Election Day 2020 with Gale Force Winds and a Halloween Golf Cart

It is very early on election morning; it's been a night of gale warnings and wind and things going bump in the night.  The winds have ushered the cold front to our area.  You folks in the further northern states hear the words "cold front" and think of snow on the pumpkins, but our autumn cold fronts aren't like that.  Yesterday evening as I walked from my office building to the car, I didn't sweat the way I did in the morning--that's how I knew the weather had changed.

The wind crashing through the palm trees, rattling the windows in their frames, making it impossible to tell if  the noises mean a serious threat in the dark or a harmless plastic flower pot--this wind seems like a good metaphor for election day, at least for this election day.

Many of the essayists I'm reading and the tweets I'm seeing are treating this election as if it's the last word that will plunge us into apocalypse or pull us out of the abyss.  I know that we have challenges ahead, challenges that we already know and those that we can't possibly anticipate.

I have been watching and listening to this version of Woody Guthrie's "All You Fascists Bound to Lose."  The song reminds me that humanity has survived tough times before.  We'll survive this too, although we may not be able to hang onto all the things we loved before.  I'm hoping that this time of winnowing makes us appreciate what we do still have.  I'm hoping that good art comes out of it.  I'm hoping that we love more fiercely.

I'm heartened by signs that although it may seem like the apocalypse is here, we are on a path to voter turnout like we haven't seen since 1908.  Yes, over a century.  Because of the pandemic, we have made it easier to vote.  And thus, people have voted.  For politics nerds like me, who always argued that we'd have more voter turnout if we actually encouraged voting instead of putting up blocks to voting, it's been fascinating to see this situation play out.

Here's one thing making me happy this week, another sign that the end may not be as close as we think.  At some point over the past week-end, I noticed a golf cart in my neighbor's driveway.  It had a tarp over it, but I didn't think much about it, since our forecast called for rain.  On Sunday afternoon (Nov. 1), I noticed that it had been decorated for Halloween:

But wait, it gets better.  At night, the lights glow and twinkle: 

I need a better picture, but you get the idea.  

Last night, I watched the father of the neighborhood take his children for a ride.  I thought about the world we live in, the world where we can't take our children to have the same trick-or-treating experiences that we had as children.  But if we persevere, if we apply our creative skills, we can create a new world which might be better or it might just be different.  

As long as parents decorate golf carts for their children, I'll take it as a sign that the world isn't ending.