Yesterday, Election Day 2024, I was a poll worker at my local precinct, as I am every election day. We are a great crew at Cambridge Ward Three Precinct Nine. After taking our dawn oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, we spend the day making the Constitution’s promise real: treating each voter with respect, providing any assistance they may need to cast their vote, counting, checking rechecking that every vote is properly cast: only once. An orderly exercise in democracy. The work’s not difficult, but it’s exhilarating. To greet my neighbors, to witness the incredible array of people who inhabit my tiny corner of a city, to be a small cog in the process we call democracy.
This election, we had a new member of our crew. When Namran and I chatted during a break I asked why he decided to do this work. “I am from Iran, where a couple of clerics hand down the names of four pre-selected people, and they call it an election. What happens in this country is beyond our imagination. I wanted to be part of it.”
I returned home, exhausted, and went to bed. The actual results of the election I’d just participated in could wait.
I woke refreshed, with a song in my head. “Make Our Garden Grow,” from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. That tune told me, immediately, that whatever the election results, I will be fine.
I’ll keep on doing what I do; lending my voice and my hand to people and causes I care about.
I opened the internet to discover a Trump sweep: a majority vote, an Electoral College victory, with Congress in his pocket.
The gut-wrenching reality of democracy is: we get the government we deserve. Unlike the citizens of Iran, we have freely chosen Donald Trump to be our president. If the ramifications of such a choice turn dire, we have no one to blame.
The personal ramifications of another Trump presidency vary for each of us,. But they are immediate, and they are real. For me, the two Haitians I love most, and applied to sponsor under Biden’s parole program, will now languish in Haiti for who knows how many more years. But I will continue to tutor Haiti immigrants here, helping them navigate our confusing country, marveling at their energy and initiative, so completely opposite the caricatures Trump denigrates.
Human history is written in blood. We are tribal, fearful violent, possessive. Although I agree with Martin Luther King Jr.’s assessment that, “the moral arc of the universes is long, and it bends towards justice,” I also know that arc is riddled with kinks, and often suffers reversals. I believe that the election of Donald Trump is one of those kinks. I will accept it as the will of the American people, but I will not let it bend me from my pursuit of a peaceful, equitable society. To look for the best—rather than the worst— in each of us. To address anger with kindness. To counter fear with hope. To meet hate with love.
Anthems are stirring songs, too often used to excite people with puffed up patriarchy and patriotism. I love “Make Our Garden Grow” because it is an anthem of nourishment, of community. When it filled my head this morning I knew it would sustain me through whatever reckoning our country has inflicted upon itself.
Perhaps it will offer solace and inspiration to others baffled by choice we have made.
You’ve been a fool
And so have I,
But come and be my wife.
And let us try,
Before we die,
To make some sense of life.
We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow…
And make our garden grow.
I thought the world
Was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But, now I’ll teach
My hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.
We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow…
And make our garden grow.
What worlds they please
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers,
The fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.
We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!
The Awkward Pose 