My Post-Election Thought Process
If you opened this hoping that I have great insight into the election and how to handle the news that Trump is returning to the White House, I will probably disappoint you. I am processing it along with you. I don’t know where you are in your stages of grief but here are my journal notes/observations since last night.
November 5, 2024, 10:13 pm
We have a national empathy deficit.
We need to practice detachment.
Without abandoning empathy.
Empathy is the idea that I feel what you feel and that helps me understand your experience. Detachment is retaining enough of myself to know how I feel, separate from you, and I protect myself from suffering.
We have a community deficit. We have a trust deficit. We no longer believe that we can be understood by others, so we detach past the point of empathy. Past the point of care. I against I. We against we. Our interests talking past each other.
I’m spewing nonsense.
I’m trying to figure out how to detach enough to protect myself. Or at least stay strong. I imagine stratospheres of caring from personal pain to apathy, concentric circles radiating out.
November 6, 2024, 2:40 am
(I waking up knowing Trump has won without checking my phone. I toss for a while, eventually falling back to sleep trying to think of animal names in alphabetical order.)
7:00 am
I can’t bring myself to look at the news. It’ll be there later, by then a part of history.
Today I’ll write a blog post. Then I’ll work on (my novel). I’ll make a project list and post it up someplace. I’ll let myself feel sad and also feel angry. I’ll try to make sense of it.
Everything is the same. The garbage is being picked up. Believe it or not, Joe Biden is still the president. Ukraine and Palestine are fucked and so are trans kids. But at least that part is a couple of months away.
I remember that annoying Chumba Wumba song and think, “When we got knocked down, we get back up again, but it’s okay to stay on the floor for a while, too.”
9:00 am
Someone posts this on Bluesky, and despite my misgivings about the author (Jamie Kalven, ask me off-line), I find it useful.
10:00 am
My older son comes over and his brother joins us to talk about the election. They are both angry but not totally incredulous. One blames the Democrats failures on Gaza and their embrace of right-wingers like the Cheneys. The other thinks people are dumb and just want lower prices and are “gonna be hella sorry when the tariffs are imposed and everything triples in cost.” Both believe that Trump is too incompetent to do anything, agree his team might be worse than even Trump, and that JD Vance will be president before the term is over.
They both reminisced about what it was like at school in 2016 when Trump won, and are amazed that another generation of 3rd graders has to go through that again. This is the world they have lived in. A nation full of angry, forgotten men, and the spiteful women who love them, wanting lower prices and revenge for having been made to share the riches of this country with people who aren’t white.
Liam notes, correctly: “It’s time for a new kind of activism, new politics.” We all nod our heads at that.
10:20 am
My friend sends me this essay by David Kurtz and I found it helpful, too:
11:55 am
My mom calls and she is far angrier than my kids. She grew up in a world where the arc of justice was long but bent toward justice. Now the arc of justice is bending back on itself like a world record set of fingernails. She’s ready to move to California (which she is, soon), even though she knows Trump won’t provide disaster relief to the state WHEN disaster strikes.
12:30 pm
The same friend sends me this poem:
For Nothing Is Fixed by James Baldwin
For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
2:35 pm
As the united states of America, we have ceased to hold each other, but the rest of us do not have to let go. We can keep faith with one another, keep our own lights on. I remember again that we need to practice empathy - radical love and empathy - to keep from breaking apart. We must also practice detachment - self-love and letting go of damaging feelings - so that can be the responsible witnesses the next generation needs.
I know I will think about all this as the days and weeks go on. Let me know what is helping you process this moment. Know that if you are reading this, I am holding you in my heart.
