I won't lie, I was pretty solidly in Stage 4 (depression) of the grief cycle for the last couple days. I felt dead inside. Just nothing. I'm not religious, and I wouldn't consider myself particularly jingoistic, but I've always had a basic faith in the decency of human beings. This election shook me to my core and I spent about 36 hours thinking that belief was misplaced. And when that's all you believe in, having it challenged is rough. Frankly, I was wishing I had a God I believed in that I could fall back on. But I think I'm finally on to acceptance. I'm not happy about the results of this election (and I'm not going to sit idly by and let my fellow citizens discriminate against minorities without confronting them) but I have to work through it for the sake of my family, my daughter, and the child on the way (planned, but not yet conceived). I'm not giving up on the basic decency of humans. We may be strongly divided, but I have faith we will recover, that we will recognize the humanity of our fellow man, that we will rise above the anger and hate that threaten to tear us apart. It's easy to think about relocating to a foreign country, about hiding from all of this until it blows over. It's hard to accept that liberal ideology, which seems like the obvious choice to me, is a minority way of thinking. But change is not easy. It is work, it is hard, it is a continuous struggle, and that line of thinking is necessary to continue to push ourselves to be better people. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
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