Donald Trump will be president.
In the coming weeks and months those of us who did not vote for Trump, will be told that we must come together and look forward. But how do we do that?
This groundswell of support for Trump has been underpinned by a willingness to look the other way while women are objectified and assaulted, minorities are belittled and hate and violence are front and center. Trump voters either heard these messages and believed they reflected their values or they overlooked these things because they still felt he was a man who had their individual interests at heart.
That they could make this choice, ignoring our common humanity, speaks to a crisis far deeper than partisan politics -- it speaks to the very core of what it means to be human. Electoral politics alone will not reconnect us with our shared humanity. The true nature of reality -- not American reality, actual reality -- is that we are all one. This is a concept on which nearly every faith or philosophy agrees, but somehow this reality has become unavailable to many in this country.
So what now?
Yesterday at lunch an older African American man came and sat with me and my friends as we stared at each other listlessly. 'Tell me something. Give me hope.' he asked.
I burst into tears.
He waited patiently and while I was getting myself together I realized that I loved him intensely because he understood (and reminded me) that to connect, to ask things of your neighbors, to expect that strangers will care about you, and to care about them without hesitation, is what it means to be truly alive.
'We just have to love each other anyway,' I surprised myself by saying, 'We have to love them too.'
He agreed so wholeheartedly I almost wondered if it was his unspoken idea in the first place -- that he somehow dropped in to pass to us. He told us to have a good day and a wonderful life.
And that's what I want to do. But I want that for everyone.
Around the world and right here in the US, millions of people live their entire lives under regimes and conditions that do not reflect their values. They live, love, struggle and many of them are abused or die at the hands of those regimes never feeling truly represented or protected. They courageously face a world not of their choosing and they carve out lives of dignity, courage and love not in spite of this, but because of it.
Now here we are at a crossroads, millions of us feeling vindicated and millions of us feeling despair, all of this tangled up with our feelings of American exceptionalism. But we are not special. We could be though. We could use the freedom we have to really learn from this election, to figure out how to open our hearts to each other, how to love those we must work and live with, who did not vote as we would have hoped. We could reject the dichotomy we've been offered and fundamentally change the way we talk to and about each other. We could decide to love each other anyway.
Those of us who are now filled with rage, despair, new fears and ugly thoughts must dig deeper. We must fight first with ourselves to be kind to those who have dealt us this hand. We don't need step aside, or be quiet -- we can and we must trust our outrage and fight for what is just. But we also must guard against the urge to make Trump supporters into an 'other.' We must not be 'us' hating 'them.'
Throughout this election I mourned for the political process. But I was wrong about where the problem really lives. This is not a political crisis. This election revealed that we are a nation in moral and spiritual crisis. What is here was always here, many just see it more clearly now. This clarity is a gift we should take very seriously.
We each now must look deeply into our own hearts and ask if we are capable of what is required next -- to actually love those who got us here even while we fight them. Because, more hate is not the solution. It's a denial of how we got here and of what was here all along.