Good morning, Hank. It's Wednesday.
We were gonna have a video from the dftba.com warehouse today, but I thought I’d make one instead.
So it appears that more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump in the U.S.
presidential race, but the presidential race is decided by electoral college votes, and
Donald Trump won most of them, so he is the President-Elect.
Most, although certainly not all, of the people watching this video wanted Hillary Clinton
to become President (I know I did), and for many of us, the results of the election are devastating.
I think part of what makes it so hard for some people is that Donald Trump has often
attacked not what his opponents believe, but who they are: their race, their gender, their
religion, and more.
And it is painful and scary to be called dangerous or less than by a man who becomes President-Elect
of the United States, and I don’t want to minimize that fear or trauma because I believe
that it is real and important.
I also want to say that I’m sorry.
I’m sorry that we have let our political discourse become so hateful, and I’m sorry
that we’ve let our echo chambers become so sealed off that it is as unfathomable to
me why someone would support Donald Trump for President as it is to many Trump supporters
why I would support Hillary Clinton.
I spoke with hundreds of undecided voters in the days before the election, and what
struck me most was how different our information was.
In many cases, we had the same concerns: the environment, or health care, or tax policy,
but we were working with completely different data sets.
Our community, by the way, is also an echo chamber.
Just 4% of the nerdfighters who filled out the census this year said they would vote
for Donald Trump.
But I don’t know how to make our community more inclusive without opening it up to cruelty
and hatred.
We have to get better at listening to each other and challenging each other constructively
and generously, but I worry that the very architecture of the social internet might
make that impossible.
Honestly, I feel lost, and I’m looking to you for guidance and clarity, as I have for
almost a decade now.
But the world doesn’t end today.
As Saladin Ahmed wrote last night, “It’s our job to fight those in power and stick
up for the powerless.
That stays the same no matter who’s President.”
As Lin Manuel Miranda wrote, “I love this country, and there’s more work to do than ever."
And as Kamala Harris said, “This is a time to fight for who we are.”
I think this will be a tough time in U.S. history.
I hope it won’t be, but I think it will be.
But I also think our nation is and always must be bigger than any of its leaders, and
that our leaders are and always must be answerable to the people.
So it’s always our job to stand together and make sure the government does its job.
That it affords equal protection under the law to all citizens, that the rights of all
are protected, and that our government’s policies are fiscally sound and carefully considered.
Change doesn’t only happen on election night, and it doesn’t only happen in the Oval Office,
and it is up to us to find the places where our skills and talents meet the needs of our
community and the world, and to do the hard work to make life better for all.
And on that front, I am hopeful.
So ten days ago, my nephew Orin was born, and bringing that baby into the world was
an act of hope on the part of his parents.
I am glad for their hope, and I am heartened by it, and I do not believe it was misguided.
That child was born into an America that is better than the one his grandparents were
born into, and it was made better by people whose hope, from restaurant counters in Alabama
to the beaches of Normandy help them to stand together and hold the line in circumstances
vastly darker than anything I pray most of us will ever see.
I don’t think hope is idealistic or silly.
I think it’s the founding emotion of our species.
And it’s not naive to hope that we can bend the arc of American history toward justice,
because we’ve seen our ancestors do that in the face of unimaginable difficulty.
As the great American poet of the human heart wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”
Take care of yourself.
And take care of each other.