Welp, that happened. Of all the possible outcomes, I never would have guessed we’d have the results the next day, and that Trump would have won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. I am on the record many (many) times saying exactly what I think about Trump and his politics, and so none of that needs to be repeated now. What’s important for me is what I do today, tomorrow, and the next. So I’m trying to look for hope. At first, I kind of just wanted to shrug and give up the internet for a day or two or 1,460. I very much didn’t want to write a blog post today, but that’s not where I settled. It just didn’t sit right with me.
So instead, I’m looking for reasons to have hope, as I assume about 46.8% of you are as well. And believe it or not, I’ve found some.
First, I have hope that I am wrong. I’m actually wrong quite a bit of the time. More often than I’d like, certainly. And I’ve always done my best to admit when I’m wrong and move forward, instead of stubbornly insisting the opposite. I would love to be proven wrong this time. I would love to have the next four years be prosperous ones for most of America and the world. (I’m not up to hoping they’ll be rosy ones for minorities and the downtrodden. My hope has limits.) I would love to have Trump end up actually being able to convince Putin to just leave Ukraine alone. To have his tariffs actually, bizarrely, somehow work to improve the American economy. Do I think that likely? No, but then again, I also didn’t think it likely that we’d know the winner on November 6th. So I hope I’m wrong again.
But let’s say for a moment that I’m not wrong. That Trump and the party-still-somehow-known-as-Republican flub this up as badly as pundits worry they will. My hope in that case is that America will finally wake up and reject them once and for all. We act as if Trump can come in, make changes, and then none of those changes will ever be undone, because he’ll change the rules to make sure that can’t happen. Except Trump doesn’t set the rules, folks. We do. The people. If things get bad or ugly, there are ways for them to get better. We can change laws back. We can find a way forward.
How to hope for that at a time when the nation seems so divided, though? Can it get any worse? Well, obviously it can and has. We had a literal civil war in this country, with around 750,000 people dying. (Around 2.5% of the country. For reference, that would be over 8 million today.) Will it come to that? I certainly hope not, and I don’t mean to imply that I think it will. Rather, I bring it up to show that all rifts can be mended, even the worst ones. It can take time, and some tragedy, but things can be fixed.
My biggest source of hope? It’s the two years I lived in former East Germany. I spent the time speaking to so many different strangers. I made so many different friends. I got to see the country in a way that I doubt even people who live there get to see it, at least not most of them. And I came away with a deep love of the people there. The culture. The land. And those same people? They had lived through literal Hitler and literal Socialists (the bad kind), and they were still there, still moving forward, and still enjoying life and hoping for a bright future.
There was a lot of rhetoric used in the lead up to this election in an effort to get people to vote the way others wanted them to vote. Rhetoric is just words. No matter what happens, this isn’t the end of America, and this isn’t the time to just give up. The America we have today is pretty much exactly what the America we had yesterday was like. We just have a better gauge of where that America is. I still believe it’s a country where the majority of people are trying to do their best, and I believe that ultimately, that wins out in the end.
So will the next four or however many years be bad? They might. But they might not. In the immediate future, I’m going to focus on what I can control. The situation around me. Being kind to other people, even those I might disagree with or even dislike. Helping people who need help. Making a difference at a level where my actions and words actually can move the needle.
And hoping.