In search of connection points with all of you:

I was holding it together until two of my best friends, a gay couple, sent me a video this morning of their daughter (about to turn 1! time flies!).

As she tries to grab for the phone with a little smile on her face, one of them voices over, “What do you have to say to Uncle Robbie? Do you love him?”?

The other parent replies softly, as if on her behalf: “Say, ‘I am the future, and I will make things better.’”

Pushed me right over the edge.

Because I believe that! I believe that she –?and so many others like her –?will make things better.

But it breaks my heart that she will have to.?

That conditions are such that some of humanity’s basest instincts – those parts of our minds that are wired to be drawn to the allure of an extreme “us/them” dynamic; those parts that reinforce our most addictive tribalistic tendencies – have led to this day.

“Democracy is crazy,” says my partner as he hugs me, and I cry.

This morning, I’ve found myself shaking my head silently from side to side, the sort of classic “disbelief” move. I’m admittedly on the more “performative" side of the spectrum, always looking for an audience – but this really feels like it’s just rolling right out of me, for no one in particular.

Are you doing that, too? Shaking your head silently?

Most thoughts I've had so far today include some mix of self-aggrandizement or self-righteousness.

“I have dedicated my whole career to fighting for a more just world, a kinder and fairer and more compassionate world, and this man represents – almost laughably so –?essentially everything I stand against. All of it!”

Things like that. Big grand statements.?

They’re climbing on top of one another to catch my attention.

My little Google calendar tells me that Joe and I are grabbing dinner with Carl tonight, just by chance, while he’s in town.

I've worked with Carl now for many years. He was the only American to stay in Kigali, Rwanda during the 1994 genocide when the United States evacuated all of its other citizens. He even signed a little slip of paper to the US government saying he was no longer their responsibility, because he and his family agreed he should stay behind to wield what power and privilege his identity yielded in such a way that would help shield as many people as he could. He lived, and so did hundreds of others in his circle over those terrible three months.

He now travels the world meeting with students and educators talking about the tremendous power of demystifying “the other,” of stepping outside ourselves to find bridges in the most unexpected places, of how communities rebuild their devastated social fabric even after the most unthinkable.

He talks frequently about the danger of anyone thinking: “My world would be better without you in it.”?

It’s an incredibly scary sentiment when you stare it right in the face, isn’t it? To truly think of another human being: “My world would be better without you in it.”

I'm looking out my window right now thinking about that phrase.

The way I project it onto the minds of so many American voters as I consider what psychology, what motivations must have led them to vote the way they have. “Is that what they think about so many other communities they deem to be the outsiders?” I wonder.

This is perhaps reductive and unfair, I know; human behavior can be complicated. But I still think it, mulling it around in my mind. And there’s no question: they knew exactly who they were voting for this time around.

I listen to the sounds of the city –?cars honking, alarms blaring –?and jump down from my high horse. I observe within myself how easy it is for me to slip into that extreme “us/them” dynamic as well. I feel the rage, the fury, the anger. “How dare you?” is a clumsy phrase that keeps bouncing around my mind. “How could you endanger so many, so much? The whole thing?”

My work usually entails translating some of this darkness into the positive, into the light, into the things that can help us become more, not less, connected.

Into finding the good, because hope can be more powerful than fear, even as impossibly strong as fear can be.

But the truth is: it doesn’t always come easily. That sometimes makes me feel bad.

I suspect anyone who is in this fight –?so many, in so many different ways –?should be giving ourselves grace if our Translation Machine is a bit slower than usual for a few days. If we struggle to generate some of that usual meaning, that drive, that momentum that we typically and so carefully cultivate and extract from the scariest, hardest moments.

Translation is a slow, circuitous art.

The video of my friends’ baby is still paused on my phone next to me. I plan to watch it a few more times and cry a bit more.

Then at some point later, I will think more about what comes next.?

I hope you will do that with me later on, so that we don’t have to do it alone.?

We definitely don’t have to do it alone.