January 26, 2021 by admin

No Ageism Here

My grandmother is a Nana for the Nation. While she was a patient in the hospital just before November’s U.S. election, she spent her time urging everyone to exercise their civic duty. As she got more than a liter of fluid drained from her lungs, 74-year-old Sylvia Fisher wasted no time spreading the word about “why it’s imperative that we vote Trump out of office.”

In addition to this kind of canvassing being totally badass, my Nana also felt she needed to prove her mental acuity in order to get the best care possible, a sad reflection of the state of our current healthcare system. “I had CNN and MSNBC on the whole time so that people would know who they were talking to” she said. She didn’t let a single nurse or attending physician leave without confirming they had a voting plan. She encouraged them to check their registration and vote early. She is rumored to have convinced even a nurse from Florida to vote blue and to call three friends from that swing state urging them to do the same. After being discharged, she took every opportunity to emphasize that the surgeons who saved her life were both immigrants.

—
ABIGAIL FISHER, “A Nana for the Nation,” Lilith Blog, October, 2020.

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The Lilith Blog

September 11, 2020 by Arielle Silver-Willner

Lilith Votes: The Truth about Voter Suppression

During my first year of college, I registered to vote at a picnic table in front of the Student Center. The student running the event, a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders campaign, shared my excitement about voting in our first-ever election for a candidate that we “actually liked.” I filled out the registration form carefully, verified that I would be 18 before the 2016 Democratic primary, and slipped the paper into an official-looking box. 

I grew up in New York, but had decided to register locally in Connecticut so that I could vote in person. I envisioned myself as a “civically engaged youth,” doing my part to push our country further toward justice.

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