We gained weight during the lockdown, had started to get that back under control. This election and the excruciating four days before Biden was declared the winner, threw us off that wagon. I stuffed down cookies—cookies I didn’t even like—while obsessively watching electoral vote updates. Went to the grocery store and forgot vegetables. My three-days-a-week exercise routine? Gone. Regular writing practice? Out the window.
Saturday, November 7 was a giddy day. We spent hours in front of the TV, heard fireworks, had long phone calls with jubilant friends. On our way to buy celebratory wine, we saw people dancing on a rooftop with their Biden/Harris signs, people holding them up on street corners, jumping up and down, cars honking madly as they passed. We saw crowds streaming toward spontaneous gatherings downtown. We ended the day with our glasses of wine, watching Kamala Harris and Joe Biden give the kind of speeches we have missed so much, yearned to hear again, words meant to unite rather than divide. Tension I hadn’t realized I was holding drained out of me. For the first time in weeks I slept like a stone.
Parking lot celebration
Sunday afternoon under a sparkling sky with shirt-sleeve temperatures, a steady stream of cars arrived at my neighborhood high school parking lot, as they did several times in the scorching summer for Black Lives Matter. This time they came honking and waving signs to celebrate again because yesterday wasn’t enough. By the time all the cars rolled in there were several hundred mostly masked people, dancing, playing music, waving flags: young people, but old people too—a white-haired woman beat on a pot with a spoon. Biden signs and American flags waved alongside BLM, climate change, LGBTQ, health care and DACA signs.
Parking lot celebration, Part 2
DACA young people can stop being afraid and LGBTQ people can breathe again and BLM people can hope for police reform and voting rights restoration. We can hope to save The Affordable Care Act with its coverage for preexisting conditions, maybe get a handle on controlling the pandemic, climate change, reviving the economy. We can once more try to save democracy. Before it got too crowded (COVID) I walked through that parking lot gathering, a diverse, ecstatic bunch. They are today’s America. They give me hope. Let us rejoice because it won’t last long. Stacey Abrams, who has worked hard to register people in Georgia, said she celebrated for about seventeen minutes and then got back to work.
We have a divided Senate, a House less Democratic than before, and a Supreme Court considering arguments for ending the Affordable Care Act. We have a sitting president who has continually sought to damage democratic institutions. It should be no surprise that he is defying the bedrock practice of our democracy: the peaceful transition of power. And worse, actively trying to sabotage that process.
Kamala Harris event at the same high school in 2019
The seventy-one million Americans who voted for him have a radically different idea about what this country should be from the seventy-six million who voted for Biden. On the Biden side, to give one example, we believe the pandemic is real and that wearing masks protects you and the people around you. Nearly all the countries in the world believe it’s real and have acted like it. Our death toll is already staggering—240,000 as of November 10—our statistics worse than anywhere else on the planet. Obese and older people, Native Americans, Blacks and Hispanics are dying of COVID at higher rates. These are facts we get from the experts. Yet many on the Trump side think the pandemic is a hoax, or it’s only the flu or it won’t touch them. They don’t believe in the facts. This is just one example. Finding a way to work ourselves back from this gapping divide is the challenge of our times. Winning the presidency was only a first step. The hard work is about to begin.