Election Reflections on a Saturday afternoon.
I’ve never been a big fan of America. Or a fan of nations as a whole. I’ve never seen much hope in the self-selected division that comes with claiming a team, a flag, a state, a banner by which you choose to actively divide yourself from others. I’ve not read much promise in the history of these nations, most built in some large part on murder, oppression, and destruction, most founded on the idea that land itself can be owned and therefore stolen and later weaponized against its inhabitants. I’ve never understood the desire to tether oneself to a pride in a past you haven’t actually known or experienced.
The best parts of the best nations have seemed obvious like the best parts of the religious doctrines that often preceded and defined them, implied rights that no organization or collective body should need to bestow on any being, basic tenets and kindnesses that should exist among all peaceful species regardless of cultural inheritance or hierarchical circumstance.
The worst parts, as with those same religions, have felt glaringly overwhelming, stains so deep and so tragic that they’re often played for comic effect for fear of actually examining the reality that the harm done cannot be unbraided from the good it has produced; that perhaps no matter how many statues are torn down, the nation itself was named for an active slave trader, that being born in the South will forever carry a different set of social characteristics than being born in the North, and that further still these characteristics can be transposed upon the East, the West, by county, province, city, township, by borough, by block, and by street.
This is a reality drawn into focus throughout my lifetime as we are regularly called upon to divide into teams, along primary color boundaries normally reserved for gang culture and sporting events, to choose symbols and mascots, to purchase hats and signs, to hold rallies and fundraisers, to declare allegiances to people we’ve rarely ever met, and bestow upon them some grand sacred title allowing them to hold sway for some arbitrary amount of time over even the smallest details of our lives. Details like who we can love, where we can travel, what we can say and how loud we can say it. This we call freedom.
We call it freedom because we still measure it against the past and against the alternatives, the other nations whose flags and colors, crests, and identities by contrast seem to us like shells of reality. Using these comparisons we say with no hint of irony that this is the best we can do, and if you don’t like it you should go and try living elsewhere. You should try living in the horrors of the past, try visiting some war torn hell scape, try a colony on the moon. We say that it is only the privilege afforded to us by those who fought and died for these now seemingly obvious rights that allows for us to call these inequities into question in the first place. And yet each year we collectively allocate the majority of our resources, against any individual and personal desires we may have, to pool toward new and innovative ways to kill each other. And each election year some portion of us cheer the coming change. The new clothes we will wear, the new curtains we will hang, the coffee table we will move from the living room to the den.
This year I cried for the first time in my adult life because of election results. I cried tears of joy that we had finally made the most glaringly obvious decision. That after four years, with access to the greatest technologies and minds the world has ever known, with computers in our pockets full of every truth we’ve ever gathered, spending tens of billions of dollars, yelling as loudly and constantly as we possibly could, we barely, just barely didn’t choose a complete and total abomination as the leader of the free world.
I cried tears of joy for this change. For the hope that I might not have to hear the inescapable name of the president every day, several times a day, no matter where I go, or what country I choose to live in. I cried tears of joy that the people I know and love whose guaranteed rights and freedoms had been called into question, wrenched from them, used as tools of oppression, might be able to go about their days a bit more easily. I cried like my parents had in their greatest election victories or my grandparents who claim to have experienced true oppression firsthand, who say they’ve given us this platform which we are meant to make the best of once cried, just as theirs before them, moving backward through history to a point of origin so abstract I would hardly even recognize it if I saw it.
Though I’ve never been a fan of America, I’ve always been a fan of speaking truth to power, a concept which at its core can be seen as deeply American. Though over time the definition of power and the delegation of those meant to protect and possess it may shift, we seem to know it when we see it on display. We celebrate it as often as we attempt to dismantle it. We agree it is dangerous when held in too ample a supply and utilitarian when measured into tiny doses. We call it out, we hold it accountable, we set it ablaze if necessary, and yet when we ourselves are that power, it is often hard to identify and even harder to know what to do with. To speak truth to oneself, to disrobe from the history bestowed upon you, or disentangle from the trappings of your past can take so much work over an entire lifetime that the process of doing so might indeed kill you.
To unlearn the failures of your parents, or the customs of your time, to be held accountable for your actions, or consider the lives of others before your own, to vote when your vote might not appear to matter, to participate when the very system you are participating in seems flawed beyond reason, to think in ways that might call into question the very foundation upon which your home is built, to say what you truly feel when you know it will not be popular, these are not easy choices. Nor is it easy to come to terms with that fact that we have been at war more often than we have been at peace, and we rarely means all of us, to admit that Hawaii and Alabama might just have as much in common as Ireland and Turkey, that fifty states seems like a randomly chosen number, and that having fifty friends who all agree on where to eat lunch every day might at best have you eating cafeteria pizza and chocolate milk six days out of seven, or that I myself might be part of the problem as much as the solution, and that none of us deep down has any idea why we even exist.
This is where I spend most of my time when the world gets too real and choices too inescapable. I visit the ether. I vacation for a moment in the philosophical luxury box. I default to the space where your country and my country are the same country, no country at all. I wander through the woods where you and I are the same person. I ramble off further still into a universe where my grandfather is an oak tree, my mother a dolphin, America Pangea, Earth gas and stardust, the sun a friend I’ll one day hug, the days a construct with no more meaning than the color of your hat.
It’s a poetic place, with little bearing on reality. It’s the haven of dreamers unwilling or unable to deal with the hard problem of the now. There’s no violence in this place, no virus, no past-due rent, no seventy million voices screaming about how we’d be better off living in the silk-lined pockets of a narcissistic casino magnate. There’s no judgement in this place about who believes what or why all of us can’t seem to get along. There’s not even any place in this place. Which is why I can’t live there forever, not yet at least. For now I’m still here in America trapped for the time being but making the best out of what I’ve been given. What we’ve been given. Hopeful, like most, that change is the only constant and that the long tail of time will provide more than we can ever imagine.
It felt good to cry over this election to see people cheering from the rooftops, children waving flags. It felt like a holiday, at least as far as I could see. I’m sure for others it was a day of mourning. The president and his friends were evicted, his fans and followers let down. In Wyoming seventy percent of the voting population chose to double down on a losing horse. In California they hadn’t even bothered to finish half the count before calling it. In Philadelphia, a city whose population is nearly triple that of Wyoming, they are holding their heads high as the final arbiters of truth. In Pittsburgh, my cousin just died. My father called to tell me. It came as a shock, but not a surprise. He had been struggling, and today while the people of Pittsburgh cheered for the first time in a long while about something other than a Steelers victory the weight this life got the best of him. I hope now he has found that place without a place, with a dolphin beneath a tree made of sunshine. I hope his family knows that they are loved and that he will be missed.
It’s a sad day for some, a great day for others, my grandmother turns ninety three this week. The best and worst of times. It always is, and likely always will be. She’s seen her husband, children and grandchildren pass. She’s lived through eighteen presidents. In her youth she was neighbors with a woman who saw Abraham Lincoln speak. On days like these I wish I loved America as much as her. But even though I don’t, I do love the people living here just as I love the people living elsewhere in the world. The people whose elections we never hear about, the ones currently embroiled in civil wars, the ones who’ve only ever known dictatorships, the ones who may never have anything but pure and total hatred for me. I try and love them as I try and love myself. I try and forgive them as I try and forgive myself, for the mistakes I’ve made, for the things I’ve said and done, for people I’ve hurt and wronged, knowingly, unknowingly. I visit them in the ether where we are all one and the same and return temporarily a better person than before.
Incrementally we change. Generationally. Perhaps the children of my child’s children will know no allegiance save for that of a desire to love unconditionally. Perhaps there’s something greater still beyond that. Maybe I’ll get there before my journey’s over and in doing so find a country and a flag worth waving in my heart.
Until then, enjoy the moment, whatever it means to you.
