Making Good Change No Matter the Election Outcome

My favorite annual seed catalog just arrived in the mailbox, signaling the start of autumn. It comes on that wonderful old newsprint that leaves ink residue on your fingertips. The page of peach trees has instructions for grilling peaches; the page of shrubs has encouraging reminders not to give up (shrubs and trees sleep the first year, creep the next, leap the third). Every page has hand-drawn illustrations - blackberries, pinecones, rose petals. In other words, it's a sweet reprieve from the post-Labor Day sprint to November 5.

The election is sucking nearly all the oxygen out of the room, and understandably so. There are stomach-turning polls one week, shoulder-dropping polls the next (for me, stress seems to show up physically first, cognitively second).

Action can be a skillful, useful antidote to uncertainty: door knocking, making calls or yard signs for candidates we believe in. I channel my nerves into driving state legislative candidates in competitive districts to doors.

There's an outdated idea that once the campaign ends, the work ends. To the originator of that, I say, "Au contraire, mon frère!" Once the campaign is over, the work of legislating begins. The work of making good (or not) on those campaign promises. Of writing the bills that become the laws we live under.

You campaign in poetry and you govern in prose, goes a line attributed to Mario Cuomo. You can promise the sun, moon, and stars on the campaign trail, but the business of governing, of passing legislation, requires hard-boiled pragmatism.

So if we understand that legislating, if we know how to make some good changes to it, we become some of the most powerful citizens of our democracy: those who have a say in shaping the laws of the land. Voting is one powerful tool in our small-d democratic toolbox; participating in policymaking is another.

This isn't a prescription to sprint through the tape on November 5 and rush to start influencing policy without so much as a Gatorade, orange slice, or calf stretch (speaking of which, a few calf stretches I like here). Not at all.

The work of legislating usually gets underway in the spring. There are lame duck sessions immediately after the election, then legislatures get organized in January, sometimes into February. So we have time.

Lame duck is that funny session between the election (November) and when the newly elected legislature gathers (January). During that session, you have plenty of legislators who didn't win their re-elect or retired, but are still in office and voting until the end of the year. It's typically a time to tie up loose ends (though Congress being Congress, there are some sizable loose ends to tie up, like funding the government beyond December 20th).

Here's the bottom line: the more we understand about how policy is made, the more we can help make better policy (or deter bad policy) on the federal, state, and local level - especially those last two - regardless of the election outcome.

So if we've got ants in your pants about Election Day, we could direct that jittery energy - or at least that's how it feels to me - towards learning to make good policy after Election Day. A few jumping off points:

• The six most important politicians to know
  
• Some good things to know about the politicians who represent us.
  
• The three powerful policy words that heavily determine where a politician will come down on an issue.
  
• A simple tool to up your policy game.

But there's one more thing. This relentless season, we all deserve our seed catalogs – those things that delight and comfort us, that drop the mercury in our internal thermometer. The morning walk, the bread making (a short, wonderful poem on that here), the fiddling or piano playing, the sketching or afternoon stretching. I think of it as good emotional housekeeping,

My Mum used to say we're building the world we want to live in in the building of it. We care about this election because we care about this world of ours. And this seed catalog returns me to my care, reminds me that the world doesn't start after November 5th. It is here and now. And I can help build it with a little more care each day until then, too.