I woke up and checked my feeds and it STILL hadn’t been called, so I puttered around my apartment for a bit. And then I heard whooping. Cheering. Screaming from my neighbors. I didn’t need to hit refresh to know it was over.
I am exhaling after four excruciating, devastating, horribly dark, embarrassingly stupid, stochastically violent, desperate years.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Before we say or do anything else I would ask that we take a little time to savor this. It is a huge victory, no matter how pundits and right-wingers and social-media contrarians will try to diminish it. It was achieved against insanely tall odds, in the midst of unprecedented challenges by millions of committed people who masked up, stood up and got the job done. The volunteers who phonebanked and textbanked and coordinated. The folks who dug deep and donated. The online communities who kept each other’s spirits up amid the struggle.
That’s you. You own a piece of this. Hold it next to your heart and let it glow.
There will be plenty of time to assess the many, many challenges that remain (hello, Georgia runoffs!). I rather imagine that the experience to come will be like what happens when the adrenaline of a fight wears off and the pain of the wounds one has sustained in that fight really begin to hurt. But we will dress one another’s wounds, and we will gird up for the fights to come.
But for now? For today? Let’s pop a cork, dance in the streets, call our loved ones, embrace our pod and take this in.
We did it.