The time has come for my quadrennial spell, the one I accidentally cast in 2016 and then cast again with purpose in 2020. And thus do I create a blog post before November with the correct title, and so the ritual is already executed to the letter. For the sake of propriety, I shall remain at the lectern for the length of a few more paragraphs.

On Sunday I stood in a neighborhood early-voting line and then cast my ballot for Harris and Walz, and proceeded to fill in all the Democratic circles down-ticket. I wish I had more of a choice in this matter, but I don’t. As in 2020, there is still only one viable political party in the United States with any interest in governance at the state or federal level. Four years ago I was hoping it’d be different by now, but it isn’t.

The other party has vanished completely into an authoritarian personality cult around one man who offers his supporters the chance to melt their personal identities into his own, so that they can enjoy the vicarious thill as he tries to use the full powers of the executive branch to wreck the pillars of national order and punish both individual political opponents and whole populations whom he finds distasteful.

My fellow citizens have every right to feel fearful, hateful, or just bored enough to want that future for themselves, and they are free to vote for its realization. I sincerely hope that their lives improve, somehow and someday, and allow their strangled and suffering hearts to let more air and sunshine in. But until then, I would encourage American readers of this blog to join me in outvoting them. Everything I wrote to my friends not voting for Biden in 2020 holds true today. We don’t vote for candidates whose policies we agree with 100 percent. We vote for the ones who, among those who have a reasonable chance of winning, promise to steer the state in the direction we find most agreeable—which, yes, you can also read as least-disagreeable. And today that means Harris, Walz, and all the Democrats and only the Democrats, up and down the ballot.

This year, when I say “be prepared for a Harris victory”, I mean it in the sense of “Nobody knows what’s going to happen”. Now, or ever. I have lost patience with social-media trends that insist that if Event X happens, then they can tell you exactly the chain of events that will follow. Nobody knows this, in any circumstance, when it comes to something as naturally chaotic as national-scale politics or larger. I saw this come to a crescendo when Biden dropped out and I saw immediate wailing from many otherwise rational people that the election was therefore handed to the Magas. They were proven wrong within days, of course: Biden’s action put the Democrats back into play again. This was the event that made me sure of only one thing in high-level politcs: nobody knows what’s going to happen.

I want to encourage you to take a page from the Stoics, here. While you can and should participate in this election, you can’t know or control its outcome, no more than you can know or control the election’s repercussions after it happens. What you can do is prepare by working on yourself. I know the stance I will hold if Harris wins, and the one I’ll hold if she doesn’t. I have the benefit of practice and experience here–and so do you. You can imagine yourself inhabiting these two futures, murky as they are, and think about the wellsprings of hope in your life that you can draw strength from, allowing you to stand in resolute self-definition for yourself, for your family, your community, your world.

Whatever happens, you’ll need that. I need you to do that. We all need to stand together here and be the best people we can be, as the world swirls and storms around us. That’s all we can do.