I don’t know what will happen but I know what I’ll do

For me and many of my friends, it’s going to be hard to feel sane for the next few days. And it might stay hard for the next few years. Or even the next few decades. But I really do want to stay not only sane, but calm, kind, and even hopeful. And strangely enough, I think I’m going to be able to. Because even though I don’t know what the outcomes of my efforts will be, I know exactly what I’ll be doing the day after the election.

All my jobs will be, in essence, the same. I will be a friend and family member to all with whom I am lucky enough to share my life; I will be a writer, scholar and educator grappling with all the ideas and potentials that the present moment offers and threatens; I will be part of a labor movement that seeks dignity and justice for all workers in and out of unions; and I will be a Christian struggling in faith to discern and do my small part to make God’s vision a reality on this earth.

I also know what I won’t be doing the day after the election. I won’t be facebooking, tweeting, and googleplus-ing my euphoria or despair. I won’t be indulging in the certainty that this is the end of my nation, my party, or my movement. I won’t be celebrating as if this is the end of my frustrations, the imperfections of my political organizations, or the need for me to be actively involved in the conversations and decisions that affect the world.

Because it’s never just my world, it’s always the world that my choices, our choices, and everybody else’s choices are creating. There will never be a way of turning that into a system that can just be kickstarted with a single candidate or finished with a single election and left to run itself–at least not in a way that will create a world we will celebrate.

Is this all just an intellectual defense against the grief that I will feel if Mitt Romney is elected, which might even dwarf the grief I felt in 2000, 2003, and 2004, and 2008 over the news from California? Is it Pollyanna talk that won’t help if Proposal 2 fails and I lose my right to collective bargaining next semester? In part, it must surely be. My grief if these two things come to pass will be real. As in the past, it will never really go away, it will change forms and maybe dull over time. As in the past, it will not be in vain, either

Is this all just tough talk that will fade away if Obama is re-elected and Michigan becomes a state that has workers’ rights in its constitution? More than ever, I don’t want it to be. In the past year, I have encountered so many prophetic voices that are all saying versions of the same thing: the world we desire requires activism that is sustainable, long term, small and persistent. I have been lucky to have growing web of people around me who are providing examples of how to do this. Slowly, the anxiety I once felt about “stealing” time from building a career is being transformed into gratitude for the call to build a life. I don’t particularly want to go home from activism anymore, although I am highly aware that it has taken me a long time to be able to say that.

If the worst happens and I once again feel that I am in spiritual exile from the country of my birth, I have spiritual tools to sustain me. I have the memory of how unproductive post-election ranting can be. I have a newfound appreciation for the Psalms–aka, how to survive and thrive in exile. I have a heart that is softening towards one of the Bible’s hardest messages: our hope is not in changing the past, it is in creating the future. No one will ever be able to truly repair the damage that any election has done in anyone’s life–and civilians all over the globe can attest to the damage that US elections have a way of doing. No matter what happens there will be more than enough grief to go around, on all sides, in a patchwork of hopes fulfilled, betrayed, and postponed. There will be people who feel that they are in exile for more reasons than I can know or count.

But future will not depend on how I feel after the election. The future will depend on what I, we, you, and they do after the election.

For the day and the week after the election, I am going to try to take refuge in reflection and recovery, in prayers that don’t assume to know the answer to all the problems no single election or single day can change. I will try to be open to conversations with friends who are reeling from the election and conversations with friends who still, somehow, will barely even have noticed that it happened. I will continue, in as many small acts of care as I can imagine, in the willingness to see the faces of people with whom I have never talked, and in the willingness to ask hard questions of myself about my role in the future being created.