I tried hard, at first, to turn off the news, but I couldn't do it. It's as if it had become my cross to bear, my penance for settling happily into my insulated corner of the universe, refusing to believe there were so many "others" out there. I flipped channels, checked on Twitter, responded to the incessant beeps from friends texting their despair. As if sharing it would somehow make it go away.
In the wee hours, when the news broke of Biden eking ahead in Wisconsin, I finally closed my eyes. Briefly anyway. I hung on to the encouraging words of pundits, comforted myself with my firmly held notion that Biden's campaign crew had been making all sorts of good decisions, and this would be okay. I even hold out hope, now, that Biden can win, but my despair is palpable. Millions of Americans cast a vote for a cruel, corrupt, criminal, and incompetent poor excuse for a human who had devoted the past four years to revealing himself (to anyone who hadn't noticed) as a cruel, corrupt, criminal, and incompetent poor excuse for a human.
The finger pointing has begun. The pollsters screwed up. We didn't pick an exciting candidate. Biden said a stupid thing at the last debate. We forgot about the Cubans. Well, sure the pollsters screwed up, but that didn't cause the mess; it only enhanced the crushing disappointment. It's why I'm such a big fan of low expectations. An exciting candidate? Because progressives were too bored to vote for our only alternative to fascism? Shame on them, if that's true. Biden said a stupid thing? Has he incited violence, given the nod to gun-toting American terrorists, caged children, denied climate change, disparaged the entire medical profession, lied about, well, everything? And we knew damn well what the Cubans were thinking. We didn't forget; we just brushed aside. They are, after all, brown people, and we assumed they would know better.
I woke up yesterday feeling optimistic. It was a beautiful day, I had finally convinced my conscientiously objecting Republican friend that he needed to cast his vote, even if it wouldn't matter in Illinois. I remembered my theory that RBG had chosen to leave us on the eve of the Jewish High Holidays so she could guide us from a heavenly bench. I put on my brand new Kamala-esque Chucks and even had a spring in my step.
The counting continues and we just don't know. We don't know when we'll know. But what we do know is that an astounding number of people who live in the clearly inaptly named shining city on a hill cast their precious votes for, well, a cruel, corrupt, criminal, and incompetent poor excuse for a human who had devoted the past four years to revealing himself as a cruel, corrupt, criminal, and incompetent poor excuse for a human.
We have our work cut out for us. The problem isn't the pollsters or Joe or fracking or even our forgetting about the Cubans, though that's the closest. It's about the messaging. We knew what message the Cubans were being fed, and we left it alone. And we've known what messages all the folks are being fed out there, outside our bubbles, by propaganda spreading news empires that have cornered those far-flung markets. While we were sleeping. Or seeking self-affirmation. Or calling people stupid and racist and greedy. I'm as guilty as anybody.
The work starts now, even if Biden pulls through. There's a whole country, out there and right here, that needs fixing.
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