The Day After

It’s the day after. And amidst my shock, disbelief, and horror, I’m trying to find a calm center. Not in a “look at the bright side” kind of way. There are no bright sides right now, only shadows of fleeting glimmers. (Like, well at least there won’t be any election-related violence, but oh yeah there will probably be much more violence for other reasons in the term to come.)

I’m trying to find a calm center for how to live today and the days that will follow. For my own sanity, soul, and physical well-being, I don’t want to carry around all this anger and fear. I have to find a way to proceed with love and hope and faith, so that the life I want to live for myself is not stolen from me.

Peeling back the layers of my own construction for dealing with the inexplicable draw of such a corrupt and incompetent man, I get to the core thesis that people have to be feeling pain about something to believe that someone so utterly unfit to lead our country is our best choice. They’re feeling left out or losing out in some way, they fear being left out or losing out in the future. There’s no other way to justify their illogic, their carelessness, their false hope.

So, I guess we could view this turn of events as happening for a reason, painful as it is to process all the enormous setbacks we are staring down. If we maintain our trust in the long arc of justice, we have to believe we’re not there yet. After all, the story of our country is an epic battle about who we are – a white, patriarchal, Christian country or a nation of cherished diversity. I heard someone suggest recently that perhaps we shouldn’t have been rooting for and thankful for the guardrails we had in the White House last time, that it would have been better to let it all hang out, so to speak, so that fewer would make that same choice again. Interesting. I guess we’ll now see if that’s in fact what we need to finally move on – because we’ll have no guardrails this time.

For now, I’m avoiding the news. It’s just too painful. I don’t know how that’ll look in the coming weeks. But that’s easy – at least for now. The harder question is how to mentally process my feelings about my country and my fellow citizens who decided this was the best way forward. Considering that we ultimately need to accept what’s happened and find a way to go forward under this cloud of incompetence and cruelty, it’s easy to adopt an “I guess our country will get what it deserves now” mindset. But of course, it’s our country too. And so much lasting damage could be inflicted in the coming term.

Do we quietly make note of what’s happening so that we can say, when the complaints and disbelief come, “Well, this is what you wanted, remember?” Do we just try to live our lives as faithfully as we can and try to ignore the noise? Do we actively set out to help those who will be most harmed by this administration?

I guess all of these things – and more? Thoughts?