Yes, Abigael, there is a November 7th

Last week a little girl named Abigael Evans became a YouTube sensation and the voice of the people simultaneously when, bleary eyed and clearly at her whit’s end, she sobbed into her mother’s video camera that she was “tired of Bronco Bama [sic] and Mitt Romney.”

But don’t worry Abigail.  Soon enough Election Day will arrive…and then it will go. And then a grateful nation – nay a grateful world – will be glad to welcome the morning sun of November 7^th.  No longer will our phones ring in the hectic early hours only to provide us with delayed and then automated political messages.  Gone will be the pop-up, corner campaigners outside every grocery store, pharmacy, and museum ready to sign us up, pin our lapels, or deride our lack of reusable bags.  Finally, Facebook will cede our precious timeline real estate from angry political messages and bullying back to its rightful owner: updates about “The Bachelor.”

November 7^th isn’t just a date Abigail.  It’s a promise, a promise of a better time on the horizon.  A promise that we as a country can find enough to get along or fight about through simple sports’ hero doping scandals and pseudo-celebrity weddings.   November 7^th marks the beginning of a magical season of religious and commercial gift giving and of Hollywood awards shows.  November 7^th means your politically conservative PopPop will probably stop calling and leaving messages about the mental sickness that leads to liberalism.  Oh, what a time it will be!

And on November 7^th, we’ll remember we don’t have to pin every ounce of our derisive energy on our nation’s leaders.  And then perhaps, Abigael, just perhaps, our nation’s leaders will find something better to do with their time now that our attentions have turned away from their every waking breath.  As one Francis Pharcellus Church told Virginia O’Hanlon in 1897 “They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”  So Abigail, maybe we can help disaffect them by letting them believe in themselves once more.  Maybe we can step off for one damn minute so they can make some kind of change in a seemingly corroded and necrotic system.

Come forth November 7^th!  Come forth this year, and in four years and four years after that.  Come forth ten thousand years from now (or whatever the closest factorial of four that would be, I’m not a mathematician) because you will continue to make glad the heart of children and adults alike.

Katy McCaffrey (Contributing Editor, Los Angeles)

Katy is a mother, a wife, and a TV producer, mostly in that order. Once she wrote some sarcastic things next to some pictures a guy took with her stolen iPhone. She was then semi-well known for three days afterwards. If You Must Know is what’s happened to her since then.

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