notes & things | election night edition
It's been warmer than usual, but still rainy and endlessly gloomy amid the shorter days. Today, it felt like a needed a lamp on even in the early afternoon to really see anything. Tonight, J is making soup as soon as he gets home and we'll be feeding our anxieties with that and a loaf of crusty and comfortable bread slathered in butter. I won a bottle of fancy riesling at horror trivia night last week and we plan to crack it open if things are looking good at the end of the night, though I am hesitant lest we jinx any propitious developments so maybe we will wait on that.
There is continually a moment when I click over to the news from whatever else it is that I am trying to do (work, write, put the groceries away) and those swathes of red states, even the predicted ones, make me remember how clueless I once was about basic sound sense and goodness in people. Like many kids that came of age in the glistening and sparkly 90s, the world seemed to be on such a good path toward sounder government, kinder government. I even understood, even if I did not agree, on many of the hot button issues that divided political parties, things like taxation and abortion (though what I used to think was a legit concern over when life officially began has been revealed again and again to be a way to control women.) Sure, I bit my nails and fretted when Bush was elected in 2000, which seemed like a backward step, and probably was compared to how if things had shaken out otherwise I also understood that every action has an opposite reaction. Obama's win made conservatives froth at the mouth and apparently completely lose any good judgment or ethics they had. The rise of social media allowed dysfunction and misinformation to spread wider than before. It became okay to be a monster, something reinforced by the events of November 2016. You'd see in chat rooms, at rallies, in the (mostly) men who bullied and catcalled and swaggered their way through the first four years.
Last election, I was careful to step lightly and not hope too much. It seemed more of a return to sense, wrought tooth and nail as it was out to the bitter end. I was too busy laughing at the foolishness of January 6-ers to be horrified in the moments splashed on screen, but that came later as it sunk in how close we had come to the unraveling of democracy right there in full view. When J and I went to see Civil War this past spring, I spent the entire night in a deep depressive funk I couldn't get out of for days. I see a lot of disturbing movies on a regular basis every week, but that one rattled me to the point I didn't even want to talk about it here. 2020 was also a return to a better version of the timeline, but still much of the same when so many of us longed for something new and progressive, and maybe we will eventually get it (AOC has that same shine that Obama did in the early aughts, and I hope she stays the course.) I am a fan of Harris, and she has all the experience and qualifications to make this happen, but there is always the fear at the back of my head that we will never have a female president in my lifetime. I dared hope in 2016, but I am measuring my expectations tonight. I still blame social media and the fanning of media outlets who tell lies like the truth at worst, or at best, fan the flames for clicks for the mess of it all.
Still, I got a little kick of excitement at each projected state that comes in blazing blue. There is so much we won't know till a couple days have passed, so it's hard to be either hopeful or despondent tonight. Illinois feels like a sea of sanity in a red wash of midwest idiocy and apparently a mix of the very gullible and the very horrible. Outside of the racists, homophobes, and anti-intellectualism, there are those who believe everything Fox News tells them regarding immigration and the economy, mostly convincing them that one is related to the other, when it's the usual villains in big business who price gouge and limit resources for all of us, especially since covid (including immigrants who should have an easier, not more difficult, time of it getting citizenship and entry in an ideal world, longer tables over higher walls and all.) There are factors I will never understand as to how we ever got in this position, but even more, how we find ourselves in it again. I keep repeating under my breath every five minutes what they told us last time, Trust the System and hope for the best.
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