The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick. Sugar is here. The both of us,

speaking straight into your ears. I'm Cheryl Strait. I'm Steve Almond. This is Dear

Sugar Radio.

Oh, dear someone, won't you please? Share something of sweetness with me. I check my mail box every day.

For some bit of sugar that you'll send my way.

That's a beautiful Angela Freeman with Wonderly, playing us into part two of our Dear

Sugar Radio live in Portland, the Aladdin Theatre.

It is the writer's, Ruzis Special Edition on this winter night in January.

That's right. January of 2017, and I was thinking Cheryl, and I've been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about

a odd story from my childhood when I was maybe four or five years old. My mom and dad sat me and my brothers down

and explained quite calmly that my dad might be going away for a few days and that he might be going away to jail.

The reason he was going to be going away to jail, they explained to us, was that he was going to be holding hands with some other people in front of

Moffett Field, which is a large Air Force base to protest the war in Vietnam, which we knew a little something about anyway.

We knew lots of people were being killed there. I remember being bewildered at the time and greatly relieved when the next day my dad showed up in a suit and tie,

which I don't think I'd ever seen him wearing. He had been in jail, but just briefly and had come home.

It was sort of a happy story as I remembered it, but I've been thinking about it increasingly in these last weeks and months because I have kids.

At that time in his life, he was in his early 30s. He had three kids, I guess, a six-year-old and two four-year-olds, and he was working at Stanford University and organizing students against the war,

for which I think he was penalized, never hired there because of those activities on a full-time basis, in addition to risking going to jail for a short or large amount of time.

I think I've been thinking about it because for a long time, as I thought about the election, I think like a lot of people are thinking, oh, we're just, we didn't take Trump seriously.

I think that's not it. I think we didn't take democracy seriously. I think that's what happened. I think there's been a fatal lack of seriousness.

And the moment that the election occurred, something really snapped in my mind, and I realized, oh, actually, democracy isn't an entertainment product.

It isn't something that we passively consume. The price of citizenship is that we have to now, in this moment, we finally have realized that we can't just drift along.

...