Member-only story
Navigating a Post-Election World
Here we are. But where on earth is here?
My inbox is full of postmortems. I wrote a small one on Twitter late on election day and immediately regretted it. What am I doing? Why am I yelling at people who are just as upset as I am?
(There will be a postmortem, oh boy will there be a postmortem, but not today)
I don’t know if this is healthy but there is a sort of cold comfort, for me, in the fact that Trump won outright. He didn’t steal the election or wrench this country from us by force, he won the popular vote: first Republican to do it in 20 years. It’s like in horror movies, where the victim does something stupid before being brutally murdered. We can tell ourselves they asked for it, which frees us from guilt as we watch them die horribly for our entertainment.
People who did not vote for Trump did not ask for whatever’s coming and do not deserve it. But America, the country, does. Over decades, we slowly became the kind of place where someone like Trump could win. Now that he has won, we have made that status official. We are, in fact, not going back.
What now?
I posted a quote in my last article about getting lost. I’m going to post it again, because I think it’s the best model for moving into the future and because I’m going to spend the rest of this…
