Default
Last Saturday night was the first time I slept 8 full hours and woke up feeling refreshed since *checks calendar* November 2016. Sure, it could have resulted from the celebratory champagne that started flowing at breakfast time in California, fifteen minutes after a friend in Germany texted “Welcome back to the civilized nations!”
But like 78 million other Americans, it was more likely the unimaginable relief that came from seeing the election results go our way. (My older sister and I were at odds on this: she refused to entertain the possibility of a second term, whereas I didn’t allow myself to hope he would be denied. The Baby Boomer/GenX divide never felt so real.) Even if it won’t be quite real until January 21, a yuuuge weight had been lifted, and it was apparently the one that had squashed my ability to sleep.
But here’s the truth: one week later, it’s already high time to get back to work.
Because that gauntlet of engagement in the political process we just survived – the one that saw us donating to GOTV efforts in our own communities and elsewhere, text banking in states we’ve never visited, phone banking in states whose pronunciation we need to be coached on (trust me, it’s NeVAAAAda and OR-i-gen to natives, and they’ll know you’re from Away if you botch it) – that is our new default. That’s the baseline of your required involvement in the democratic process, though you’re always free to level up.
Why? Because we now know from direct experience what it looks like when we don’t.
I’m not saying people didn’t work hard in the 2016 election. I am saying each of us has been touched personally in the past four years by what it means to have an incompetent administration elected by a minority of the voting populace. Public health, racial justice, immigration policy, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, climate crisis – the impact of failed leadership in these arenas will never be theoretical again, for anyone alive in the country today.
But the good news is that holding ourselves to a higher standard of knowledge and activism about democracy isn’t bad news. I mean, you have to find humor in the fact that on a Zoom call this week with college friends I met thirty years ago, we spent as much time dissecting the Twitter feud between the Lieutenant Governors of Texas and Pennsylvania as we did talking about what our kids are up to. (Pay up, Lt. Gov. Patrick, and Lt. Gov Fetterman would like his reward in Sheetz gift cards.) Or that my brother and I, whose only shared memory of Georgia was when we were packed into the backseat of a woody paneled station wagon circa 1974 on a family drive from Florida to New York, had an in-depth discussion of electoral college votes and recounts in the Peach State on Tuesday. After eight months of sheltering-at-home, it’s actually been nice to have something new to talk about.
The new default is to recognize that democracy is a full contact sport, played year-round, in your neighborhood, city, state, and country. And you are ALWAYS the snack mom. There’s no getting out of it.
Wherever this man goes in January, it’s not to an isolation booth. He’s going to keep stirring shit up, more than ever because he’ll have none of the constraints of public office (not that he ever thought much about them in the first place.) He’s wounded, he’s a bottomless abyss of self-pity, and he’s ready to amp up the 72 MILLION people who still thought he’d make a swell leader for another term, primed to encourage their anger and paranoia.
Our only real hope is to make things better for everyone, and quickly, before he decides to try for another round at the pinata of our national dignity in 2024.
That’s a shit-ton of pressure for this administration to shoulder, though if anyone can handle it, it’s Joe and Kamala. But that job gets infinitely easier when it’s spread out to all of us. Stay involved. Be vocal. Reach out to understand the needs of your community. Keep fighting back against the disinformation, the cynicism, the hatred. All of us have time, talent, and/or treasure in some combination. Figure out what you can contribute to making sure that this election was the inflection point that saw us finally start solving hard problems., instead of a dead cat bounce.
If you’re sleeping better, may as well make it count, right?
Of all the songs crowd-sourced on the fly during our impromptu front-yard/masked/distanced dance party last Saturday, this was probably my favorite.
“Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night…”
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