Crying About Cory Booker

...with 300,000 other Americans.

Senator Cory Booker with the late Congressman John Lewis

HI

Senator Cory Booker making me burst into tears of gratitude was not on my 2025 bingo card. To be frank, I haven’t given Senator Booker much thought prior to this week. Like every politician, he’s also an imperfect human who, in his career, has at times been labeled problematic—more recently for his stance on Israel/Palestine. To say I’m educated about Senator Booker’s Middle East policies would be patently false. Historically, my feelings about him amounted to the brain-space he’d been afforded, which is to say: not much.

But there I was on Tuesday, April 1st, 2025, brushing my teeth as I tuned in to hour 22 of Senator Booker’s history-making Senate-floor speech, snot running down my face into minty spittle. At hour 24, I ugly cried listening to him read the impassioned letters of his constituents. And as Booker’s voice shook with determination in hour 25, I cried in awe while putting on a pot of rice. “If America hasn’t broken your heart,” he said at one point, “then you don’t love her enough.” Yes, I thought. She has certainly broken mine.

I’ve been nursing that heartbreak for a while, desperate for a sign from our elected government officials that they actually get it, that they care, that they’re willing to forfeit their own comfort to reflect back to us the profoundly abnormal times we’re living in. We didn’t ask for this gift from Senator Booker; it was freely given, a surprise (for us, that is). The man really just stood up at the Senate floor lectern at 7pm Eastern on March 31st and announced that he was going to speak for as long as he was physically able.

“I rise today in an unusual manner,” Booker said to his colleagues. “To get in good trouble, necessary trouble, help redeem the soul of America.” Speaking of “good trouble” and “redeem[ing] the soul of America,” Booker invoked the late Congressman and Civil Rights hero John Lewis, who issued this as a mandate to all Americans in 2020—just months before he died.

Soon, the internet was aflame with Booker’s “good trouble,” which was live streaming on his Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as PBS and other news outlets. Democrats across the country stood at attention. Golden Leaf Books posted, “Thank you to Senator Booker for giving millennials a historic moment to live through that feels more like hope than a…nightmare.”

Or as @onbooksandmountains wrote, “Girls be like ‘I needed this’ and it’s Senator Cory Booker filibustering for 24 hours to fight fascism”.

While not technically a filibuster, Senator Booker’s speech shattered a 68 year-old record for longest speech on the Senate floor, previously held by segregationist Strom Thurmond. In the end, Booker spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes, surpassing Thurmond’s 24 hours and 18 minutes. As this history was being made, Wisconsin Democrats celebrated a 10-point win in a highly contentious justiceship election.

Though I only watched segments of Senator Booker holding forth, what I saw was electrifying. He did not read the phone book or Dr. Seuss, as politicians have done in filibusters past. Instead, Booker was equipped with binders of letters from his constituents, 200 of them peppered throughout 1,164 total pages of prepared remarks. As the hours wore on, he received over 28,000 voicemails of encouragement at his office. Over 300,000 active viewers streamed his speech (live, all at once, not cumulatively) on his social platforms alone. On TikTok, Booker’s livestream garnered a historic 350 million likes.

Afterwards, someone suggested to me that we call his office to express our gratitude. I dialed the number given, reaching a chipper-sounding voicemail. “Senator Booker, I’m calling to thank you,” I began before my voice buckled and I started to cry again. I let myself go watery, telling him the relief I felt seeing an elected official rise to the seriousness of the moment.

Was Senator Booker perfect? Were his policies morally unimpeachable? Did he do everything just as I would have wanted him to? Likely not. And, in this moment, was he showing himself to be a leader who stood up for his constituents, who listened to their needs and demands? Was he creating a new kind of blueprint for resistance from within an elected office? Absolutely yes.

When I hung up from leaving that message, I immediately called my representatives here in Hawaiʻi to say: Now you. It’s your turn. I saw someone post that if every Democratic member of Senate picked up a shift, it would just be two 5-hour shifts per week, per person. Couldn’t our reps be bothered? Would it be worth it?

But let’s rewind to March 31st, when Senator Booker began his speech, and to the days leading up to it. As @labeautyologist wrote:

I need a 30 for 30 on the preparation required to pull off this feat Sen. Cory Booker just pulled.

The letters from citizens. The binders. The staffers behind the scenes. The 20 min questions from other Dems.

How did he know what to say? How long have they been prepping? Has he fasted before? does he work out regularly? Where did the stamina come from? Just God & the ancestors? Was he running thru Hoboken like Rocky?

Once Booker stepped down from the lectern, he took a moment to speak to a reporter who asked what he averred were the burning questions we all wanted to know:

Had Senator Booker eaten? Yes, a banana to break his fast—which it turned out he’d been keeping since Friday in preparation. How did he feel? Ok, though he’d experienced some muscle cramping in the final hours, due to dehydration. Because yes, he’d also dehydrated himself in the lead-up. How does one dehydrate oneself, I wondered. Abstention from drinking water and other liquids? Saunas? Working out in extreme heat? Apparently Thurmond took dehydrating steam baths to prepare for his 24-hour filibuster. And had Senator Booker gone to the bathroom while speaking? Not at all. So all those theories I’d seen about whether he’d used a catheter or a diaper were, apparently, moot. The man just…didn’t—for 25 hours and 5 minutes.

And then there was this, shared post-facto by ABC News’ Capitol Hill Correspondent Jay O’Brien:

So what is it that Booker did with that biblical directive? Among other things, he read letters from us. He brought the stories of U.S. citizens struggling under the effects of the current administration to the Senate floor. He let the people tell their own stories. In the segments I watched, he emphasized the strength of the collective again and again. To that end, he affirmed: “The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

This was a man who knew, if only in that moment, that he was standing in as a vehicle and a voice for those without that access, ability, or platform to stand on the Senate floor themselves.

Indeed, over the course of those 25 hours and 5 minutes, something was happening. Author and therapist Katherine Wela Bogen wrote:

Literally 300 [thousand] people are sitting on this TikTok live right now watching Senator Booker break the filibuster record. He’s invoking the Underground Railroad, Stonewall, Selma and the room is in tears. He’s in tears. I’m in tears. I know this man isn’t perfect - no one is perfect - but there is immense bravery in this labor. It is a labor of love, devoted to the maintenance of an idea. Ideas are the hardest things to love.

The ideas Bogen is referring to are, in my mind, the principles of freedom and equality upon which American democracy was founded, its formative mythology (also Bogen’s term). This myth—enduring and intoxicating—has tried and faltered to come to fruition many times over the past centuries. It’s an aspirational ideology we still strive towards, a critical piece of Americans’ collective cultural identity, consciously and subconsciously. It’s a dream we seek out, hope for, cling to, fail at, try for again.

In those 25 hours and 5 minutes, Booker invoked the myth of America, and perhaps for a few minutes, he let us live within it.

His commitment to sharing people’s stories, to flooding the Senate floor with undeniable voices that reveal a snapshot of this moment in time—people wrestling with medical bills, job losses, health and familial crises, deportations, program and grant funding cuts, and more—makes the difficulty of upholding the myth tangible. We don’t get to freedom and equality without excising everything that stands in their way. And as we know, what’s in the way is formidable, historical, entrenched.

After Senator Booker stepped away and sat down, here’s what he wrote:

I may be tired and a little hoarse, but as I said again and again on the Senate floor, this is a moment where we cannot afford to be silent, when we must speak up.

What’s most clear to me tonight is that this is just the beginning, that Americans across this country, no matter their title or party, are ready to be heard.

In these words, and the 25 hours that came before, Booker touched that place in many of us that has felt unsupported, unseen, unrepresented by those purportedly elected to represent us.

Hence: tears. Booker’s speech delivered moments of compassion, humanity, and witnessing that broke through the struggle. It offered a sense of momentum towards catharsis. No matter the folks complaining that it was performative (which, duh), or that it didn’t accomplish anything (which, I beg to differ). What absurdity, in the face of an act generating something so tenuous as hope and vision, galvanizing something so potent as action and possibility for a political party deeply wounded.

Yes, this merited tears. And apparently not just my own. As more and more of us took to social media to post about crying over Booker’s speech, Bogen again took note:

None of us expected a representative to fight this hard for the American public. We are cynical. We are disillusioned. We are deeply blunted. We have come to expect political and rhetorical violence from policymakers against Americans. Booker is a shock. His behavior is so stunning BECAUSE it is good.

For once, perhaps, we might let something just be good, without picking it apart, without holding back at the risk of being cringe, without naysaying for the sake of discourse.

On the phone this morning, a friend confessed to me that her trainer had recently chided, “You’re very good at being sad, you know.” We laughed, knowing. “Just let yourself be happy,” her trainer said. “Because the happiness fades, too, just like the sadness.”

So here I am, taking a beat to revel here, in the collective tears, the small catharsis, the still-possible myth of America that Senator Booker let us live within for a day and change—or even just a moment. I’m letting it carry me forward into what comes next.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

Fancy a stress-relief baking session? I got my hands on an advance copy of megastar baker and pastry chef Nicole Rucker’s book Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake, and it’s truly the material of baking book canon.

I’m reading Tracy O’Neill’s mystery-detective memoir Woman of Interest about the author’s search for her biological mother in South Korea. Bonus points for noir vibes infused with comedic overtones.

To listen.

Season 4 of two-time Peabody-nominated podcast “Scene on Radio,” “The Land That Never Has Been Yet,” is about the myth of American democracy from its historical beginnings to the present day. I relished it when it came out in 2019 and am considering a re-listen.

I appreciated the audio version of a New York magazine piece about the commodification of perimenopause—because clearly what women in their 30s and 40s need is one more psychosomatic crisis to spend money on *sigh*.

To watch.

Anyone else watching “Paradise”? I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I have strong suspicions that these sorts of apocalyptic enclaves are already being built below our feet.

STAY SANE

…and power to the people.

Love,

Lily