Tuesday is Finally Over

I still didn’t feel very well.

I was sitting up awake on the third night, the third long dark night of a neverending Tuesday that started on Election Day. We all knew it would take this long, but it was still agony to live through it.

I don’t have to tell anybody this. You were all there with me. I don’t think anyone in America had a very good night’s sleep, regardless of your political views.

Trump had come on television with a sputtering tirade so shameless, even his usual enablers cut away. The news media that would’ve found a way to “both sides” the issue 5 years ago didn’t last more than five minutes before going back to their regularly scheduled programming. Of course his disciples believed him. I don’t think we can sway those people.

And there are an awful lot of those people.

I live in a country where nearly seventy million adults looked at the pandemonium of the last four years and decided they wanted more of that, rather than something else. That’s not something that’s going to go away.

The tirade had aired at 6:30 Eastern, which seemed late at night because of the time change and because of how tired I was. After that, we went back to watching the vote counters.

We watched and mocked the video of Trump’s ridiculous spiritual advisor babbling and shrieking about a sound of victory and angels from Africa. She spoke in tongues, horribly. I remembered every cruel, deranged and disingenuous prayer I’d ever heard offered, in the Charismatic Renewal, and shuddered, but I also laughed. It was all so patently ridiculous. Everything I’d feared for so long was so clearly not of God. There was nothing of charity or justice or compassion, nothing of Christ, in this, just a false prophet babbling nonsense.

We waited again.

We watched and mocked the video of those MAGA-hat-wearing women praying outside of the convention center. They said they were praying for “justice” but they didn’t look like they were. They were bowing and kneeling and prostrating before the door of the convention center, exactly like the Israelites bowing to the golden calf in every portrayal of that scene I’ve been shown since I was a little girl. They were worshipping their idol.

A personality cult for a politician is idolatry, and a sin.

It would be a sin if I carried on about Biden the way they’re doing about Trump, and I refuse to do so. Biden is not God or God’s Anointed either. He is a deeply flawed politician with ideas that are not adequate. Biden’s position on race and police brutality isn’t adequate. His position on the environment isn’t adequate. His position on economics isn’t adequate. I disagree with him completely on other things. But he’s not the butt end of the moral compass the way Trump is. Trump massively jacked up the abortion rates during his term. He deliberately downplayed a pandemic, resulting in the deaths of a quarter of a million Americans. He drove white supremacists out of hiding and gleefully made wealth inequality so much worse. He tortured immigrants to make an example of them. I voted for Biden with a clean conscience. But Biden is not a messiah.

Still, Trump’s lying rant made it clear that if Biden wasn’t elected, America would be stuck with a full-blown fascist at the helm with nothing left to lose. I don’t think we could recover from four more years.

We were never great, but we had the potential to be so much worse, and we still might be.

We waited.

I personally stayed up until three o’clock in the morning, waiting.

I decided to lie down and close my eyes for a minute, and when I opened them it was daylight.

I came down just after the count had flipped Georgia to blue by the tiniest margin, thanks for the most part to the effort of Stacey Abrams. And then Pennsylvania flipped, and the people in Philadelphia were dancing in the streets. Pennsylvania flipped so thoroughly that it’s being reported Trump can’t win his lawsuit: none of the ballots counted so far include those mailed on election day but received afterward. These are all votes received on the third.

I felt muscles unclenching that I hadn’t realized I clenched in 2016.

Is it over?

No. We don’t know what Trump and his supporters will pull next.

But this part is over, and Trump lost.

We have the same people to thank that we always have to thank, whenever America manages to do something truly great: the people of color in Georgia and Wisconsin and in Philadelphia and in Detroit, their tireless organizing, their determination, doing what they ought to have done when the white voters didn’t show up as they’d been expected to do. They’re the ones who dragged America to safety.

They are always dragging America to safety.

I live in a country guilty of more sins than I can name. But I also live in a country where marginalized Americans have time and again stood up and called America’s bluff. They’ve looked at the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And they’ve demanded that for themselves, knowing full well that’s not what America meant. They’ve fought and struggled and bled and died, and every time America has been anything close to admirable, it’s because of them.

I can be proud of my country for that.

I can be just a little proud of my country, for the first time in about five years.

We’re so far from safe, I know. None of the problems we had before have gone away. But for the moment, I feel more relief than I have in years. We managed to elect the flawed man instead of the golden calf. The centrist won instead of the fascist.

This impossibly long Tuesday is finally over.

Now we can get to work.