We Cannot Fail This Assignment
The invitation said the attire was casual, comfortable, and clean.
I have not stopped thinking about that line. It isn't really a dress code. It's a promise: come as you are, we mean it, don't let the lack of a good suit be why you stay home. A small thing to print on a flyer. A very hard thing to pull off in a room.
They pulled it off.
The hall had gone all in, royal blue sequins, blue roses in rhinestone vases, balloon arches in three shades of blue. So unsubtle it circles back around to sincere. But the decorations weren't the thing. Once it filled, the room looked like the county actually looks, folks from all walks of life.
The flyer promised “Together, We Build the Blue Wave”, and the load-bearing word there is the first one. A wave isn't announced from a podium. It's something a great many people do at once. And this was a room of different cultures and different pasts, people from every rung of the economic ladder, all arriving at the same unglamorous conclusion: we're in one boat, it only moves if everybody rows, and things improve in exactly the amount we're each willing to carry.
Then the speeches, which I expected to be speeches.
Zuriel Nyamutsaka stood up first. He's eighteen. He had note cards he barely needed. He talked about 2026 in South Carolina, a place where nobody thought it could happen, a place where nobody said it could be done, and about being the ones who wrote the next lines of the next chapter. The ones who broke the circle. We'd do it, he said, by talking to our neighbors and our families, and by not leaving anybody out.
Dr. Annie Andrews did not explain what she believes. She proclaimed it, at volume, with both hands in the air. Raise the federal minimum wage. A permanent child tax credit. End partisan gerrymandering. Restore a woman's right to make her own health care decisions. Then she pushed us to November 3rd, to a version of ourselves that had laid it all out there, hearing an anchor say we're about to call that Senate race in South Carolina, and looking up to find her face on the screen. She said it grinning, and the room came apart.
Dr. Jermaine Johnson, the keynote, closed. He came to the microphone smiling, not the practiced one, the real one, then put a question to the room and let it sit. I know you may understand the assignment. But are you prepared to fail? The pause got uncomfortable, which is what it was for. Then: We cannot fail this assignment.
That room walked in knowing the work. The speeches make it feel winnable.
Andrews and Johnson are the wave, what has to happen this November, and they told that hall precisely what it will cost. Zuriel is what happens after. The reason to believe the water keeps moving once this election is spent. By the time the keynote asked if we were prepared, the answer had already stood up a little earlier, holding note cards he didn't need.
You can download all the photos from the event and video clips of the speeches at the link below.