When We Hope, We Win (Something)

A moral victory amid an electoral loss and the cracks

I have long forgotten the origins of this story, but a woman I respect once wrote down that there was a man who stood outside the White House day after day.

He allegedly had a candle and stood, rain or shine, in protest of one of our forever wars that had the kind of collateral damage that makes your stomach churn.

Did he really think he was changing anything? He was asked.

His answer was that by standing out there, as a witness to the atrocity, they did not change me.

He didn’t want to be the kind of person who heard of such things and was unmoved.

The moral victory here, while seemingly small, was about the soul and the inside bits. How do you stay, in the face of banal evil, tender to what is good and holy? When everything else is out of your hands, is this the battle of the soul you can fight?

If you set aside the history of this country, Donald Trump’s demeanor, rhetoric, and campaign were and are ludicrous. When you look at his actions in context, it is a tale as old as time. It tracks. It is the language of the past and present. It is a direct response to the new version of America unfolding.

Men like him have spent generations getting away with sinking other people’s businesses, harassing women, saying racist things, saying sexist things, and doing crude and crass things to applause.

Men like him are great candidates for forgiveness and power. It took nothing to call Kamala Harris a communist while those accusers can’t seem to see the autocratic and erratic behavior of Donald Trump. The double standard stuns.

My inside bits have been a mess this last week. One of the things I am choosing to see as a victory is that we didn’t have two Donald Trumps dueling for office. We had a woman in Kamala Harris with grace, tact, and professionalism counter him. We had an alternative vision, an American dream that did not rely on the denigration of other people, to offer the American people.

I have repeatedly said that this election was like voting between a kick in the head or free ice cream.

I must admit I am still shocked at the people voting for a kick in the head so a Mexican migrant wouldn’t potentially get a lick of free American ice cream. I am still in awe at the way people voted to end Obamacare but didn’t realize that they were losing their very own health insurance (I guess the ACA is only Obamacare when Black people use it?). I am horrified at the way people went out of their way to call Trump the pro life candidate, and then stayed silent when he suggested the child trafficking Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. I guess rapists will nominate other rapists and we will say nothing?

But to the hopeful part because that is the point today: It matters that half the country said no. It matters that people weighed the two and then chose her.

This country’s entire gynecology science is based on the experiments forcibly practiced with zero anesthesia (and yes it was available) on Black women Dr. James Marion Sims purchased.

When the Civil War ended and amendments and legislation went to work to give freed Americans their rights states rushed to create White Supremacist codes, laws, and terror campaigns to prevent this new America from taking root.

When Ida B. Wells bought a printing press to freely publish reports on the ways White mobs were running around killing Black families for succeeding financially with their new found freedom, it was burned to ashes to stop her from telling the truth.

When Ruby Bridges went to integrate an all White school, after decades of intentionally hollowing out and segregating education to fail Black children, she was frightened by a White lady protesting her integration by holding up a small coffin with a black baby doll inside.

There are thousands upon thousands of stories of people who deemed Black, were told for generations that they were only good enough to open their legs to be bred for slave babies, to be killed in fields to make White men rich, to be paid nothing to make White households run, and to be second class citizens.

And in 2024, a formerly bussed in Black woman traveled freely around the country on her two protected legs to ask us to vote for her to be the president of that same country. A former apartheid state!

And we did. We voted for her. We voted for her amid clouds of racist nonsense by her opponent. We stood in lines against brand new voter suppression laws created by his party. We filled in the bubble by her name on real US election ballots. We tried.

There is an account on Instagram run by a young woman named Elora Dodd. She is a Christian fundamentalist homeschooler all grown up now. Her relationship to Christ, her autism, and body led her to explore what she calls “cracks” in her worldview. She wrote to her many followers about what we have now that we didn’t have eight years ago, which are cracks slowly opening in the minds of people who have been convinced to protect a man like Trump.

How in an authoritarian, racist, and sexist subculture a person can finally see an inconsistency or flaw and break away. What came out of four years of Trump was a rejection of his vision for America and a young population mobilized and less nonchalant about the democracy they were handed. There are cracks up ahead, as people who could delude themselves into thinking he was a blip can no longer divorce his behavior from their neighbors’ casual relationship to racism and classism.

I should add here I am -daily- aware of the fact that this current administration is financially funding an American ally who is carrying out war crimes against women and children in Gaza. It is haunting. It is something we cannot look away from today or tomorrow.

And yet Kamala Harris was the person I wanted to push and pressure in this, not the new president elect. He has since said we shall simply see how it will play out over there.

He was elected and he won. But it must matter to us that this wasn’t a true landslide, that there was opposition to his dark vision of who we are and where we must go.

It’s been a decade or so since Donald Trump came down an escalator to whip the worst fears of this place into a powerful coalition. And yet, so many have rejected it and continued to reject it. There will be many of us rejecting this the next four years and beyond, long past the sprawling effect of the men he puts in power.

A Black woman ran for president and came close. I will revel in that for as long as I want. I refuse to take the critique that she lost on identity politics, when I know down in my marrow that Donald Trump won on the kind of White male identity that mocks pronouns and women. His criminal record, long and sordid, was made okay in the blinding face of his White maleness. He could afford to smirk at his own supporters calling the VP of the United States a tramp. That is what men like him can get away with.

And I will write week after week on an internet certain men have not yet learned how to burn down because I refuse to let the baptism of that man by my own people change me.

I hope you are not ashamed of your hope. That took courage. That took belief in your country, a belief our president elect does not have. What we reached for was a testament to who we are and who we think we can still be. I think that’s a beautiful thing.