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catsittingstill I woke up this morning to an outpouring of relief and joy over the election results. And while I'm happy too, it made me think.
When the Democrats' 60 vote majority was broken in the Senate, one of my more conservative friends linked to a celebratory song. That hurt me rather a lot. I tried three times to respond and three times deleted my attempt as being too angry to be helpful. I had kind of thought about posting to him about it today, pointing out that he had hurt me but I wasn't going to hurt back today because I'm better than that.
Except, well. My friendslist is full of cries of joy that would no doubt be just as hurtful to him. If I'm holding the high moral ground here (arguably debatable to begin with) my friendslist certainly is not and I can't bring myself to chide people over what looks to me like a perfectly normal reaction. Which means I had better not chide anyone else over their perfectly normal reactions. They weren't directed at me at the time. Just as our reaction isn't directed against him. He's still in the blast zone. I'm not saying no fireworks, but we should be careful to point them away from actual people.
I'm a little late saying this, because I was a little late realizing it, but as we celebrate let's do it gently, aware that some people are unhappy about this, and some of them are our friends. And let's keep that in mind for future elections.
And let me say "Yay; we live in a country where we can have these things without violence! Yay; we live in a country where people who disagree with each other over fundamental issues of culture still can all come together on the importance of everyone getting to vote, and on accepting the results even when we don't like them! And YAY! It's OVER!"
When the Democrats' 60 vote majority was broken in the Senate, one of my more conservative friends linked to a celebratory song. That hurt me rather a lot. I tried three times to respond and three times deleted my attempt as being too angry to be helpful. I had kind of thought about posting to him about it today, pointing out that he had hurt me but I wasn't going to hurt back today because I'm better than that.
Except, well. My friendslist is full of cries of joy that would no doubt be just as hurtful to him. If I'm holding the high moral ground here (arguably debatable to begin with) my friendslist certainly is not and I can't bring myself to chide people over what looks to me like a perfectly normal reaction. Which means I had better not chide anyone else over their perfectly normal reactions. They weren't directed at me at the time. Just as our reaction isn't directed against him. He's still in the blast zone. I'm not saying no fireworks, but we should be careful to point them away from actual people.
I'm a little late saying this, because I was a little late realizing it, but as we celebrate let's do it gently, aware that some people are unhappy about this, and some of them are our friends. And let's keep that in mind for future elections.
And let me say "Yay; we live in a country where we can have these things without violence! Yay; we live in a country where people who disagree with each other over fundamental issues of culture still can all come together on the importance of everyone getting to vote, and on accepting the results even when we don't like them! And YAY! It's OVER!"
