The Day After

 A front page New York Times article caught my attention this morning.  It reads: “From the start of his 2020 campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr. insisted that President Trump was an aberration, his norm-breaking, race-baiting tenure anathema to the national character.  ‘It’s not who we are,’ Mr Biden often said, ‘not what America is.’ At the end of the 2020 campaign, an anxious, quarrelsome country is turning a question back to him.  Are you sure?”

This morning I find myself in a state of hyperawareness about the election.

  I stare at leaves and flowers thinking, “well, at least you’re still here.”  It is reminiscent of how I felt after 9-11 when I struggled for perspective.  Today I am struggling to reassure myself the world is still here and some things are still in order. While we wait for results, we went on a walk.  Everything seemed unusually vivid.  A squirrel hustling over the street on wires, a confident tight rope runner, caught my eye.  The many bird calls seemed extra loud.  Nature seemed to be reaching out to calm me.   I am in shock that so many of my fellow Americans think so very differently than I do, that so many could vote for trump.  Oh, the election for president hasn’t yet been decided.  It depends upon the mail-in ballots, not yet counted, in a handful of states.  But my sober realization that my country has become a different place than the one I have known and loved all my life. I look at the red/blue map on my IPad and wonder if we were to drive across the country to Michigan how I would look at people in the red states.  I was not paying attention to those horrible tv shows where people insulted and beat up each other like the Apprentice or where they showed no mercy like on Survivor.   I just don’t understand how, knowing what trump is like, they could vote for him.  Biden and trump, both old white men, are symbols of different views of the patriarchy.  Biden is compassionate, full of integrity. He’s not perfect, but nobody is.  trump on the other hand is an arrogant lying cheat, a mean bully who cannot tolerate anyone with differing views.  What is to become of our country?  If Biden wins, how will he ever bring the healing he says he will.  Is our democracy so deeply divided, it can’t be fixed?  We wait.