Election Decompression Reflection

We are here, in the wake of an exhausting election, to process our feelings, regain our grounding, and re-orient ourselves to move forward in love. Love is at the center of what we are about as a people of faith – and so we resist the temptation to give in to hate. Our watchwords are the ones from Martin Luther King Jr. that we often quote. It’s from a sermon he seems to have delivered in 1957 in Montgomery titled called “Loving Your Enemies.”

“Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

I know it is hard to think of loving our enemies when we feel disempowered – as though our neighbors have decided that everything we learned to hold most dear is of no account -- doesn’t matter anymore: caring about other people, trying to tell the truth and live with integrity, justice, equity, rule of law. It is hard right now to say yes to the world as it is. A poem by Rosemerry Watola Trommer posted late last night is titled: "When You Ask Me If I Can Say Yes to the World as It Is -- November 5, 2024"

Today yes is made of lead.
You look at me
and I nod —
and together
we carry the weight.

The president-elect has promised mass deportations. He has promised retribution against the enemy within – which, in his mind, is you and me and people like us. The people he will appoint will set to work implementing Project 2025 which will:

• Gut enforcement of civil rights laws
• Appropriate the Department of Justice to go after its enemies.
• Seek to exclude noncitizens from the census count.
• Attack Reproductive Rights, ban mifepristone, and prosecute people who send medication abortion drugs in the mail.
• Expand Digital Surveillance to enforce laws against women seeking to exercise their reproductive rights.
• Proliferate Online Misinformation and Disinformation by ending ongoing federal efforts to combat online disinformation.
• Enact “Schedule F” reforms, that would force tens of thousands of civil servants — including in agencies that protect civil rights — to serve the president’s political aims instead of serving the public interest.
• Erase the very existence of communities by deleting the terms sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity — as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion — out of “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
• Weaken the Fair Housing Act and scale back affordable housing.
• Weaken key provisions of Affordable Care Act which helped millions of people gain health care coverage.
• End to American climate leadership on the international stage, which would harm Americans and prevent the global community from achieving climate goals necessary to maintain a livable planet.

Will the coming administration succeed at these things? We don’t know. Comedian Jon Stewart:

“Here’s what we know: we don’t really know anything. We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know. This isn’t the end. I promise you, this is not the end. And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

Tom Nichols writing in the Atlantic, said:

“The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy.... Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.... If there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now — not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers....Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.”

We are called to love – to live from compassion. Let’s remember the broader context.

For much of the last 3,000 years, much of humanity lived under autocratic rule. The briefest flash of a partial democracy appeared in ancient Athens amidst an otherwise constant crush of Pharaohs, Kings, Emperors and their vassals. Three thousand years is a long time, but this does not mean that autocratic rule is somehow "natural" for our species, nor did it become inevitable once agriculture generated surplus resources that were taxable to support standing armies. Actually, archeologists and anthropologists have been uncovering details of earlier civilizations and ways of living that exhibited all sorts of diverse political arrangements, hundreds of thousands of people living without a ruling hierarchy, peoples without kings, or kings that were purely ceremonial, or kings for a season, and then the duties rotated -- and many of them had developed some form of agriculture.

Nothing about the way humans are built, nor about the contingencies of grain agriculture, makes autocracy inevitable. For much of humanity’s time on the planet, we didn’t live under autocratic rule. Then, for a few thousand years, much of humanity did. We were beginning to work our way out of it – and if we take a step backward for a century or so, we can nevertheless return to working our way out of it. That's the broad context.

For us here today, our work is very much the same, whichever candidate had won the White House. Our task is compassion. Our task is empathy and understanding. Our task is to help one another. Our task is respect for every being’s worth and dignity. Our task is to forthrightly and creatively rise to meet all the challenging realities of modern society.

These are tough tasks no matter who is the President, or who is in the US Senate and House, or who sits on the Supreme Court. Our task is the same.

And so we gather because we draw strength from each other – and we need a little boost right now to carry out our task. We gather because we draw joy from each other – and joy is a subversive activity – joy is resistance to injustice. Let me share these words from Rebecca Solnit, and then I’ll want to hear from you.

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love. The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones. People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

In this time we need to hear each other’s voices. We need the help of each others’ words to make sense of what happened. I will invite your reflection on two questions:

• One: What is going on? As best as you can figure, how do you account for how this election went the way it did? And
• Two: What will you be doing about it?