Kamala Harris, during her first appearance as Joe Biden’s choice to join him on the  ballot, revealed that through her many years as an elected prosecutor in various California courtrooms, she routinely approached the bench with these introductory words, “Kamala Harris for the people.”

Makes a pretty good slogan, don’t you think? For a campaign. For a life, actually.

Yes, I know, those formal words are issued pro forma in courtrooms routinely, but with the emphasis Kamala Harris gave to those words, you just know she took the double meaning of “for the people” to heart.

Even without the hoopla of past years and no applause lines, I loved every aspect of yesterday’s low-key campaign pandemic launch.

Even more, in the hours following the virtual launch coverage, I found myself involuntarily smiling or tearing up along with women of color who have been working so hard and waiting so long for today’s acknowledgement of their importance to the party. The field of possible alternates to Harris, each handled her own disappointment when being told in personal calls from Biden with grace and class, immediately pivoting to pledge to do all possible to assure a Democratic victory in November.  I have never been more proud. And, you know, we’ll be hearing from many my fellow Democrats, men as well as women, before this ordeal we’ve been going through has ended. Our bench is way more impressive than theirs. Especially since all the firings!

Having been immersed in the details of what felt like a presidential campaign with no discernible end, to be told election day will be here in 83 days was a welcome relief. But Good Grief! Is there nothing the current administration will not try to gum up the works?

Photos: Daniel Acker for New York Times; Carolyn Kaster, for Associated Press

A friend from my previous neighborhood called last evening just as I’d put a pot of rice on the stove-top in an admittedly late start to dinner. Turning the heat under the rice very low, I picked up an already-poured glass of wine and moved over to a comfortable chair to talk. The conversation quickly turned to food, perhaps what I was cooking for myself that evening and how I could resume preparing the dish once the rice was done. I have been accused, since living alone, of being able to rattle on into the phone about next-to-nothing to any willing listener. But at some point, I mentioned trying to do without meat these days.

“Why?” my friend asked. 

His question was so direct to be off-putting, and I found myself stumbling about with various reasons, some culinary, some health related, some ethical,  some political, none very articulate.  I brought up the Midwest slaughterhouses being declared essential services so endangered workers must continue working in spite of their location in counties the White House declared coronavirus hot spots. What are we doing?

I needed more time to think. And right on cue, the next morning my New York Times Sunday edition gave me “The End of Meat Is Here” by Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals and We Are the Weather. Like me in lockdown with time to consider these things, he writes that the situation “has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is. Is it more essential than the lives of the working poor who labor to produce it? It seems so.”

In recent years, Ed and I both consumed a lot less red meat, not that it kept him from lethal lung cancer or me from heart surgery. We turned more to chicken and fish – and increasingly, to interesting vegetable-based recipes. Our New York daughter has been a vegetarian for years, adding fish to her diet with marriage to a man from Sweden. Both are excellent cooks, as was Ed, particularly in New Jersey where an expansive vegetable garden led to freezers full of meals and a larder filled with home-canned foods. Because our guests increasingly included non-meat-eaters, I began making our large batches of spaghetti sauce without meat so it could be served with anything – and to anyone –  from the freezer, as needed.

I used to joke that I could be a vegetarian if it weren’t for bacon. That was over even before I read that now because plant shut-downs due to sick workers “has led to a backlog of animals,” Foer writes, so “some farmers are injecting pregnant sows to cause abortions. Others are forced to euthanize their animals, often by gassing or shooting them.” Foer notes,  “It has gotten bad enough that Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has requested the Trump Administration include mental health resources to hog farmers.”

Parts of this Times piece are difficult to read. Years ago, something I learned convinced me to never order veal from a restaurant menu and, if at all possible, not to eat it anywhere. This just reinforced my conviction. Even so, I continued to enjoy an occasional hamburger cooked on an outdoor grill, telling my hosts, “If you only have one cheeseburger a year, it tastes really, really good!” Even though I know about global warming and the effect of greenhouse gases emitted by cows. (“If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world,” Foer writes.) 

And then there’s the matter of pandemics, which the author claims are inevitable as long as we continue to eat meat regularly.  While much has been written about wet markets the author points to “factory farms, specifically poultry farms…(as) a more important breeding ground for pandemics.” 

The author of this article is not an anti-meat scold. Rather, he acknowledges the importance meat has “in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hotdog.” In an earlier blog post, I wrote about my Aunt Tine, a life-long vegetarian who married into the Italian-American side of my family. I told her how my cousins and I learned to hate the cruel teasing aimed at her and Uncle Philip during Thanksgiving dinners. In what I viewed as a remarkable display of tolerance,  she said, “You have to understand how hard it was for immigrants to this country to have achieved the ability to put meat on the table daily if they wished, not just at a special holiday dinner, and then have one of their sons reject it all.”

I guess. But it’s taken me a long time to get to this place myself: Meat? Don’t need it, thanks just the same.

If ever there were a perfect time to switch to mail-in voting, that time is right now.  Even before onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and my subsequent lockdown as part of the at-risk demographic (old, with health issues) I’d been re-thinking the importance of voting by mail, particularly this year. I’d even checked out the deadline for requesting the proper ballot. But then Gov. Gavin Newsom took care of it for me last week with an order that ballots be mailed to all 20.6 million California voters. That makes the state the first in the nation to do so, though more will follow, I’m sure — unless Congress could be persuaded to miraculously fall in line quickly and make our national elections truly national.

Giving up a long-held tradition like in-person voting is hard and very much out of character for me. Especially when it’s something that Ed and I practiced faithfully over close to 60 years of life together in communities on one coast or the other. When we returned to California — cross-country move Number Five —  some of our Los Angeles neighbors seemed surprised that we did not, as they did, vote by mail.  I had the impression our insistence on going to the actual polling location reflected to them some unnecessary, outdated East Coast oddity, one of several, no doubt.

Looking back at all the skulduggery – not  to mention outright illegal acts — perpetrated by one political party against the other over the years, I wonder what took me so long to join what is a growing consensus. It was the sight of Wisconsin primary election voters braving cold, rain and the threat of coronavirus for hours last April that did it for me. I’d tried to follow all the machinations leading to the chaos of that day in Milwaukee where fear of contagion kept so many older poll workers away that only five of 180 polling places were open. Five polling sites!

Had any of the voters that day become ill, I’d been wondering. I found the answer in this excellent New York Times Magazine article by Emily Bazelon titled “Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic?” (The online version now reads “Will Americans Lose the Right to Vote in the Pandemic?”). To my concern for how those hours outside in line might have affected voters, Bazelon writes, “In the weeks after the election, “Milwaukee health officials traced at least 40 cases of the virus to in-person voting.”

As more than one commentator has declared, “No one should have to choose between exposure to a potentially fatal disease and exercising the right to vote.”

So there’s Reason Number One to vote by mail, particularly during a pandemic.

Others that come to mind: Safety from hacking by nefarious outsiders. Ease of voting for the elderly or disabled persons. Increased involvement and interest in our government. Support for our beleaguered postal service.

The only people on earth who do not think foreign entities are already planning to disrupt our 2020 election are those who loudly claimed for the past three years it didn’t happen last time. And they now just as loudly claim vote-by-mail is unsafe. They are wrong.

Think how fearful so many of us are about identity theft or just plain theft from our bank accounts. We’re advised to change passwords frequently and to keep watch for unusual online activity.  Think how frequently you hit the wrong computer key or send something off into cyberspace in error. We have become so enamored with computerizing everything, simply because we can.

There currently is a movement for requiring paper ballots in elections. I signed a petition in favor but wished I could add a codicil requiring the completed ballot then be put into the mail. With a copy kept behind for reference. I can’t even begin to imagine how hackers could change the results of an election conducted with paper ballots mailed from secure locations all over the country. But there’s Reason Number Two.

As for my Reason Number Three, assistance for elderly and/or disabled voters,  it goes without saying that making the voting process easier for everyone is beneficial to democracy. What if a person, having intended to go to the polls, wakes up on election day too ill to leave the home with deadlines past for obtaining a mail-in ballot?

When I’d contemplated obtaining a ballot myself as a precaution this year, I found the rules in my district fairly simple. But regulations differ from state to state, and some are quite byzantine. Some states require absentee voting applications to be witnessed by another person, and even in some states notarized. And only certain excuses will pass muster. During Wisconsin’s April fiasco, voters complained the ballots they’d requested never arrived. I suppose some of those would-be voters could very well have ended up in line that day.

Exercising the right to vote should not be a grueling enterprise with hurdles thrown up along the way to be overcome. And we’ve certainly seen enough of that in recent times, starting with ridiculously gerrymandered voting districts. Along with insufficient numbers of polling stations, how about those placed far removed from any possible public transportation access? Or with polling days or hours that make it impossible for those without flexible work schedules? Another lousy choice: Lose a day’s pay or get to exercise your right to vote.

If the actual voting process could be made less onerous, more people would participate and become more interested and involved in the workings of our democracy. I would think our current president and others would be embarrassed to admit out loud that they prefer elections in which fewer voters participate because they think their side fares better. C’mon, really? Well, there you go: Reason Number Four.

And finally, Reason Number Five, support for the U.S. Postal Service, which our current president denigrates at every turn, calls “a joke,” and hopes to privatize into oblivion. When I first began thinking of this post, I planned to head it “Ben Franklin Must Be Rolling in His Grave.” But I learned that while the multi-talented Franklin was brought in to help with improvements to our emerging country’s postal services, many others among our founders and then leaders through ensuing years are credited with building the service into an envy of the world.

While I was thinking that all this deserved more time and space, and perhaps for another day’s post, Saturday’s New York Times jolted me with an article by Ted Widmer, a professor at the City University of New York, titled “The Postal Service Is Not ‘a Joke.” (Online, the title became “The Postal Service Is the Most American Thing We’ve Got.”)

I commend it to you and urge you to join me in becoming informed on the urgency of saving this worthy service, which, he writes, “was never supposed to be a moneymaking enterprise, or a political football. The founders understood that the reliable delivery of information was basic to democracy.”

Most alarming to me as I have been meandering about the subject of mail-in voting, was this observation from Widmer’s article:  “Without major new funding, the service will run out of money in September, well before the November election — whose success may depend on a huge mail-in effort.”

Is that enough to get you moving? To be safe, find out what’s required in your state for mail-in voting and prepare yourself. Please.

The first time I voted in Pasadena was for this year’s May 3 primary election. As I stood in line admiring the beautiful architectural details in the second floor hallway of the old City Hall, volunteer poll workers appeared from time to time to give updates on the expected wait time both in the hall and once inside the room set up for voting. They also offered to accept any mail-in ballots voters had with them, sparing them further wait. That interested me; I guess the postmarked date was unimportant if you brought it right there on election day.

A new touch-screen computer system was being introduced, and once the line had moved close enough, I could see a young volunteer excitedly moving from one machine to another offering assistance. “He’s having fun, isn’t he?” I mentioned to the man ahead of me in line.  I hoped the tech enthusiast would still be at it when my turn came to use his help. He was and he did.  It all went quickly. “See you in November,” I told the volunteers. And then we all went into lockdown, and in-person voting became, at least for now, moot.