The Day After the 2020 Election, with the Winner Yet to be Determined

Well, this is not the morning after the election that I was expecting.  I truly expected a Biden landslide, and while I knew that we might have to wait a few days for ballots to be counted, I thought there was a good chance that we'd know a Biden landslide was coming early on election night.

Right now, the race for president is still not settled and may not be for days.  It's a much closer race than most of us expected (or at least, most of the people whom I know personally and whom I read).  Why does it always surprise me to discover how deeply divided the U.S. is?

I also did not expect to wake up to find myself in the cone of a possible storm.  I made this Facebook post this morning:   "Well, obsessively following this election has been interesting, but I must now turn my attention to Hurricane Eta. South Florida is now directly in the cone of a hurricane that's already set records for strength and landfalls late in the season. Woe comes in so many flavors this year."

And so here we are, all of us who have gambled by continuing to live near a coastline.  Here we are, all of us who voted and who wait.   Trump has declared himself a winner, as he said he would do. But the counting continues, and I have no idea who is likely to be a winner at the end. Right now, it feels like we're all losers on the cusp of losing something even more essential--like gamblers who have lost more than they could afford to who then decide to make one last huge gamble, to bet all the remaining money one last time.

But let me talk myself back from the edge of this abyss.  Let me remind myself of the record number of people who turned out to vote.  Let me remind myself of all the kindnesses that I've seen people show to each other in past weeks and months and years.

Let me also remind myself that repressive regimes do come to an end, sooner or later.  But let me also acknowledge how easy it is to become the thing we've been fighting against.

Let me take a larger view and remember that neither party offered a deeply compelling view of the future.  If they had, they would have won.  Let me not get bogged down.  Let me dream new dreams and visions.