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How to be Now: Tender
My daughter wants me to buy a five-dollar toilet brush with the president-elect’s head upside down on the handle.
Some caustic humor relieves stress, but all the wise teachers writing to my inbox are urging equanimity. The neighbor with a wooden you-know-who sign on her house for the last four years got a nice smile from me and some small talk. Communication across the divide is not easy. A million-and-counting people canceled their X accounts recently and signed on to BlueSky, an alternative social media space.
The word on the street is that Democrats will focus on state legislatures and legal challenges. In this opinion piece in the New York Times by a 16-year-old girl, a view from Gen Z, wonders why the day after the election, all the women and girls at school seemed to have been crying and the boys appeared non-plussed. It’s a beautiful piece, although I suspect the male students are conserving their feelings for moments when there is something they think their actions can affect.
At the top of society, the business world is largely concerned with what tariffs will mean and how to maneuver.
As I move about my town, I feel a tension. A young man in an SUV yelled “B***h!” at me because my car wasn’t fully able to line up in a turn lane. Is this a portent of generalized misogyny? When I walk through the grocery store with my daughter, her indeterminant style seems to provoke lingering narrow-eyed gazes from puff-haired older blond women. I could be imagining things.
My highest intention is to be gentle, kind, humble, and generous to all my fellow Americans. I know this is the right way, the only way to a better future. But I feel chagrin, horror, disbelief, anger, shame, disgust, bewilderment, despair, scorn, and an urge to scoff at the other’s right to be respected. You (all 77+ million of you, and oh white sisters…jeez!) voted for an individual who sways with a familiarity of the seven deadly sins.
Now, I mentioned white sisters—one of these, a liberal in all things but abortion, made the point that repeating the phrase, “a woman and her doctor” does a disservice to women and is out of touch with what is happening. Sometimes, a girl or woman is not with a doctor, but with a pill and the bathroom mirror. It is a small percentage still (3.4%). There is a reason liberals rarely permit a moral discussion of abortion (If you doubt me, try it). That is a direct result of the widespread experience women have of men (the predominant power in legislatures and personal relationships) not taking responsibility for the complexity introduced into the world when pregnancy happens. To take responsibility would include nurturing the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, financial, and physical needs of women and children. Yet, it’s hard on those non-plussed boys too. The rarity of a living wage makes visions of a prosperous family life blurry.
How to live in a broken civis? Ride out whatever privilege you have? Write essays bemoaning the destruction as it is witnessed? Hunker down, teach children how to be loving, and wait for the energy of life to restore things?
Here is where the story trails off…
What about the feelings of those who were so desperate for a tough guy to send some economic relief or racial pride that they abandoned America? Maybe, as Pema Chodron might say, the ground has always been falling out from under us, and now is just as good a time as any to realize it.
Be grateful. Be kind. Speak wisely.
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