If you’re feeling down after the election, or even if you’re feeling up, I wish I could deliver a real live introduction to this dude Stanford referenced in this Daily Kos post. This hits it on the head:
“I’m afraid of living in world that’s gotten crueler!” I burst out. “I don’t want to live in a world in which daily cruelty is normal. I don’t want to live in a world that hurts vulnerable people. I don’t want to live in a world that is mean.”
“Then be kind,” he said.
He reminded me that he and [his late husband] Mac had lived through a world much meaner than this. Those who are kind will continue being kind, and we will carry on fighting. Assholes may be emboldened for a while, which will suck, but that is the way of the world. You win, you lose, you win again, and you do your best.
Sometimes you take backwards steps. The only thing is, taking backward steps with nuclear weapons on hand is unsettling.
I’m not sure the author of the post, SeattleProgressive, fully understands:
Today, I think I was hoping my hatred and fury for the world’s mean people would have some kind of magical power to make other people see how horrible this is and feel bad about it. But mostly, I realized, I am grieving and raging at a world that was always mean getting a bit meaner despite our efforts. We’ve been rejected. The beauty and empathy of our way have not won people over. We’ve been rebuffed. It hurts, and it hurts badly. It is humiliating and frightening. But that’s the way it is, and we don’t stop. We’ve been through this before, and far, far worse. Consider what was normal in 1924. Our work is the work of centuries. This is a battle lost, but we’re still here, and there are still a freaking lot of us, and we’ve got a long string of wins behind us.
It doesn’t appear that he’s begun the self-examination to see why what he believes to be beautiful may seem, oh, autocratic to others.
But, taking a page from his friend Stanford, he’ll probably get there.
For me, I think some of the grief comes from the realization that I do not understand the country as well as I might. 300+ million people can be hard to grasp, but some of the reasons given for Mr Trump’s victory, such as legal Latinos’ anger at the illegal immigrants being permitted to enter, I’ve been hearing for years, and it seems I didn’t give it proper weighting in my analysis. No where close.
Well. Live and learn, eh?
