After I write these few notes, I will do laundry.  I am absorbing the November election. Doing daily chores grounds me. I am also accumulating a “portfolio for processing,” items and texts and remarks that help me adjust to the election and my only-too reasonable apprehensions about its consequences.

Here are four contributions to my portfolio for processing:

1. Lamentations is a book in The Hebrew Bible. My copy of the Bible [i] describes it as a “work of art produced in response to a historical disaster.” To lament is to grieve and to learn to exist with grief. The leaders of the Auburn Theological Seminary in New York have issued a wise comment on lamentation. We must grieve, but ask without flinching why we are lamenting? For what?
2. I am experiencing an angry sorrow at the raw extent of the misogyny of the Trump campaign and his supporters and at the excuses for it and the racism entwined with it. “Oh, it’s only a joke.” If it is a joke, the laughter it provokes lacerates me. I am reading Fintan O’Toole, “The Protection Racket,” New York Review of Books (November 21, 2024), a brilliant anatomy of this misogyny.
3. The Wisconsin Democratic Party is one of the most effective in the country. Read a post-election letter, of analysis and gratitude, from its chair, the remarkable Ben Wikler. A primary cause of Trump’s victory? Inflation, the price of things. A primary reason why Wisconsin was as close as it was? Organizing with values, day after day, year after year. Persistence, perseverance. I wonder if this is not the reason why Democrats in North Carolina won every state-wide race below the presidency and broke the Republican super-majority in the state legislature.
4. My list of local institutions to support includes: the library, the schools, the historical society, the volunteer fire department, the local Democratic party, public health.  

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[i] I use The Harper Collins Study Bible  (2006). 

(A caution: clicking the above links will take you to those sites, which include ads and commentaries within each article.)

A note from the editor:

After the election, there has been an uptick in violence against women online. The latest trend has been a wave of comments and DMs from men writing, “your body my choice” on women’s public profiles. Some women have chosen to retaliate by reaching out to these mens’ universities, workplaces, and families with screenshots. Some of these men have been doxxed.

One of the common responses to public stories about this retaliation comes from other men saying, “you’re taking this too far… you shouldn’t ruin his life… it was just a joke.” The consequence for women who choose to live public lives online is the threat of sexual violence, but holding men accountable for that violence is taking it too far?

As Kate writes, if this particular comment is a joke, the laughter it provokes lacerates me… and I’m not losing any sleep over these men’s lives being “ruined.”

— Zoe Patterson