal intuition: despite the sexism, racism, ageism, and opposition lining path, I think she could astonish us all.

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