2025 promises to be a seriously tumultuous time, and a dangerous one for many people. But before you turn your disgust at the incoming administration on our fellow citizens, please remember that…
…nearly 75,000,000 of them wanted a Black woman to be their president (Peter Baker of the NY Times says that Trump won the popular vote by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century).
…58% of our fellow citizens in Delaware voted for a trans woman, U.S. Representative Sarah McBride.
…the majority of them in seven states voted for constitutional amendments protecting abortion rights, including Arizonans and Montanans.
And our compatriots did this in the face of massive amounts of disinformation, extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression.
In his recent essay “The Berlin Wall Never Fell,” historian Timothy Snyder says, “[East German resistance was] a human story of cooperation. Its most important organization was a union [Solidarity in Poland]. The human cooperation, called “civil society” at the time, was not enough in itself to change the world. But when the world began to change in other ways, people were ready. When we imagine the Berlin Wall falling, we are instructed that freedom is something that just happens. The wall was up. Bad. And then it fell. Good. We think of freedom like that because it removes the responsibility from us. And that is the wrong lesson, wrong historically and so wrong politically and morally.”
I hope you will feel empowered, even responsible, to strengthen civic society, to talk about what you want from your government, what choices you hold dear to your heart and to find harmony among your friends and family, as well as with people across the country with whom you might be surprised to find some common ground.
