In early November, I visited Canada with Steelhead, celebrating twenty years of marriage. We spent a week in Victoria, B.C., exploring museums, beaches, cafés, and (of course!) tea houses.
We also watched U.S. election returns until we didn’t.
On November 6, en route to meet a friend at the Royal B.C. Museum, I stepped into the spacious lobby next to a woman bundled up as I was for the wind and rain. She held an e-device on which she was collecting tourist info and asked if I’d take a three-minute survey.
First question: “Where are you from?”
“California.”
“Oh.” She lowered the device. “Sorry about your election.”
Until she told me about similar growing dissent in Canada, I hadn’t heard much about populism north of the border (set in motion in part by the 2022 Freedom Convoy). There’s a movement afoot, clearly, to burn it all down.
While in Victoria, I read and overheard a range of sentiment about America’s election: everything from they didn’t deserve their republic to this opens up great opportunity, let’s recruit doctors and nurses over the border and we’d better prepare now for the economic hit Canada is going to take.
All incredibly understandable—and sad to feel estrangement from our fellow North Americans.
Before the election, I joined the massive letter-writing campaigns that were reaching out to voters in swing states. (Volunteers for Vote Forward alone wrote over 11 million such letters; organizers claim that they moved the needle, if not enough.) “In November I feel our country acting as one,” I wrote. “It’s the only time all our voices get equal weight.”
So letters were on my mind when we ferried to Canada, as was Anne Frank, who wrote her diary entries to “Dear Kitty,” in epistolary (letter-writing) style.
We know her young writer’s voice was silenced just as she reached the verge of womanhood. Today her family home is a museum that keeps a timeline on the gradual slide Germany took to fascism prior to 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor (without a mandate).
Anne’s writing, which she hoped to publish in some form after the war, reveals the workings of her heart against a backdrop of traumatic change: “the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too.”
She held onto a ton of hope in the worst of situations. “I somehow feel,” she wrote, “that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall soon end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”
Wise beyond her years. Anne’s oft-quoted passage, “people are truly good at heart,” breaks our hearts, knowing what she faced. Naturally those seizing power today want to keep her book banned; her long-gone voice became the mouse that roared.
Sorry doesn’t begin to describe how we feel when looking back on the 1930s holocaust. And without Anne, and the words of others, anyone can rewrite that moment.
Before Sarah and I parted, we walked among boats on the marina under gray skies. There was no more talk of politics, just a sense of the importance of writing, which if we’re lucky reaches far beyond us. And connects us back through the years, to a teenaged girl in a hidden annex speaking truth to power.
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