Earlier this year, I broke my favorite mug. Knocked it over, it fell on the floor, and the handle broke off and split into a handful of pieces. Now, maybe in the end that’s not the end of the world—it could have been a lot worse—but this mug and I had been through a lot together, and I’d hoped I could salvage the situation.
Of course, mostly, that just ended up with my hands covered in superglue (you know how it is with superglue), but eventually, I did get the handle back on. Still, I knew that using that mug would never be quite the same as it had been—in the process of being broken and repaired, it had been changed. You will always be able to see where it was broken. Even if I could fix it, I can’t erase what happened to it.
John, in so many ways, our state has also been broken over the last twelve years of Republican governance. We’ll never truly reset the clock and make North Carolina the state it was before they took power—and, frankly, we shouldn’t want to. The task before us now is not just to repair the damage, but to make ourselves into something new. Something stronger than what we were.
It’s like when you break a bone, and your body knits the fracture back together into a denser, harder bone. You can’t go back to what was there before—and if you tried, more likely than not you’d just break it again the same way.
There’s another half to this story that I want to share before I go: when the staff at the General Assembly found out I’d broken my mug, they banded together and tracked down an identical one for me. It’s not the same mug either, but I cherish it just as much as the old one, because just like the old one, it’s really the memories around it that make it special, and the memory of their kindness makes my new mug absolutely wonderful.
And just like with everything else in my life, I owe the opportunities I’ve had to a community that decided to come together and care about people other than themselves. That’s the North Carolina way, and I really believe it’s the path toward fixing what’s been broken in our state—and when we get ten million people together, caring about each other, we can do a lot more than fix a broken coffee mug.
So here’s your least-favorite part of the email: right now, we need to raise $2,385.75 before midnight tomorrow night to stay on target for our August fundraising goal. If we want to make it to next November and take our state back from the people who broke it, if we want to start the work of mending North Carolina, we can’t afford to fall behind. I rely on you and donors like you for contributions because this movement has to be bigger than one person. We’ll only fix what’s broken if we work together.
So, John, can I count on you to chip in to my campaign before August runs out? Any amount that you can contribute will help us get to where we need to be.
