Before dawn, across the city, the first SEPTA buses pull up to the curb and open their doors. Workers in hospital scrubs and warehouse vests climb aboard, their hands wrapped around cups of coffee. For many of them, this is the first job of the day, not the last. Sunrise on I-95, the light guides every person, headed to work for what is one day in the 60 or so years that they will take this same route. Work is a healthy thing, but these workers are overworked, because no matter how much the labor, they are still struggling to pay rent, food, gas and the basics.

In the Oval Office, however, the same morning light feels different as it bounces off gold medallions, a gilded mantel and cherubs carried up from Mar-a-Lago. The President has boasted that it is 24-karat gold, the same gleam that lines his penthouse high above Fifth Avenue.

The gold is only the backdrop. What matters is the disconnect and lack of consciousness about the current struggles of the average person and what this administration has done to the country, to immigrants, to children, to the elderly and to young soldiers sent to a war that many agree didn’t need to happen. We have a Constitution and it is being challenged. One of the challenges is to say that the President can run for more than two terms, which is prohibited by the 22 amendments. Laws are being passed in the Republican Congress that hurt the American people and help billionaires. They have forgotten where their loyalties lie and the interests of the people who voted for them.

You can hear it in the pharmacy line, in the long pause before a mother asks what the prescription costs, or people staring at their grocery bills and wondering what they bought that costs so much. The One Big Beautiful Bill, which the President signed on July 4, 2025, cut Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage so deeply that about 16 million more Americans are projected to lose health insurance by 2034, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. CBO also found that the House version would cost the poorest tenth of households about $1,600 a year, while the richest tenth would gain about $12,000.The same law poured $75 billion into immigration enforcement, even though undocumented immigrants, the hands that knead our bread and frame our houses, paid an estimated $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022. The Education Department lost nearly half its staff, and Philadelphia lost its regional Office for Civil Rights.

We have a vote which is our voice in what happens next. In the November 3 election in Pennsylvania, we will vote for the office of the Governor and also seats in Congress. This means that we can vote for the candidates that we feel will restore the checks and balances on the President. Congress controls the money, writes the laws and holds the power to investigate. A Democratic majority can block legislation, refuse spending and subpoena records. None of it happens if we stay home. Gold fades. Ballrooms empty out. What lasts is a country that remembers who it was built for: We the People. On Nov. 3, show up and prove it.

 The registration deadline has passed, but if you are registered:

• Apply for a mail ballot by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27.
• You can apply, vote and return it in one visit to the county election office.
• Mail ballots must arrive by 8 p.m. Nov. 3. Postmarks do not count.
• Or vote in person on Nov. 3, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Encourage your family, friends and neighbors to vote. Every vote count, and everyone’s participation is essential.