Until yesterday, Enola Holmes was trending #1 on Netflix, and my family has been watching. Even though the protagonist is a teen, it’s not for kids. The violence is too intense. So we’ve been watching slowly and forwarding past the really scary parts. The film is quite well-done, and I really want to write about it. I want to pitch a piece to Bitch Magazine that contrasts the film with the book (which I’m also rereading) but I’m restraining myself because I actually don’t have time.

Which is to say that I might be able to make time, but I am desperately trying to figure out how to make room in my already jammed schedule as a working/artist/activist/primary parent to do calls or texts to swing states for the election. And I think our electoral crisis is actually a big reason that Enola Holmes was #1. I think people are terrified by this moment in US history and want to escape. I have asked the question before: “Why Do We Only Want To Read About The Future Or The Past?” There is an excruciating uncertainty to this historical moment. I certainly want to escape. But I think Enola Holmes represents a particular type of escape that is connected to our current crisis: we are desperate to be in a different moment in this same story.

The Enola Holmes movie represents a moment in Western history where women and people of color were on the brink of getting the vote and having access to electoral and other types of power for the first time. In the US, we are facing a moment of reckoning where women and people of color are at risk of losing our electoral power. We want to be the scrappy white girl who is ahead of her time and so clever that she gets out of every scrape. We don’t know how we’re going to get out of this. We already have concentration camps on the border. Tr*mp is doing all he can to steal this election and has signaled the white supremacists to stand by for instructions.

Here is the question: what are we gonna do to stop Donald Tr*mp?

Because we have everything we need to win. We just need to show up in massive numbers. Show up in voter mobilization efforts. This can be before and during the election. Show up to vote. Show up to work the polls. We can do this. We just have to be present with this moment, our biggest ever fight for democracy.

Now.

It’s not easy. I’ve been an activist since I was in single digits, when I used to walk precincts with my family on Election Day. But I don’t have any experience with phone or text banking. It’s taking a while to get plugged in. The timing hasn’t been working for my schedule as a mom and a teacher. But here’s what I know: we can’t give up. We have to keep trying. I have to figure out how to get started. It just requires that everybody do their part. The idea that it’s already “too late” only benefits the other side. Do what you can–whatever that is. Do it. Now. And if you miss this moment, the next moment will be another “now.”

Evette Dionne’s recent book about Black women & suffrage, LIFTING AS WE CLIMB

And yet, in spite of its escapism, Enola Holmes also speaks very powerfully to this moment. It was a very forward thinking choice to make the suffragist leader Black. This confronts the erasure of Black women in the suffrage movement,The Black British suffragist calls Sherlock Holmes out:

“You don’t know what it is to be without power,” she tells him. “Politics doesn’t interest you. Why?”

“Because it’s fatally boring?” he asks.

“Because,” she says, “you have no interest in changing a world that suits you so well.”

In the last hundred years since women got the vote in the US, the unquestioned power of wealthy white men has been steadily eroding. Let’s defeat Tr*mp and give us a shot at being a real democracy. Not “again.” For the first time.

Now.