Tuesday was rough. Wednesday was worse. Grief came in waves. Horror paralyzed me. Wednesday night I called Stanford. Stanford is probably my best friend. He is 75 years old, a West Point graduate, a journalist, and an ABD PhD from the same program I’m in now. He is also gay, and six months ago he lost Mac, his partner of 40 years. He knows about bigotry, struggle, survival, and way too much about grief. He also is as blunt as an elbow, and I knew he’d help me get my head together. He did. Here is what he told me.
His take on the election was that the world has changed too fast for too many people, and they voted from a place of fear. This was my take, too, after six years of studying conservative media.
“It happens, and it’s no fun,” he said. But, he said, time goes on, and things change and change again.
Then he asked me what I was afraid of.
I said I was afraid of people losing their rights. I was afraid of losing marriage equality, for one thing. What he said really took me aback.
“We got along without it before,” he said. “Mac and I didn’t need it. It was nice, and it helped with taxes and the hospital. But we didn’t need it to make us be us.”
This seemed horrifically cavalier. But it was not, because Stanford is a serious man. He’s blunt because he has little patience with people who try to avoid reality, and reality is and has always been ugly in ways that he is more familiar with than most.
I wanted him to understand my anguish, though.
“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 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.
“What about my stepdaughter?” I said. “What if she needs an abortion and there’s a national abortion ban?”
He really doesn’t think a national abortion ban is in the cards, because four years will pass, Trump’s presidency will end, and people really do vote based on abortion. That was pretty clear on Tuesday night. If she needs one now, she can have one, because there are states she can go to, including the one she lives in. As for people stuck in non-abortion states, terrible things will happen. That can’t be changed now, he said. Help the people you can help, and just keep fighting.
That got me to the heart of my terror.
I’m afraid we will lose our democracy in a way we can’t fix, and then we won’t be able to fix anything, and I told him so.
“Unlikely,” he said. He doesn’t think we’re so far gone that Trump can capture the military, and Stanford’s pretty experienced with the military. And without the military, Trump can’t fully realize his authoritarian dreams.
But if he does, or the right finds some other way to oppress us all, then we fight like hell, he said. Then the world becomes a nightmare, as it has done before, and we deal with what we have in front of us.
But what is more likely is that we will survive four more years of sabotage to our gains, and then we will start rebuilding. If Trump delivers on his promises and deports millions, or imposes those insane tariffs, or takes a stab at stripping out services that millions of people depend on, then the vote will probably go the other way next time because people will be miserable. And if Trump doesn’t deliver, and he does have an abysmal record of doing things he said he would do, then hooray. Things could have been worse. Reality will fall in the middle, more than likely.
And where Trump does succeed, there could be a silver lining, he said. It might be the brick upside the head that this country needs. Maybe people will see what happens when they get what they said they wanted, then they’ll do things differently next time. We may hope.
For the next two years, he said, the fight is in the courts. The Supreme Court only hears so many cases a year. They don’t always side with the radicals. And there are a lot of lower courts. Some are packed with conservative judges, but the courts are not entirely lost. And in two years, we’ll get another stab at congress.
At this point in the conversation, I was feeling pretty unsatisfied. I knew he was right; I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like hearing that things might not entirely go completely to hell because that meant I was overreacting, and I like to think of myself as having a cooler head than that. I also didn’t like hearing that we can survive a world that is still mean. I don’t want to have to, and some of us can’t. Just being kind myself doesn’t feel like much of a solution. I’m furious, and I want that to mean something.
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.
And I just don’t like losing. This is a loss. It’s humbling, embarrassing, and ego-crushing, as well as terrifying, and all those things make up what I’m feeling now. The emotional shit to do with losing will fade. There will be real world consequences of this election, and then we’ll have to deal with them. There is reason to hope that the worst-case scenarios will not manifest.
And I’m sad that we 50+ people probably won’t get to be among the generations that get the world to that state of justice that we imagine is possible. We’re only part of the history of that effort, and we’re a long way from where we were when Stanford was born.
Then Stanford said a thing that put things into perspective in a way nothing else could have. A mutual friend had said a clumsy thing to him earlier in the day. She had said that he must be glad Mac was not alive to see this shitshow. Stanford is as blunt as my elbow. He bawled her out, and she apologized. They’ve mended fences since, but Stanford was still incensed.
“As if this is worse than losing Mac,” he said. “As if I wouldn’t give anything to have him here for another four years. As if anything we go through in the next four years could be worse than Mac and I being apart.”
I realized that my shriek into the void was cathartic but that my pre-emptive I-told-you-sos were as yet unrealized and certainly ineffective at changing anything. Most of all, I realized that the way to address this situation is a grind, daily work, and willingness to fight through what comes. What else can I do? What else has anyone ever been able to do? We’ve done a hell of a lot that way. That’s how the world changes.
I’m going to go have dinner over at Stanford’s place tonight, and he’s going to continue to educate me in the world of musical theater. I guess we’re going to watch something funny. His conversation last night on the phone healed me up enough to write this. Who knows what I’ll be ready for tomorrow?
