Sadness, Fear, Everything Changed

Warning: Some (mostly) depressing reflections on the recent election.

Photo by Magnus Andersson on Unsplash

My apologies for taking some time off from Substack. In all honesty, I’m still reeling from the election results. The emotions I felt/feel—and I’m sure some will say it’s an exaggeration, still, there it is—have been on par with what I felt on the morning of 9/11/2001.

I was preparing to teach for the first time at Yale University. I believe it was a college seminar, fiction writing workshop. I knew the students would be sophisticated, demanding. I was putting the finishing touches on my syllabus, trying to make sure it sounded smart enough, that it was thorough enough, when my wife called from work and told me to turn on the television.

As I watched the second plane vanish into the side of the second tower, as the flames grew and grew, smoke billowing, people jumping from impossible heights, the towers finally collapsing unimaginable distances down into themselves, I was left with—all at once—immense sadness, deep fear, and a sense that everything in the world had irrevocably changed.

Those same three emotions descended on me on election night.

I felt a breath-stealing sadness that so many of my fellow Americans could cast their votes for such an objectively immoral and awful human being, could somehow put aside his innumerable lies, his convictions by juries of his peers (jurors agreed upon by his lawyers, remember), his infamous grab them by the p**** comment, the phone call we all heard to the Georgia secretary of state asking him to find more votes, the call to a foreign leader asking him for dirt on Biden if he wanted to receive more U.S. weapons….

To list everything would be too exhausting (and depressing)—and I guess that was maybe the point: to act so absurdly, say so many outrageous things that they would all blur together into a kind of white noise voters weren’t keen enough to parse?

I am also saddened that so many people may well soon feel the impact of the coming storm so directly in their lives.

There’s the man I know who has worked his whole life in this country, has paid significant sums of money into Social Security (that he will never be eligible to receive), who is one of the hardest working, decent people I will ever meet. He works for a nearby business, and in his spare time rakes leaves, weeds, tends gardens, cleans out gutters—helps people like me with tasks we don’t have enough time for at a fair price. He has lived here for decades, raised a family here, just getting by, hurting no one…eating no pets, not released here in some villainous plot by foreign actors to undermine and poison the good blood of America….

I fear for my daughter who may one day find herself in a situation a pregnant colleague of hers recently faced, deciding not to attend an important professional conference in Florida for fear of the outside possibility of needing emergency medical attention related to her pregnancy while there.

Under the next administration women face the very real possibility of seeing even more of their rights amended and upended, of seeing their freedoms increasingly curtailed.

On a personal/financial level, as I can now officially start tapping into Social Security, drawing back from it, finally, after a lifetime of paying into it, I fear the likelihood of its continuation is seriously in doubt—with many Republicans outwardly calling for its elimination or significant reduction.

I also fear for a planet on the brink of, if not already in the throes of climate catastrophe. I recently read that the Gulf Stream (which is important for so many reasons, including bringing a more temperate climate to all of Europe) may well soon stop flowing. The drought we are in the midst of in the northeast is unlike any I’ve ever seen. Yes, it was nice to go for a bike ride wearing shorts and short sleeves yesterday, but I can’t remember a time when I was able to do that this late in November.

The climate got little coverage this election cycle, as is too often the case. People were too worried about the cost of eggs and bacon to see past that to Mother Nature sending up warning after warning—floods, hurricanes, droughts, forest fires…of unseen intensity. While not enough has happened to curb the steady march of climate change even under an administration who accepts the irrefutable science, the next administration insists it’s just another lib-tard hoax….

Perhaps most like 9/11, though, is the sense that everything has changed, that the world just isn’t fundamentally the same any more. If it no longer matters if our elected officials are decent, moral human beings (or simply not felons)… If lies can be so easily (and liberally) spread and then accepted (or simply ignored)… If the basic tenets of our constitution (“no person is above the law”) can be so summarily dismissed by 6 individuals… If a party can spend years and countless sums demanding to see and then act upon the contents of a president’s son’s laptop but then push to not release the findings of the House ethics committee on alleged child sex trafficking and drug charges of a man who will potentially be our next Attorney General—the chief law enforcement official in the land… If an anti-vaxer nut job can become the director of Human Health… If  a monomaniacal billionaire nut job who has zero empathy for non-billionaires can be put in charge of “government efficiency”…. (Here, too, I could go on and on)… Then, yes, things have fundamentally changed—and this change is more serious (and terrifying) than any we faced in 2016.

The consequences of the next four years may well be significant in terms of human suffering and human freedom—and even just in the day to day way we interact as citizens and live our lives. Imagine, as Pete Buttigieg recently did, being legally married in one state, with a house, children, then crossing a state line and finding your marriage is seen as illegal (and immoral)….

So? Be vigilant. Continue to be loving and kind and good—as foils to the politics of hate and division that have, unfathomably, become normalized. Look to what gives you sustenance, what gives you hope and uplifts you. Then, look for ways to give others sustenance, to lend what may well be a much-needed hand. For me these will entail seeking out local volunteering needs, researching and discovering what small differences I can make to help us weather the coming storm. Writing.

It will also entail walking out into a silent forest and looking up at the twisting beauty of branches. Paddling deep into the wilderness across a glass-flat, mirroring lake in the company of loons, mergansers, eagles, ravens. Scrambling up rock faces to high outlooks, the world small and unfamiliar spreading out below in grey-yellow afternoon haze. Riding my bike down curving gravel roads with no houses and no cars, a bobcat dashing across the road, stopping for a quick glance my way before vanishing into the thick underbrush….where, for a short time at least, the eternal mystery and beauty and complexity of being will counter the petty smallness and imperfections of humanity.

Photo by the author.

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