Words (Sort of) Fail Me

Actually, it is not the words that fail me tonight, it is the ability to put them into sensible thoughts.

• Sadness- deep sadness over a loss in this less than hopeful election season just ended.
• Uncertainty- what will this change mean?
• Fear- what has this victory unleashed?
• Conflict- values and basic understandings of life and even of the role of our democracy in conflict- deep, divided conflict.

This will most likely go down in the long catalog of historic elections as one of the top game-changers. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before. A man with no public service experience, no government experience, no seeming understanding of how nations and governments are different from business.

More thoughts will come; more reflections will arise. We as a nation are in a different place tonight than we were when polls started closing on Tuesday. We have no idea what the next four months, let alone the next four years will bring. But yet, we are still the United States of America. We are all in this together.

Let me repeat the quote that I put on this page earlier today.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds

that there are many more hills to climb.

-Nelson Mandela

Actually, I chose all the quotes of these past two weeks at the very start. I knew that when we got to this day very little will have been resolved. No matter who won, I knew, we would have a very long way to become more united again. We have been deeply split; many feel deeply wounded. The voice of the people who felt left out has been expressed through Donald Trump. The wounded ones today are those who had other dreams of a nation living out its ideals.

It is not over. The great American experiment, the exceptional quality of this kind of democracy, is never finished. The pendulum swings from one side to another; one group is in the majority today, another will be in the majority next time. We must uphold that gift we have exercised for 240 years of a peaceful transition of power. Then we must move together to find the common ground, not allowing ourselves to get lost in recrimination, repudiation, vengeance, or just plain old apathy. There are many hills left to climb.

May we climb them together, even when we don't agree on what they might mean.