I was in India on election night. It was a strange place to experience an election, and perhaps even stranger to wake up the next morning as the polls were just closing in the westernmost states. I’ve had so many conversations about how the electoral college works and why the American executive is so uniquely powerful. It spills over everywhere - a few hours ago, when my passport didn’t scan on my layover in Paris, the agent said “it’s because of Trump”. (It worked fine on the next machine.)
I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out what to say in this post. So much has been written on why the election went the way it did, what it means, what it doesn’t mean, how we persevere through it. I still can’t quite figure out what I want to say even after rewriting this half a dozen times. I have other things I want to write about, but this has completely blocked me - I just can’t let my last hopeful post go unanswered.
I think it’s important that I go on the record and say I’m unhappy about the way the election turned out and that I have a lot of fear about how things are going to go, both within the US and outside it. I have friends in Ukraine who I’m very worried about right now. And there are so many other things too…
I thought about writing about false hope, or about the importance of investing in our communities, or about the importance of personal resilience. Those are all important things. I could go over the litany of reasons why we should expect better in our country.
But I think I’m just going to go with this:
Just because something should happen doesn’t mean it will, and just because there is nothing (or very little) I can do doesn’t mean I have to be okay with the way things are or the direction they’re headed. So as for me and my family, we willl continue to live according to our convictions, we will practice building resilience, we will continue to show love to others, and we will seek opportunities to live the America we want to see in the world.
I feel your pain