Reality. On TV.

My first memory of something in the news is from an election when I was little. As far as I can tell, it was a million times less contentious than the current one (which is why I'm skipping the specifics--no one deserves the comparison). I was not exactly politically aware, but my parents explained to me what was happening in basic terms, and I knew which candidate they hoped would win.

The day after the election, they told me that the other candidate had won, and I remember being very surprised. To my young mind, this thing happening far away, involving two men I'd never met, was a story. And stories were supposed to have happy endings. (Which were defined by the adults around me.)

It's easy to feel like what's happening in the news is a story, even when we understand it a little better than I did way back when. Most of us don't know the candidates personally, but we've been told a lot about them, so they become characters to us. It's somewhat natural for them to occupy the same space in our brains as, say, Hermione and Voldemort, even natural for us to want to rubberneck when one of them does something shocking. I know I've been guilty of that sometimes. I've even caught myself assuming things will turn out okay, because that's how the story's supposed to go.

The thing is, we have no power over the (canonical) fate of Hogwarts. We--at least, probably the majority of people reading this--do have some power over the fate of a lot of other things.

 Like many others, I keep thinking lately of Mrs. Banks and her "Sister Suffragette" song in the Mary Poppins movie. Mrs. Banks wasn't real, but the people she sang about were, and so were their counterparts here in the U.S. They knew that the stories they read in the newspaper were real, and they wanted to do something about them.

Well done, sister suffragettes. Now it's our turn.