Get back up
Some morning thoughts on reckoning, winning, vigilance, and hope
I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but it’s OK not to know the answers.
It’s OK not to have your perfect diagnosis of What Went Wrong at the ready.
It’s OK to consider possibilities that challenge everything you believe in.
It’s OK to be curious about what you don’t know and can’t see.
Everywhere, I hear people trying to figure out the meaning of the election and reckon with what went wrong and plan for the future.
But so much of what I see is doubled-down certainty masquerading as introspection.
So let me just say that it’s OK to sit with doubt and self-criticism and confusion.
It’s OK not to represent your old ideas as new ideas.
It’s OK to use this as a moment of openness. And of rebuilding.
We are not throwing any of our people under the bus by opening ourselves to genuinely hard questions about how to communicate, how we sequence priorities, how we come across, how we strategize.
If your theory of where we go from here happens to be exactly the course you thought we should have been on before, either you are just amazingly brilliant, or you are unaware that, sometimes, to stay on the road, you have to turn the wheel.
I wonder what it would look like for more of us to be open to this moment and open to the fullness of the reexaminations it could bring.
Our movement for multiracial democracy and progress can no longer afford to behave like a subculture that we think would be ruined if too many normies heard about it.
It needs to behave like a commanding emerging majority.
Yes, feel your rage. Feel your grief. Feel your dread. Then a shower and back to work.
This country will not be easily subjugated. It is a dense thicket of institutions and systems and norms and tolerances and relationships and associations that will prove more resilient than the insurgents hope.
Be vigilant. And be, at the same time, hopeful.
Democracy is not a supermarket, where you pop in whenever you need something.
It’s a farm, where you reap what you sow.
We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.
As a gardener, I love your words! As a League of Women Voters member, I know about democracy not being a spectator sport, but necessitates action. Thank you so much, out of all the newspapers, Substack writers, etc, I cannot read everything, but always make sure I read yours. Your voice is greatly appreciated.
Love the spirit behind these morning thoughts, Anand. As an avid gardener and educator I am particularly drawn to the notion that Democracy is a farm and not a supermarket...such is also true of a robust public education system that inculcates a deep and abiding love of citizenship. A citizenship that does not just pop in every two or four years, but one that is nurtured and tended to, much like a garden of farm. It is slow, careful, and lovingly observed, studied, and worked on like good fertile soil to yield the best results.