I have a confession to make: I wrote my newsletter for the week, about the election, before the race had been called for Biden. It just felt like the slow trickle of votes couldn’t possibly dry up before the scales tipped in his favor, and luckily I was right.
I’ve been writing about the election on and off for the past few months now, but never really thought about what it would be like if Biden won. Not what his presidency would be like, but what the day would be like. My only memory of 2016 was waking up at 3am to some texts on my phone, and feeling a bit stunned. Work the next day was quiet.
So I was very surprised – although in hindsight I shouldn’t have been – to come back from Baltimore on Saturday and find a city of honking horns and Biden t-shirts. 2020 may be one of the most challenging years in recent memory – COVID, forest fires, Trump’s slow madness – but it takes a year like that to produce a moment like this: A sunny, 70 degree day in November where people finally said f*ck it and tossed their masks aside to bid farewell to the Donald, shoulder to shoulder with strangers.
Plus, here in the city we were given this magical sunset:
I ended up discarding that original newsletter that I pre-wrote. It didn’t mesh with how I felt, walking through the city yesterday with my sister Gillian. Seeing and hearing and feeling its collective heartbeat. When a city this size is all focused on the same thing, you notice.
But the celebrations put off facing the reality of our situation. We’re at a crossroads. We’ve discarded Trump, who is the embodiment of everything we say we hate about politics – the misinformation, the cruelty, the corruption, the tribalism – but we’ve done nothing to address any of those things for real. If the conversations I’ve had with people since Tuesday are any indication, we’re probably headed for a worse place, even more disgusted that 50% of the country could have voted for the wrong guy, whichever guy that may be.
Polarization is talked about like some monolithic thing that just happens. But all of us play the key role. Facebook algorithms, news outlets, globalization, inequality – those are factors, but they rely on eager partisans to function.
So my goal for the next four years is to speak kindly about people I disagree with. I believe that words matter, and what we say within our ideologically uniform circles determines how we feel about people. Deplorables doesn’t leave much hope for redemption, does it?
The next few months will pull us right back into the outrage news cycle. And it’s up to us to keep our heads above water this time around.
– Emmett