Dear friends,
Burlington has a new mayor. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak will be the first woman to serve as the city’s mayor. She brings fresh perspective on questions of community safety, climate resilience, and tax equity.
In what was expected to be a tight race in the first ranked-choice vote in the city’s history, Emma got 51.4 percent of the vote in a 4-way race.
Lena and Emma at the Victory Party on Tuesday evening
Lena did not win their city council race in Burlington AND they were proud to have participated in Emma’s successful mayoral race.
When we got on FaceTime to debrief the campaign and see how they were feeling, Lena was exuberant. This did not surprise me.
Lena cares deeply about remaking the world without winners and losers. They told us about a conversation and a hug with Ben Traverse, their opponent. Traverse reposted Lena’s thank you to their team with this message on Instagram:
Thank you to my opponent who, to use their words, ran a “beautiful campaign.” @Greenbergfor5 is an incredible organizer and all of us, myself included, can learn valuable lessons from how they engaged our community.
I trust you’ve seen the other electoral results from Tuesday by now.
We are struggling, as a nation, to move forward together. Apart from the increasingly polarized partisan divide, there is real division over the war in Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands of voters across the country cast their ballots for no candidate in Democratic primaries on Super Tuesday, instead selecting versions of "uncommitted," as a movement opposing President Biden's handling of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza grows across the country.
On Tuesday, when Trump was asked about the IDF’s prosecution of the war against Hamas,
Trump’s response seemed to suggest that he supported the genocide of people living in Gaza. “You’ve got to finish the problem,” he said.
In additional comments regarding Israel’s attacks, Trump appeared unwilling to differentiate between the governing body of Hamas and the Palestinian population more generally.
It is impossible to imagine that those of us dissatisfied with the Biden Administration’s handling of the war would be more satisfied with Trump’s.
The ceasefire talks continue in Cairo without the presence of the Hamas delegation. The sticking point for Hamas is
that Israel [is] rejecting Hamas's demands to end its offensive in the enclave, withdraw its forces, and ensure freedom of entry for aid and the return of displaced people.
Tell the president that we must stop supplying weapons to Israel.
Moving forward together does not require that we agree on all points. It requires instead that we envision a future in which we all have a stake.
Perhaps the thing I like best about our current president is his determination to reach out to others in an effort to work together. He’s hoping to expand his initiative to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare recipients, which will require some cooperation from an uncooperative Congress.
I hope for a repeat of Biden’s skillful parry of Republican hecklers at the State of the Union last year.
I applaud Biden’s commitment to a shared future. Part of our work is to keep it in view.
with love,
L