The Day After The Day After
Since I talked about election night and I talked about the day after, and since I’ve (mostly) been limiting my social use to posting photos from the Camp Snap camera of my trip to the zoo, let’s talk a bit about today, although this will have some of those other days, too.
Yesterday morning I had a dream that wound its way into my therapy notes for the week like this:
Something or somethings are eating away at the fabric of reality bleeding into ours and a woman tells me they’ve studied all the options and there’s only one way to save me, and she lunges at me to choke me into suffocation or to completely crush my chest.
After weeks of swollen lymph nodes, aching in my left neck and shoulder, and near-constant Eustachian tube dysfunction in my left ear, I awoke to all of it gone. Who knows if it will last but at least I woke to some kind of relief in some part of gestures at everything.
On the way back from the zoo, my bus got stuck in the deep industrial wilds of Northwest at a railroad crossing whose light was red for fully fifteen minutes before there was any sign of what then was a very slow-moving train. By the time we reached the point where the train existed but simply kept moving back and forth along the tracks, I uttered aloud, “I think I’ve had this nightmare.”
In the evening well after making a batch of baked Chex, I discovered that I’d left my small sauce pan on the stove for an hour or more and likely utterly destroyed the coating. It’s also the pan I use to boil water for coffee.
Gaby:
It is 2016 all over for me again, with one difference. In 2016 my first thought was, I am glad Marley looks white, but I did not know any better. Yes, she looks white but she’s a woman, and I fear for her rights, and Luna’s too. Yes, she’s only 8-years-old and and Luna soon-to-be 6, and they don’t know what’s going on. Some things may not affect them in the immediate future, but who knows about in a not so distant one, down the road, when they comes to age.
Bear:
The fact the US has always projected itself around the world as being a paragon of freedom, an insanely well-funded military and nuked-up protector of it no less, while having a political election system that even allows such a person - a CONVICTED, hateful criminal - to get anywhere near being on a ballot paper is just another one of it’s many enduring but not endearing weirdnesses.
I felt my blood pressure shoot through the roof because yeah if feeding someone fleeing a war zone and making sure they have access to a doctor should they need one here then I don’t care if my taxes did go to their aid (Even though they don’t and you need a valid SSN to apply for government benefits, at least the kind she is claiming they can get willy nilly). Like the fact you can look at these people and call them illegal…it makes me absolutely sick. What has she done to be more deserving than they? Because she was born on this dirt and they were born on different dirt? That was by no way something she achieved it was a happenstance. Had the wheel of fortune turned a bit differently, she may very well be the one regarded as illegal (and in some eyes is).
(See also.)
Right now, deciding what to do with the hand we’re given doesn’t mean solving every problem. It means asking what we each stand for and how we’ll live that out. Be a good person, the best and most genuine version of yourself, even in small ways. Stretch your hand out to a stranger, and stay engaged in difficult conversations. Small acts that, over time, make a difference.
If this is America, I need to reconstruct my politics. If this is who we elect, and this will be our judiciary, and these are our values, we need a different politics. We could have cared about each other, we could have worked to build an effective, efficient, operable government that ensures safety and equality of opportunity, and a minimum life of dignity.
Misu:
My boss took the day off today. “I won’t be able to focus,” she’d said. It sounded like a good idea when I heard it, though now that I’m in the office, I’m glad to be here. I’d be doing my head in at home without something like work to distract me. She must not have been the only one with that idea, because the office is eerily quiet today. People greet each other with shaking heads and long hugs and soft words of sympathy.
I would like to be able to discuss and understand the reasons that led to such a clear choice, even more so than in 2016. I believe there is a lot of anger, misinformation, and a desire to defeat the other side rather than firmly believing in what the future will grant them with theirs. And I felt strongly unwilling to judge since Italy also experienced a similar situation with Berlusconi, so when I read absurd posts online from indignant Italians, they might forget what happened just a few years before in our country.
Naz:
I’m not surprised. Disappointed and angry, yes. But not surprised. I’ve experienced racism enough times in this country and gone through a lengthy process with immigration to know what this country truly is. Ironically, the racism I’ve experienced has occurred in cities. And despite being heightened to it when traveling through smaller parts of this country, I haven’t knowingly experienced it. The racism is here, in our backyards.
So I was surprised to feel that sadness when it became clear that it was mathematically impossible for Kamala Harris to win. I thought I could not be more numb than I already was. Still, I frantically refreshed all the apps hoping for a miracle. Maybe some people may wonder why is a Singaporean so concerned about the US elections? I don’t know if I should spend the energy trying to explain systemic repercussions. It is very disturbing when people out of the US see it as a joke, or make some statement about “next time”. For some people, there is no “next time”.
Roy:
I wish I didn’t have to pay so close attention to US politics, but as I’ve said many times, our declining superpower casts a long shadow over the rest of the world. Trump’s comeback would have disastrous consequences at the very least in terms of climate change. Ukraine will soon lose access to aid and perhaps be forced to cede territory to Russia. And my own country might find the US a less reliable ally in the face of possible future Chinese aggression. Certainly European countries will be forced to find a way to be less dependent on their American cousins.
There’s something Ben said that I wanted to highlight, if briefly. his hypothesis “that the Democrats have been culturally outmaneuvered”:
That electorate needs help, which means they need change, and will vote for someone who seems like they might bring about change.
The Republican base of high net worth donors (the people who, frankly, really make a difference to election campaign finances) is all-in on funding that change. […] The Democratic base of high net worth donors is not.
Ben’s pitch basically boils down to the Democrats reconceptualizing what even is a modern political party and it very much resembles countering the “command and control” approach of the caste-driven and nativist GOP with a sort of distributed, asymmetrical political warfare: “run principled grassroots campaigns” rather than “optimizing for money”; become “the anti-authoritarian, anti-war party”; and stop working with the GOP, instead “working very directly with local communities and giving them a platform”.
As he puts it: Become an operating system for local organizing.
It’s compelling, and certainly the sort of thing that no political party is really doing, at least not with the sort of cultural heft that comes with being one of the two major political parties in the country, but it’s not hard to see that the Democrats will not do anything at all like this. Especially when almost the first thing that happened after the election, amid all the typical in-fighting and fingerpointing, was that conservative Democrats went running to the press to make explicit transphobic noises with their shitty little mouths.
Come morning today, the cognitive and motor flubs ran rampant, as evidenced by having put the pot with my oatmeal down on the countertop instead of the stovetop, then somehow throwing the serving spoon across the counter instead of simply moving it ninety degrees, and then essentially being unable to walk a straight line on the way to sit to read over coffee.
My plan for the day mostly consists of this post, maybe using some Threadless store credit to get myself a pullover hoodie of my #EverydayAntifascist design for the years ahead (I’m also thinking of making the design freely available for anyone who wants to do it themselves), and settling in for an evening of one or more of my escaping television rewatches.
After all of the above, there’s one more thing that’s important given all of the above, from Nick, that’s not about the aftermath the election but was prompted by that link-laden anti-endorsement from The New York Times.
Both these pieces are so good, I just had to point to them and add my own stance: link often, and link generously. Writing on the web is not like print, where too many citations can feel interruptive. On the web, it is just part of the visual vocabulary. It encourages a more expansive tapestry where references can be used for more than just acknowledging source material. One can also point to definitions, tangential pages, or jokes. The hyperlink is among the singularly magical elements of the web.
There’s another thing about that “more expansive tapestry”. You’re probably sick to death of hearing me say it, but I’m forever going to be building upon that idea from Kevin that blogging is the great empathy engine of the web. It’s why in the midst of everything else here I stopped to give a sampling of blog posts I’ve read in the wake of the election, when I’ve been reading almost nothing else about it. That sampling is my “heard”.
In the hours after Mine Furor was re-elected, tech billionaires raced to effusively congratulate him. It’s more important than ever now that we continue to make use of the empathy engine, that we power it daily with our words and our links.