What The Hell Just Happened, America?

Photo by Abenezer Shewaga on Unsplash

This is probably a really bad idea.

Writing while grieving deeply is like drunk-tweeting: it’s likely not going to come out well or effectively convey anything helpful. I don’t feel like I have real encouragement to offer you and I don’t want to bullshit you or myself by trying to pretend that I do.

But maybe reaching out to you right now, in the middle of the disorienting hurricane inside my head and with this massive stone sitting upon my chest is the best time: because some days the beautiful mess is a whole lot more mess than it is beautiful, and this is one of those days.

Seriously, what the hell just happened?

There is no spinning this into something it isn’t.

We can name it: this. fucking. sucks.

It is the worst-case scenario, nightmare fuel, shit-meet-fan moment—a sky is falling, bottom-dropping-out disaster on a Biblical scale, and it hasn’t even really begun yet.

We are witnessing in real-time, a spectacular failure of the collective humanity of this nation: a defiant refusal to welcome in our better angels, a passionate embrace of the darkest recesses of our shadow sides.

And with that, what felt a few hours ago like a long-delayed but suddenly-within-reach dream for this nation and so many women and people of color particularly, evaporated into the ether, sWallowed-up by white supremacy and misogyny.

Most of us didn’t sleep last night, and if we did, we soon regretted it because we had to wake up and realize and feel it all over again: we are strangers in this land, we are orphans now without a homeland.

For a long time, we have been fighting a battle for the narrative in our heads about America. Despite so much evidence around us to the contrary over the past ten years, we strained to believe that this is not who we are: his unapologetic racism, his contempt for the different, his vile disregard for women, his unrepentant hatred.

We hoped that if there was just a younger, more hopeful candidate who would offer a clear alternative; someone who calls us to unity and purpose, that this person would awaken the dormant goodness hidden within so many people.

And there she was: qualified, prepared, ready. She wore her fierce heart for this nation and all of its people on her sleeve. She declared her love for our Constitution and her belief in our shared humanity—and they simply said, “no thanks.”

Her gender and her pigmentation were apparently greater sins in their eyes than the litany of those her opponent wore like badges of honor.

And that is why this hurts like hell.

We all believed over the past four months that our friends, family members, and neighbors were coming out of the cultic haze that has aligned them with something so grotesque; that they were finally ready to emancipate themselves from it.

Instead, they declared with searing clarity that they have gone all-in with his rotten, putrid movement of phobia and grievance and dehumanization and we can’t avoid it any longer.

The reality, unmistakable to us right now, declared by the people, is that the majority of Americans have chosen this, three times. It was not a fluke or an aberration or a temporary leave of their senses—it was the desire of their poisoned hearts all along.

Over the past few years, we’ve often found ourselves saying, “This isn’t who were are! We’re better than this!”

But once again, they have told us that he is who they are, and this place is not better because of it.

And these people, those we find ourselves surrounded by here are celebrating democracy’s demise as if they’ve won something.

(I told you this was a bad idea.)

What has happened here is a national disaster and a relational catastrophe.

Tens of millions of families and friendships have been irrevocably fractured. That will never show up in the data as the media postmortem on America is completed and history records our swift leap into the abyss, but it will be where some of the greatest damage is felt.

Yes, the legislation will be grisly and the human rights atrocities will recall Germany one hundred years ago, and the America we grew up in will soon become unrecognizable.

But perhaps worse than all of that, is that the people who we called home are not anywhere we feel comfortable anymore.

None of us really can fathom what lies ahead, how we will alter our lives, where we might go from here, but we know that we will likely never mend the wounds inflicted in these hours.

Listen, friends, I know your steadfast goodness, your boundless compassion, your persistent spirits, and as devastated as you are right now I know that you will keep doing all you can do to be light and decency and love, even when it is most difficult (which would be where we find ourselves). I believe in your capacity to persevere and to keep fighting and I will be joining you in that work, which will be more necessary now than ever moving forward.

But right now, all you’re required to do is sit with this second, this breath, and fully mourn what you’ve lost, what we’ve all lost.

And speaking of loss, the story will be told that Kamala Harris lost but she didn’t lose, America did.

As a nation, we collectively failed her, and in doing so we failed girls and women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, Jewish people, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the people of Ukraine, and Gaza, and the planet.

It's unthinkable, that instead of being able to celebrate a glorious, hopeful new chapter in the story of this nation with a leader who appealed to the best of our natures—we will instead be holding an autopsy for democracy as we enter our 250th year, stewarded by a malevolent sociopath who despises empathy and shuns the law.

This nation is broken, perhaps beyond repair, that much I know.

Whether I want to spend the rest of my life in such a place is something my mind isn't prepared to consider.

Right now, I just know that I'm seeing the nation with my eyes fully open and there is no mistaking what so many people I Ioved and once respected, actually value.

As heartbreaking as that is, I now know where they stand, and I know it's nowhere I want to be.

Racists, misogynists, and homophobes will be celebrating today.

Many former friends, family members, and neighbors will be, too.

For a long time, I tried to convince myself that those were two separate groups of people.

Today, I had to finally admit they are one.

Going forward, that’s what I will grieve the most.