We Bend the Arc Together

I was anxious on the afternoon of November 6. I checked Facebook regularly to see what my friends were saying. Literally hundreds of people (and, yes, I just kept scrolling and scrolling) posted pictures of themselves and others having voted.

That meant a lot to me.

So we have the House. That’s a big deal. But, for me, as I begin to look at the long game, something else happened last night that I think is perhaps more important for our country: over 100 women will be serving in the next Congress.

We know now that as we go forward, culture shifts call the tune. This was a huge culture shift for our nation, one that I think greatly benefits our nation as a whole.

I don’t argue this from a feminist position but from a humanist position. The US made one more step toward being human that night. Clearly, more steps are yet to come.

I was also encouraged by the huge number of Floridians, in a state that was a clear 50/50 split, who voted overwhelmingly to give the right to vote to convicted felons. A smaller step toward humanity perhaps but one that recognizes the justice in restoring a fundamental right to over a million people.

Imagine this happening across the remaining states who deny the right to vote to those who have paid their debt to society.

This indicates to me that even in the most hotly contested state in American history, humanity is still favored by a huge majority of citizens—including significant numbers of Trump supporters.

Was this a Blue Wave? I don’t know. But I know it was a wave of humanistic thought and action that brings us closer to the best of our foundational values as a nation.

So many people worked so hard for so long this election cycle. I want to thank them all for their effort, for the collective assertion of humanity they produced.

We have a long, long way to go. As is so often and so rightly noted: “We have made progress but there is still much work to be done.”

The arc of the moral universe is indeed long, and we discovered in 2016, to our collective horror and disgust, that it does not, of its own inertia, bend toward justice. Sometimes, a determined group of people, if they hold enough fear and hatred in their hearts, can bend it so far in the wrong direction that justice seems a galaxy away.

So let this election be instructive to us all: WE bend the arc from now on; OUR sense of justice is was what we bend it toward; WE control the fate of our world and of our lives and of our children’s lives.

WE win when we bend the arc together with the strength of love and the power we wield, even when we’re not in power, to remake our nation in the image of our greatest leaders, our highest ideals, and the better angels of our human nature.