“Today is a good day. It’s easier to be a parent this morning. Character matters. Being a good person matters. This is a big deal. It’s easy to do it the cheap way and get away with stuff – but it comes back around. Today is a good day.” – Van Jones
Character won, but barely, and the battle is far from over – and I don’t just mean the current president approaching a failed presidency the same way he approached his failed businesses through lies, threats, and litigation. I worry about the next few months, but come January, a new president will be sworn in, and we will see an end to stochastic terrorism from the highest office.
For all his flaws and missteps, Biden possesses humility. He’s not a narcissist demanding fealty, but a civil servant whose supporters don’t revere him as king, and he chose as his VP a woman, Kamala Harris, who challenges him. He won’t be able to magic away our problems, and hopefully nobody expects him to do so; that requires work at every level of government, and within families and communities, but he’s more likely to work for us than against us. What sort of cabinet he can build will hinge on the outcome of Georgia’s senator runoffs in January.
If elections had MVPs, Stacey Abrams is a top contender. She may have lost her race for Governor against a man who refused to recuse himself from running the election despite the obvious conflict of interest, but she continues to combat voter suppression and rally the people of Georgia. Part of me cheers her efforts; the other part feels saddened that women like Abrams carry so much of the burden on their shoulders.
This country was largely built by people who were enslaved, or by immigrants who continue to be rewarded with discrimination and worse. Too many celebrated “champions” of women’s suffrage chose supremacy over uplifting others, and even now too many of any political persuasion continue to do so. Since the beginning, women of color have done much of the heavy lifting, both literal and metaphorical, only to have their hard work overlooked, and to be so often left behind. We need to stop expecting them to save the rest of us from our worst impulses.
My former home state of Arizona has also seen a dramatic shift. I’m proud of friends who have been active participants in bringing us closer to the nation’s professed ideals. Celebrity politicians flitting from state to state don’t make or break elections; community organizers and their dedicated volunteers do. While we’ve seen the damage that can be done from those at the top, positive change depends on every level of government, and within communities.
I’m disappointed but not surprised that other people I know continue to spread disinformation, even when it endangers lives. If people were even half as skeptical of a pathological liar as they are of literally everyone else, we’d all be better off. It’s telling when people who only know someone from a “reality” TV show admire him despite their claimed distrust in the media that elevates him, but those with firsthand knowledge decisively reject him.
Too often people value image over reality, and symbols over people, but I’m relieved the specter of so-called “patriotic” education no longer hovers over us. An important part of taking pride in yourself is self-improvement. You need to acknowledge your flaws and work to correct them instead of pretending to be perfect and infallible. That path leads to arrogance and destruction. Pride in country should be no different. Otherwise it’s not patriotism, it’s indoctrination.
My own path to self-improvement has been rocky. While the events of the last four years in particular have been eye-opening to some, they confirmed what I already knew deep down. Time and distance have a way of clarifying the lessons of experience. I feel guilty when I grieve for a childhood tainted by loneliness and self-doubt because many have had it so much worse (as a teacher, I’ve encountered too many real life horror stories) but that doesn’t mean my circumstances were ideal. I never really accepted that until now, and it helps me make sense of past traumas and move forward. Sometimes I feel like the only thing I do right is owning up to what I do wrong and working hard to improve (with varying degrees of success or failure).
These days many of us feel alone together. I take comfort in knowing I’m not the aberration people treated me as when I was younger, not just because I’ve met others like me, or people who accept me despite my quirks, but…if people can rally so strongly behind someone so toxic and destructive, is it such a bad thing being ignored or ridiculed by them, and failing to fit in?
Honestly, I’d need to do some serious soul searching otherwise. I just…I wish things had been different. Or at least, that I’d been different. So many years wasted feeling sad and alone, and then giving myself reasons to feel down on myself because I thought it was no better than I deserved.
It still bothers me that developing children who do or say the wrong thing out of innocence are held to higher standards than adults who choose to be cruel. I imagine that’s been hard for a lot of us in the neurodivergent community in particular. We spend our lives working so hard to do right by people, and along comes others with bad intentions serving only themselves, and getting revered for it when we can’t even get a pass for being a little quirky or weird.
Worse than that, they devise an alternate reality, observable facts be damned. I may write fantasy, but I prefer to keep my feet planted firmly on solid ground. And that disconnect from reality is not just a problem for the neurodivergent community, but consider people with visual or hearing impairments, or both, that rely on the accurate reporting of personal and public matters from friends and family or strangers alike. At least I can see or hear for myself what others deny. The gaslighting has been the worst part, and it’s not going away just because he is. It brought him into power in the first place.
For those who feel vindicated, take a breath, but don’t get complacent. The work isn’t over. There’s just one less roadblock in the way. I hope. Sorry to be a downer, but when you see people call for unity and their alleged friends and family respond with threats and insults, it’s not encouraging.
