My Favorite Take

This blog is going to go back to "business as usual." Tomorrow. I felt like I couldn't just jump right back into my normal thing without first saying something about why I'm choosing to do that.

In my copious doomscrolling of the last 36-or-so hours, I've come upon hundreds of takes about the results of the U.S. presidential election. One in particular has resonated with me above all others:

There were no winners. We all lost. It's just that some of us aren't going to understand that until later.

The more I think about this, the more impressed I become about just how much is packed into that punchy summation.

The thing that really resonated with me on first blush is the whole "forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" tone of it. I have always felt that non-evangelicals and atheists understand and demonstrate Christian values more than the performative evangelical crowd. I believe that most voters did not cast their vote as a personal "fuck you" to me. (Though side note -- here in Colorado is evidence of around 921,000 losers who very much did.) A lot of voters, and absolutely a lot of non-voters, "knew not what they were doing."

There's clear proof of that in the results. Montana and Missouri passed ballot measures they think will protect abortion access, even as they elected a president almost certain to curtail it at a superseding federal level. North Carolina voters rather emphatically rejected a candidate for governor who clearly did not align with their values... while choosing for president a candidate who espoused all the same values of (and who explicitly endorsed) the reject. It seems to me that any split-ticket voters in these states "knew not what they were doing."

But back to the take:

There were no winners. We all lost. It's just that some of us aren't going to understand that until later.

As I pondered that even more, a new layer hit me -- one I'm really going to strive to embrace. Later. That word is carrying a lot of weight.

For one thing, nothing I say (no matter how long I might spend laboring on exactly how to say it) is going to change anyone's mind now. People are going to have to come to the realization of what has happened later. We've "fucked around." It's not time yet to "find out."

I believe that so much damage is about to be dealt to the United States that I question whether it can even be repaired within my lifetime. But... it's happening later. As in, literally, not today. For my own mental health (if nothing else), I think I must choose to squeeze every bit of joy out of the two-and-a-half months we still have before our newly-reelected, self-described "dictator on day one" takes office. There are going to be enough bad days to come without me giving potentially good days I have right now over to dread.

And so, to the best of my ability, I am choosing not to. Business as usual (for now, at least).

As for later, we'll all see.