I went to bed at 8 p.m.

Yesterday, Tuesday 11/6/2018, was voting day for the 2018 mid-term elections. This has been billed as the most contentious, hard fought mid-term election in ages—maybe ever. It was also one of the most racist, acrimonious ones I can remember. In my own state (Georgia) we have a black female who could make history as the nation’s first black female governor. A black male was running for governor of Florida. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, women began becoming active in unprecedented numbers, including declaring candidacy for elected positions of all kinds: local, state, federal.  They were all over ballots everywhere. A lot was at stake.

Having experienced our female governor candidate long before she declared for the run, I was ecstatic that she decided to do so. Without having any idea of any political ambitions whatsoever, I quickly realized when I met her that without a doubt, she is, quite simply, awesome. Stacey Abrams is an incredibly bright, intelligent, whip-smart, inclusive, down to earth, caring, experienced, and knowledgeable lawyer-turned-politician who believes in practical solutions.  Working across the aisle as the minority whip in the Georgia legislature was her thing. You may have seen her during the televised 2016 Democratic National Convention when she spoke. I was blessed to be there and see it live as a delegate from Georgia’s 10th Congressional District.  In fact, I’d had the privilege of voting for her to join the delegation as a super delegate.  Evidently, the Democratic Party had recognized her brilliance and gave her a prime speaking berth.  They should have.  She is an utter delight to listen to. She also happens to be black.  That is just a bonus, not a prerequisite for voting for her.  She’d be incredible whatever color she was.  Earlier, she even wrote romance novels.  What’s not to love?  🙂

As it turns out, as a candidate for governor, she was running against a Trump aligned man who billed himself as “politically incorrect,” and whose idea of who we are as a state was doing a TV ad and driving around in a truck that he said he would use to pick up illegal immigrants even if he had to do so himself and saying he owned guns and no one was taking them away. Seriously?  How embarrassing to even be in a state in which someone thinks it is OK to represent a state that way. As far as I was concerned regarding choice, what’s the question?

Turns out, he was also the candidate who just happened to be the secretary of state in charge of voting matters for the state and vigorously enforced some of the most restrictive voting laws around. Eight months after declaring for the governor’s seat, in a single day he purged over half a million people from the voter registration rolls (591,000),  107,000 simply for not having previously voted.  He later threw thousands of  voters off the rolls, 70% of whom were minorities and said to be likely Abrams voters, for small inconsistencies like not having an apostrophe in their name to match some other record. The court had to make him reinstate some of them. A few days before the election, without offering proof, he had his office open an investigation of the Democratic Party of Georgia for trying to hack into his system. Can you spell “CONFLICT OF INTEREST,” people?!

In addition to being concerned about my state’s governor’s race, women running, minorities running, and ballot issues of importance, I was also extremely concerned about the general tenor of the acrimony that had arisen in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016.  I don’t have to go into how much the level of rancor, incivility and out and out violence has risen since then.  It didn’t take much for it to find its way into our elections and make them even uglier than usual.  Race took center stage in some.  Race of the ugliest kind.  “Cotton pickin’,” and “Don’t monkey around,” became unabashed (though, of course, denied) dog whistles used by prominent figures on behalf of those running against blacks.  I’m sorry to say that the former was said about the black Florida governor candidate, Ron Gillum by my state’s former governor, now US Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue.  Racist robo calls, even invoking Oprah, were used.  Oprah had to respond that “Jesus don’t like ugly….Vote.”

Seriously, y’all?  Are we back to that?

So, as you can imagine (and I am sure I am not alone!) all of that was totally stressing me out.

Some would be able to dismiss all this.  However, much of the work I do is around issues of race, gender, sexual orientation and trying to teach the country to do a better job of hiring based on qualifications for the job rather than immutable characteristics having nothing to do with such things (and is, of course, illegal under our employment protection laws).   In many different ways, I also try to teach those in the world to love each other.  It is is my undying belief that we all have something to offer and things like race, color, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, being other-abled, etc., are simply not a part of the equation that should operate against us.  Period.  Full stop. End of discussion. Living in a world that doesn’t understand this can be stressful, but most of the time I can maintain my equilibrium.

However, with the political stuff taking center stage and being non-stop, and so much of it being around issues I care about, I just needed a break.  I could tell something was truly off because I felt myself craving carbs, my neanderthal brain go-to comfort food. I wanted a fluffy apple fritter and some coffee.

What?!!!!

Last night was going to be insane if I let it.  Watching the election results creep in bit by bit was something I absolutely dreaded.  So much of what I thought about my country, about who we were since 2016, about who my long-time neighbors were when I saw the political signs for dubious candidates in their yards, about the rancor and incivility we seemed poised to normalize, about how low the bar for a presidency and presidential actions had gotten, was on the line.  For 42 years, I didn’t brag, but I will say it was a point of pride to say, when the issue arose, that I had worked on Capitol Hill and then the White House (for President Ford after Nixon resigned in the aftermath of Watergate).  Now, it was an embarrassment. How can we ever think of the White House the same way again after 2016?

I needed to get a grip.

So, I went to sleep at 8 p.m. (mind you, I get up at 4 am to get to the gym by 5 so my normal bed time is 8:30, but since I’m a night owl, I don’t want to and going to bed early is a big deal for me).

I just took to my bed.

I couldn’t watch the results dribble in bit by bit by bit.  Like the 2016 election,  if there was going to be bad news, I had to let it hit me all at once in the daylight hours when I was up and about and could do other things to take my mind off it rather than see it on the way to bed where I’d lay there and stress all night long.  I’m big on a sense of history and making sure to be attentive to living it, but, I couldn’t do it this time.  Living history would have to take a back seat to my sanity.

I peeked at my phone when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night only to realize I had the right idea.  I needed daylight to deal with this.

So, with all this going on, I did what I needed to do.  I knew what that was.

I took to my bed in the face of chaos.  I took care of myself. I just went to sleep.

It’s not escape.

It’s self-care.

I knew I’d be able to better handle it today.

And I was right.

When I awoke, I dreaded looking at my phone.  Then, I remembered I had to.  After all, I was scheduled to give commentary on Atlanta’s Public Radio station about the possible impact of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements on the election of women in the mid-term elections in a few hours.  I needed to know what happened.

The first thing I realized was that the GA gubernatorial election was too close to call. I had wanted Abrams to win for the state’s good, but it was actually very good news that it was close enough that it couldn’t be called.  If it hadn’t been that, my fear was that it wasn’t close at all and Kemp was now governor.  After all, this is Georgia.  That hadn’t happened!  That was a good thing!  It’s one thing to be a blue person in a red state.  It’s another to have it come raining down all around you.

Then, I realized that there was no blue wave and the African American running for governor of Florida was close, but defeated.  However, on the bright side, there was, as CNN commentator  Van Jones called it, a “rainbow wave.”  That is, there had been the election of two Native American women, one of whom was not only an attorney and MMA martial arts fighter, but also a lesbian, two Muslim women, one of whom was born in Somalia and wore a hijab, the youngest member of Congress, a woman from New York, the first-ever black female from Massachusetts elected to the House, two Latinas from Texas elected to the House, and the first elected openly gay governor in the country in Colorado.  In all there were 31 new women elected to the House, joining the 67 already there. The number of women now in the House of Representatives outstripped the former number by around 10.   Not all votes are in, but 115 women won national office, 42 of whom are women of color and 4 are veterans. That was a great thing. The numbers may be comparatively small, but they are a start on America’s legislature finally beginning to look like America as should have happened long ago.  There was even a constitutional amendment in Florida to allow voting for the 4.15 million convicted felons barred for life under a Jim Crow-era law disproportionately disenfranchising minorities and Colorado abolished unpaid prison labor.  Young people voted in incredible numbers.

I now had a buffer in case the governor’s race did not turn out the way I wanted when all was said and done.  In the wee hours of the night Abrams had given to her gathered supporters with all the fire, grace, and class I’d loved about her from the moment I first saw her,  a rousing speech saying this was not over until all of the dreams in the envelopes being opened across the state (absentee, mail-in, and provisional ballots) were counted.  With only about 50,000 or so votes between her and her opponent, I appreciated her not giving up.  Even if the numbers only got them to a December 4 runoff, she knew she deserved it, she knew her voters deserved it, she knew her supporters, campaign workers and donors deserved it, and she knew the state of Georgia deserved it. We need her. She especially deserves it with all the foolishness around her opponent being responsible for voter registration rolls in the state and the ridiculous shenanigans surrounding it. Not conceding? I’m OK with it.  Fight for Georgia, Girl.  Even though I am a lawyer, I still can’t believe it is possible for someone to be running for an office and still be in charge of who gets to vote—particularly in a southern state with a history of voter suppression, and with the closed polling places, sites running out of ballots, voting machines not working, long lines and other issues traditionally experienced with voter suppression tactics. After all, this is the same state in which 7 of 9 polls in a county likely to vote for Abrams were to be closed, and on another occasion, a group of older black folks (likely Stacey voters) at the senior center, being bussed to the polls for early voting, were made to get off the bus.  I have no doubt you will do absolutely everything the law allows you to do to make sure our votes are accurately counted, Stacey.

I’m still nervous and anxious.  Especially since my daughter just informed me that the first of Trump’s post-election heads to roll was Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  I am by no means a fan, but at least he recused himself from the Russia investigation and stood up to Trump, who had continually and publicly harassed, harangued, belittled and castigated him for choosing to follow the law and recuse himself rather than be blindly loyal to Trump and position himself to interfere with the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.  Clearly, this, in addition to now having to deal with the fights between Trump and the newly-elected Democratic majority House that overturned the Republican one Trump enjoyed for the first half of his presidency,  it looks like even more chaos for our country is underway.

So, in the midst of this chaos and craziness, do whatever it is you need to do for you.

Not only did I go to bed at 8 pm and shield myself from the drizzle of unpleasant election results, but I also gave in and went out and got the apple fritter and coffee.

😉

P.S. Haven’t I trod this territory before?  It sounds vaguely familiar…..post-2016 election maybe…..?