Hope

It's what we needed. And what we received.

As I sit here, writing at 11:50 on election night, I’m feeling something that hasn’t stirred me in quite a long time.

I am feeling hope.

It’s weird, right? The way hope can come and hope can go. The way it can rise, then fall, then rise again. Ever since Donald Trump won last year’s presidential election, I’ve been overcome by alternating senses of dread and hopelessness. “We are done,” often entered my mind. “We are cooked. Toast. Splatter.”

And, to be clear, we are nowhere near out of the woods. Trump still has another three damned years to ruin this country. He owns the justice department, owns the FBI, owns the Supreme Court. He will work his ass off to fix elections, intimidate voters, fully transform the federal government his own instrument of evil. It is disturbing, scary, awful, sucky—all in one.

That being said …

Tonight mattered. Like, it really mattered. Not merely because Proposition 50 passed with ease, and not merely because of New Jersey and Virginia and New York City. And not merely because of Pennsylvania and Maine and Georgia. No, it mattered because—despite the efforts of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to tiptoe through the daisies—we punched back, and connected. In this case, Donald Trump was Mike Tyson. The bully. The tough guy. The thug. And we were Buster Douglas. The upstart. Hungry for redemption and fueled by hope. We kicked his ass. Amen.

If there’s a lesson from tonight, it’s this: Keep punching. Keep slugging. When you get down, find a way to get involved. When you feel demoralized, turn that into righteous anger. Democracy is as stubborn as a splinter. It doesn’t merely fade away. It has to be taken—ruthlessly.

Tonight, America made a stand.

We will not surrender who we are.

We will not back down.

We have hope.

Once again, we have hope.