I went to bed Tuesday night with the Senate called and the House leaning the right way, and I woke up Wednesday to find both had fallen to the Democrats. I’ll admit it: I celebrated. I’ve written here about the cruelty, the lying, and the sheer ugliness that have defined these past years, and about the way friends in other countries have looked at us and shaken their heads. So yes, I poured a second cup of coffee and let myself feel it.
Then I thought about the people I’ll see this week. In my small Indiana town, several of my friends voted the other way. They will be hurting today, and some of them will be angry. And the question that followed my coffee was not “How did we win?” but “What are we going to do with it?”
The win is real
Let me say plainly what happened, because it matters. Voters handed Democrats the Senate, flipping seats in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The House is projected to follow. Governors’ mansions changed hands in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Georgia. Kansas elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since the Depression, and Texas for the first time since 1988.
Those are not the numbers of a party eking out a win. They are the numbers of a country saying, in a voice loud enough to carry, that it has had enough.
And here is the part I want to hold onto. Susan Collins conceded. Greg Abbott conceded. Ken Paxton congratulated the man who beat him and said he would pray for him. The President, asked whether he would accept the results, said he would. After the last decade, I did not take any of that for granted. Each of those small acts of ordinary decency is a brick, and a country is rebuilt one brick at a time.
What I learned from studying humiliation
I spent years of my life studying humiliation, how people experience it, and what it does to them. The pattern is depressingly consistent. People who are humiliated do not reform. They retreat, they nurse the wound, and they wait. Humiliation does not end a fight; it schedules the next one.
That is my fear for this moment. Not that we won, but that we will do with our win what the other side did with theirs: gloat, mock, and treat the losers as enemies to be punished rather than neighbors to be lived with. If we do that, we will have changed the names on the office doors and nothing else. The hate will simply switch sides, and in two or four years it will come back to us wearing a different hat.
I have had friends tell me they can’t understand how anyone could have voted the way they did. I understand the feeling. But I also know that “I can’t understand you” is only a short step from “you are beneath understanding,” and that step is where the ugliness begins. The people who voted differently than I did are not a problem to be solved. They are my neighbors, and many of them are my friends. Three-quarters of the voters on Tuesday said they were unhappy with the direction of the country. Gas was over four dollars a gallon on Election Day. A great many people on both sides voted their fear and their exhaustion, not their hatred. If I forget that, I become the thing I say I oppose.
Coming together after the election is not the same as giving in
I want to be careful here, because “unity” is a word that gets used to shut people up. I am not saying we should forget what was done. Children were separated from their parents. Public servants were threatened. Lies were told so often and so loudly that millions of people came to live inside them. None of that gets a pass because an election went well. Accountability is part of healing, not the enemy of it.
But accountability for the people who did harm is a different thing from contempt for the people who believed them. Holding a leader responsible is justice. Sneering at your neighbor is just cruelty with a clear conscience.
So what does coming together actually look like? For me, it starts small and close to home. It looks like showing up at today’s lunch with the friends who voted the other way and not bringing it up first. It looks like listening when they do bring it up, and asking a question instead of winning a point. It looks like refusing to share the memes that make the other side look stupid, however funny they are, because I know exactly what those memes do to the people in them. I’ve studied it.
The self we build in moments like this
I believe that none of us is a finished thing. We are made, and remade, by how we respond to what happens to us. An election is one of those happenings. Our side won; that is the experience. What we make of it, and how we respond, will decide what kind of people, and what kind of country, we become next.
We could become a country that won. Or we could become a country that healed. Those are not the same, and only one of them lasts.
The world has been watching us for a long time, and shaking its head. Tuesday night, I think a few of those heads stopped shaking and tilted, curious, waiting to see what we would do with the chance we just gave ourselves. I would like us to surprise them.
So here is my question for you, whichever way you voted: who is the one person in your life who voted differently than you, and what would it take for the two of you to have a cup of coffee this week? I’d like to hear about it in the comments, and I’d welcome disagreement.
