Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

If not, I get it. Come back later when you’re ready.

I was one of the millions of Americans who were, let’s say, disappointed by our 2024 Presidential election results. I really loved and believed in both our first Democratic candidate and our second one, as well as the second one’s new adorable running mate (and her actual mate as well). And while I obviously knew it was a tough race, I really believed she would win based on the information I was looking at. But she didn’t.

Of course, I’ve been here before. I thought we would have our first female president in 2016…but we didn’t. After that election, I had to acknowledge that while I supported Hillary, I could have done more. So, especially once we had Kamala as our candidate, I went all out…or at least as all out as I could manage. I donated money to her (along with many other candidates I supported), as I did with Hillary. But this time, I volunteered with get-out-the-vote and voter education campaigns and such, which I didn’t do for Hillary. I even wore a political shirt, I think for the first time in my life (growing up in DC with a father employed as a government bureaucratic official, we were raised not to publically advertise our political preferences). It was a lovely artistic shirt given to me by a good friend that spelled out KAMALA with cat images (I have 3 cats, so yes, I’m a cat lady for Kamala). I made Tim Walz’s award-winning turkey hot dish recipe for one potluck and his wife Gwen’s ginger snap cookies for another.

So I felt I went all out. And my side lost. Therefore, in the moment, my heart was broken, even more than 2016.

I grew up in or outside of Washington, DC, so politics is kind of in my blood. Other than messages from my friends and family, usually the first thing I read in the morning (after doing my beginning-the-day spiritual practices) and the last thing I read at night (before doing my going-to-bed spiritual practices) is what I consider to be my hometown paper, The Washington Post. You know, just to know what is going on in the world while the rest of us are living our lives. (I also have subscriptions to a couple of other newspapers I support, so I have access to lots of both local and national/international news.)

However, The Washington Post also broke my heart this election.

Amazon owner Jeff Bezos invested in The Washington Post when it needed money. The newspaper industry has been particularly hard hit by technology changes, but that is a topic for another post. I am not a huge Amazon fan. I won’t say I never use them, but only rarely. I dislike their impact on local businesses that can’t compete on prices because they aren’t selling on an international volume. But I really admired Bezos for using his millions of dollars to support a newspaper and saying he wouldn’t interfere with the editorial content.

Until he did.

Bezos vetoed the Post’s pending endorsement of the Harris/Walz ticket. His written excuse was that people didn’t trust newspapers and so newspapers should just report the news and let people make the decisions for themselves. Except…the Post gave endorsements for all kinds of local candidates and has during all the Bezos years. Apparently, Bezos’s new concern only related to the 2024 presidential candidates. Could that possibly be because his company has been bidding on federal contracts that he knew President Trump could veto because that man is known to hold a grudge?

As someone who started reading The Washington Post as a teenager during the Watergate era, and all the courage and integrity the newspaper showed at that time that really set a new standard for newspapers….yeah, that decision broke my heart.

After Bezos’ decision, at least a quarter of a million subscribers dropped their subscriptions. Obviously, I was not the only one upset. However, I didn’t do that. As the journalists themselves wrote, canceling subscriptions hurt the paper, not Bezos. They didn’t say this, but if you disliked Bezos’ decision, cancel your Prime membership, which affects him, instead of ending your Post subscription.

Instead, I wrote heartbroken emails to all the editorial leaders at the paper that I could access by email. But mostly, I protested through a lack of clicks. I stopped reading The Washington Post after that decision. I had other news sources instead.

And then the election results came out. After November 6, I stopped reading any news sources. I just couldn’t. I needed time to process…my grief, my fears, my judgments, but mostly my disappointment in my fellow Americans. I just couldn’t believe a majority of us bought into the vengeful and almost dystopic vision of our country that President Trump presented. I had spiritual work to do to be at peace with this election.

But it’s been three weeks, and I’m doing better. I don’t know what motivated so many in our country to swing towards Donald Trump. We may explore that in future posts. However, I started this blog in January 2017 when Spirit encouraged me to put positive energy into the world when so many of my friends were devasted by President Trump’s first election. I personally think things may be even more negative this time around. But that means we need even more people sending out positive energy without ignoring or justifying policies or personnel that simply are not uplifting.

So, this is my resolution of the significant issue at this time. It doesn’t feel good to me to think that more Americans (not the majority of the country, as President Trump is claiming, but more than voted for the Democratic ticket) are racist and/or sexist and/or seriously believe the dark and vengeful picture of the country he presented. I choose to believe that most of them did not vote for Project 2025. I choose to believe that they love this country from a different perspective than I do and that their dreams are simply different than my dreams. I’ve tried to learn more about their perspective since 2016, and I have, but obviously not enough. And I have to admit that I live in a progressive urban bubble that is pretty affluent and not suffering the economic issues of so many of the Republican-based areas. We voted for Kamala by a large margin and elected mostly Democratic representatives.

So, I know I need to approach those who voted for President Trump with curiosity, not judgment. I also have to reach out beyond the circle I know because I mostly talk with people who agree with me.

It’s taken me three weeks, but I don’t think that’s too bad in the grand scheme of things. I will continue to report how I am progressing in handling issues as they arise. But I urge us all to put out positive rather than negative energy. The things I care about and believe in are the same regardless of who the president is. My work may look different based on who the president is, but I focus on what I want to see in my country. I need to work towards my vision, not on the personalities that I think stand in favor of or oppose my vision.

As I was meditating on all this, I realized that in the real world, we mostly see a rainbow with red on one side and blue on the other, with the other colors in between (except purple, which is hard to see in a physical rainbow). And rainbows usually show up after storms because they reflect water in the air. So, I’m choosing to see a rainbow as a metaphor for the next few years. We have red red and blue blue people, and all sorts of colors in between. And we all have to figure out how to get over what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr called “the arc of the moral universe” together.

This is the song that I’m choosing to represent this journey together: