Election Reflections
The most important thing that happened on November 8 is my oldest daughter turned 17. And that was all I had in mind when I booked tickets to New York City for that morning 6 months ago.
As the day drew closer, we realized November 8 was also election day. Both candidates claim New York as their home. Both candidates would be in the city on that day.
I imagined watching fireworks over the Hudson River Tuesday night, celebrating the election of our country’s first woman president. What an amazing moment that would be! To stand next to my daughter celebrating that women can really hold the highest office in our country.
The fireworks were cancelled and we didn’t want to give 6 hours of our Big Apple hours to the Clinton rally at the convention so we went to the Top of Rockefeller Center and reveled in the red, white and blue lights throughout the city. Our mouths gaped open at Rockefeller plaza awash in American flags.
“We stood across the street from Trump Tower and wondered what would happen to his empire when he lost the election.”
And then. We went back to the hotel room and turned on the TV to watch the results to come in.
As the day drew closer, we realized November 8 was also election day. Both candidates claim New York as their home. Both candidates would be in the city on that day.
I imagined watching fireworks over the Hudson River Tuesday night, celebrating the election of our country’s first woman president. What an amazing moment that would be! To stand next to my daughter celebrating that women can really hold the highest office in our country.
The fireworks were cancelled and we didn’t want to give 6 hours of our Big Apple hours to the Clinton rally at the convention so we went to the Top of Rockefeller Center and reveled in the red, white and blue lights throughout the city. Our mouths gaped open at Rockefeller plaza awash in American flags. We stood across the street from Trump Tower and wondered what would happen to his empire when he lost the election.
And then. We went back to the hotel room and turned on the TV to watch the results to come in.
The newscasters were as shocked as we were. The whole country seemed to turn red minute by minute, county by county.
I woke up Wednesday morning with a completely different sense of my future and the future of our country. I have voted Republican and Democrat in my lifetime and have respect for both parties at their essence and the historic tensions they represent between centralized and localized government, social welfare and fiscal responsibility. I agree our government needs a shakeup. But electing someone with no experience, no demonstrated understanding of our past, present or future, who seemed to stir up the darkest shadows of America? I am not blind to those shadows, but I hoped they would not win out for even a minute, much less four years.
Wednesday was not going to be a dark day for us, because we held two of the hottest tickets in the world – a showing of the Broadway musical Hamilton. This show is a masterpiece of hip-hop, rap and classic Broadway ballads that retells the story of America’s founding father, Alexander Hamilton. The actors are almost completely people of color. I had previously been disappointed that the only tickets I could procure (on the day they were released 6 months before!) were for the matinee, but it turned out to be one of the most memorable shows in the Hamilton’s Broadway run.
The entire audience felt the weight of the latest turn in our country’s history. I wept openly throughout most of the show. The cast was emotional and sang like the future depended on the words of their songs:
“Raise a glass to freedom,
something they can never take away, no matter what they tell you...
Winning is easy, governing is harder...
You’ll come of age with our young nation. We’ll make it right for you.
We’ll pass it onto you and you’ll blow us all away.
Someday, someday”
Together, we remembered the beauty and promise of our country even as we mourned the darkness that threatens. Strangers to each other before the show and again afterwards, we were a tight knit community recommitting ourselves to freedom and hope. We sang, laughed, cried and applauded.
We have hard work to do in this nation. As a person of enormous privilege, I have little to fear for myself. But I am afraid for my friends who are undocumented and believed President Obama when he encouraged them to come out of the shadows to seek deferred action for childhood arrivals. I am trying to imagine how it must feel for LGBTQ friends to think a new Supreme Court configuration could threaten their marriages and future marriages. I am heartbroken that already people of color have been attacked, as overt racism is emboldened by the election results. I looked into the smiling eyes of the kind Muslim couple who toured the United Nations with me on Friday and worry they will be targeted and registered.
Garrison Keillor wrote in the Washington Post this week that liberals need to sit back and grow heirloom tomatoes in the next 4 years while Republicans run this nation. Grow tomatoes, but also learn what it means to be a peacemaker. Risk your privilege on behalf of those who don’t have yours. Speak out, even when it’s awkward. Parties don’t matter, but freedom does.
George Washington hands Alexander Hamilton a pen inviting him to write his way to freedom, to write a new history for a new nation. And I felt as if the pen was being handed to me as well.
So, here we go. Write. Sing. Dance. Speak. Organize. The politicians aren’t doing the healing for us. They never were going to anyways. Learn what it means to be a citizen. Let’s make it right for our children.