After The Deluge, What?

Writing this on an Amtrak to New York, where I'll spend the weekend celebrating a friend's marriage for the third time this fall (third friend, not third celebration of the same marriage) and exhausted after staying up late last night watching returns come in. I'm sleep deprived, sad, and scatterbrained. So, in short, we're in for a highly typical post here.

Primarily, I wanted to post in order to link to this list of organizations that will need financial and volunteer support during the years of this presidency.

I don't have anything to say that other people aren't saying more eloquently or urgently. As a cis straight white man, I have very little to fear from our president-elect personally - yes, his lack of experience, terrible judgment and prioritization of vengeance and selfishness over thought and service mean we're in for an ugly time across the board, but I'm not one of the refugees he demonized through the campaign, I'm not an LGBTQ person whose vice president-elect thinks should be subject to conversion therapy, I'm not a person of color who watched a candidate win the presidency with the vocal and enthusiastic support of white supremacists, and I'm not a woman who just saw an admitted sexual assailant elected to the highest office in the country. I owe it to the most threatened and marginalized to give what I can of my time, money, and energy to these groups, and I hope you'll find ways to do so too.

I spent the summer seeing turbulence abroad. There was the Austrian presidential election, in which a nationalist right-winger nearly won (and in fact forced the country into an electoral redo). And while Brexit seemed to be universally shattering to the Brits I met along the way - with the Scots particularly contemptuous - I met an English couple in Poland that ran through hand-waving "it won't be the end of the world, they need somebody to rattle the cages" justifications before the vote took place that feel all too familiar now. About a month after the vote, a pair of drinking companions in Berlin - one Swedish, one Irish, disagreeing on virtually everything they discussed - both instantly came to the same conclusion about Brexit, which was that it was a disaster but that the EU had asked for it by inflicting painful austerity measures on Greece for ideological reasons, causing human suffering while creating the impression of total indifference to human suffering.

But of course nothing seemed quite like this does now, if only because this is happening here, in a place we thought we knew.

I hope you'll find ways to dedicate more time and energy over the next four years to those in danger, to political movements aiming to preserve the experiment of American democracy, and to the project of keeping these years from being as destructive as they might be without a lot more work on all our parts. I need to do the same. This election has to have an upside, and that upside (I think) must be a generation that re-learns what active service in the real world looks like.

And in the meantime: be kind to each other. Be gentle and loving to those around you, and to strangers. This is a good time to reach out to people - authors, artists, politicians, creators - whose work has moved you and who have helped keep you afloat through the ugliness of the past year. They will be kept afloat by your encouragement in turn. Hate and fear and anger and selfishness have ruled so much of this year. We are capable of better things, and we'd do well to practice them day to day in our lives, honing a sense of gratitude for the blessings we have, of our need for those who nourish us, and of our obligation to those who need us.

OKAY! I'm done bossing everybody around, and if you've made it this far you deserve to eat at LEAST three cookies (oh, they're small? Yeah, go ahead and have five) because hi why are you even listening to this dope mutter about how The Things Are Bad But Could Be Better? But I will tell you what: thank you. I think I believe in us? Let's go be flawed but ravenously-hearted humans.