Waking up this morning to read the election results provokes a number of thoughts.
The first is the Chinese curse, so-called: May you live in interesting times. The next four years will certainly be interesting.
The next thought is something like a prayer: May they not be that interesting, may they stay within the guardrails of our long-established political and legal institutions.
In my hopeful and possibly naive way, I believe they will.
Another is that people I know from Evanston did everything they could. They filled out and sent postcards, donated money, even traveled to Wisconsin, Michigan and other swing states to canvass for Kamala Harris. They have nothing to regret other than the result itself.
Doorstep discussion
I’m put in mind of a conversation I had with a Donald Trump supporter some weeks back. I rang his doorbell because, as far as I could tell, he was the only person in the city who had a Trump sign in front of his house, and I was interested in why. We had a five-minute conversation at his doorstep, and although he declined to let me quote him by name, he did explain why he was supporting Trump.
He said he had voted for Barack Obama, but when the country shut down during the early months of the pandemic, he felt things had gone too far. He said he was a law school graduate, and I took it from his comments that he believed the decrees to close down society — to shutter schools and businesses — went too far and were unlawful.
He said people had been stealing or tearing up his Trump signs four or five times a day, and we both agreed that had been disgraceful: He was entitled to express his opinion like anyone else.
I pointed out that while reasonable people could disagree about Trump‘s actions during his term in office, to me the Jan. 6 uprising was a dealbreaker, that no president who countenanced a violent disruption of the democratic process deserved to be reelected. He responded that Trump had told the crowd to go “peacefully,” which is what I have heard other Trump supporters say about that terrible day.
That sent me back to the original speech, the hourlong harangue at his Capitol rally. And while it is true that Trump used the word “peacefully,” the actual phrase was “peacefully and patriotically,” which could be interpreted any number of ways.
In any case, the rest of the speech was filled with belligerent incitements, 36 by my count, enough to boil the blood of any Trump supporter.
But dwelling on that thought is painful, and I prefer to promote optimism, not fear and anxiety, about the next four years.
What about the future?
So what can we say? First, that through the ungainly apparatus of the Electoral College, voters have had their say. That’s more than billions of people can say in China and Russia and elsewhere, where elections are truly rigged.
Second, while I don’t fully understand their thinking, I hope the millions of people who voted for Trump can appreciate how their voices have been heard. Because it’s clear to me that the divisiveness in this country stems in part from Trump supporters feeling disrespected and neglected.
And finally, life will go on. We will if necessary push back against unreasonable actions and laws — such as assaults against women’s rights to choose their own health care and wholesale deportation of immigrants – and comprise the loyal opposition as need be. We will stand firm in our belief in the general goodness of our fellow citizens.
And we will recall other interesting and painful times — the wars and depressions and divisiveness experienced over the country’s 248 years — and how we got through them too.