This is no time for despair: Links to fire you up.
"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"
Hi! I’m here!
I have spent a week now thinking, reading, Bluesky-ing, and liking too many posts on Instagram. I’ve buried myself in work that I enjoy. I’ve eaten my fair share of vanilla Oreos and NYC pizza slices, and drunk the good bourbon. I’ve dragged my butt to PT in the mornings for a left shoulder that doesn’t like me much these days. I’ve kept the TV off for the most part and listened to Massive Attack and Portishead instead. I’ve caught up with friends over the phone, and met one for dinner. (“We’re not mourning,” I said. “We’re eating and plotting.” I also helped my daughter with college applications while devoting a billionty hours to filling out financial aid forms.
(As a brief follow-up to this post, Sage officially chose to remove schools in solid red states from her college list. As a future Civics major and badass but unusually self-effacing changemaker, she knows what’s what. Just saying, colleges: You’d be damn lucky to have this one on your campus. Unbiased opinion, swear.)
Now I’m back and wow, is there a lot to talk about.
While I have observations about what happened this election, I’m not going to jump into the overcrowded Monday Morning Quarterback scrum right now.
Another thing I will not do: Fall into despair, or pull you down with me.
I will not spend all day doom-scrolling the what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. I already know them. Reading them over and over does nothing good for me, and frankly, I don’t own any pearls to clutch anyway. Christine Koh’s election week healing plan offers some excellent alternatives, by the way.
What I am going to do today is share some encouragement, positivity, and hope for the future — with the reminder that YOU have a role in creating that future.
YOU have a role in creating change.
WE are the revolutionaries, the changemakers, the light-bringers, my friends.
It’s us.
However you’re feeling right now — angry, betrayed, sad, confused, frustrated — feel it all. When you’re ready, channel it into action.
I mean, by all means keep eating the carbs and making art and bingeing new series on Netflix, but it can’t be all you do.
It’s time to steel ourselves. It’s time to plan. It’s time wend our way from concerned to tenacious.
I believe that starts with hope, not fear.
I hope I can help you in the coming weeks, months, and years to find comfort, hope, community, and the will to keep on keeping on. Also, there will be GLORIOUS holiday gift guides. And humor. And guest posts from cool people. Maybe the occasional silly family photo, which is the only kind, really. I’m not going anywhere and I hope you’ll stick around too. Please consider supporting my time and my work by subscribing, or upgrading to a paid subscription if you are able.
Here are some helpful and hopeful links, to help us prepare for the work we’ll be doing together.
🔥 From executive director of Protect Democracy, Ian Bassin on The Ink: A pep talk about defending democracy as sent to his team.
On the other side of this crisis lies the potential for a Fourth Founding — an advance for our country to finally achieve our highest aspiration to create a thriving, pluralistic, multi-racial democracy. That future still lies ahead of us, it will just take us longer to get there, and the hill to climb will be steeper…
Right now, as much as those specific strategies and tactics matter, I want to share a broader perspective, and that is this:
Authoritarianism thrives on hopelessness, loneliness, and despair. The antidote is holding fast to our agency, embracing our communities and connections, and finding spaces for joy. In countries where autocracy takes over, it does so by grinding people down, either forcing them to retreat from public spaces or intimidating them into doing so voluntarily. We cannot do that.
So as you cope with this new era in your own ways, try where you can to lean into being with others, in public, proclaiming the values we still share.
🔥 From Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: The Berlin wall never fell.
When we imagine the Berlin Wall falling, as we will be summoned to do today, we are instructed that freedom is something that just happens. The wall was up. Bad. And then it fell. Good. We think of freedom like that because it removes the responsibility from us. And that is the wrong lesson, wrong historically and so wrong politically and morally.
Thirty five years ago today, the Berlin Wall did not fall.
Thirty five years ago today, some people made history, amidst other people making history, thanks to some prior cooperation, and some good thinking about what freedom means.
🔥 From Ali Velshi with Laurence Tribe, constitutional scholar and law professor: It’s not over. The resistance is about to ignite
When I read that the guardrails are gone, I wonder where these people have been. The Constitution is not just a remarkable piece of prose…the states themselves have enormous power. We’ve seen them just beginning in the last couple of days. They’re not rejecting the outcome of the election, they are not plotting to overturn the transfer of power, what they are doing is reminding people that they have authority. They are not empty vessels...
There is an enormous reservoir of resistance and authority that we need to now activate and there are hundreds of people — lawyers among them, who are working with state attorneys general, state governors, state lawmakers — to make sure those guardrails are activated.
🔥 From Rachel Maddow: Trump win gives us a really big to-do list for democracy.
They are going to start pushing to see how far the country is going to let them go without pushback, without protest. And part of this is because it’s just psychologically advantageous for them to do this now, right? They’re counting on half the country that voted against them — the half the country that doesn’t want to give up on our system of government — they’re counting on all those tens of millions of Americans to check out, be despondent, which would mean letting them do what they want, letting them run the table.
What they really don’t want is for those tens of millions of Americans to wake up tomorrow feeling scrappy as hell, feeling regretful about the election outcome, freed up from having to spend all our time working on the election so now we can work full time on being frickin’ pirates. On being a thorn in the side to anyone who now intends to turn this country into some tin pot tyranny.
What they want least of all is to realize that half the country went to bed sad tonight but then woke up tomorrow fired up with a new sense of purpose.
From Kamala Harris: It’s Going to Be Okay.
From Bluto:
LFG.
For more conversation, inspiration, breaking news, and wacky videos my kids send me, follow me on Instagram, Threads and Bluesky @mom101.
My best friend and I have kept in touch with our former US History professor. Even before the election, she was saying that this was as important a moment for America as the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the succession of the southern states. As we all reeled from the election, I had the thought that these events led to war. But out of war came a stronger and better union. I don't know what form this war will take, but my hope is that we will again come out stronger and closer to the ideals of this nation. LFG
I am all for positive thinking instead of hand-wringing. One note, though: Wasn't it the Japanese rather than the Germans who bombed Pearl Harbor?