There’s a scene in the sixth season of How I Met Your Mother where Marshall is dealing with the aftermath of his father’s sudden death. Driving back from Minnesota, he recalls how safe he used to feel with his father at the wheel of the family car, the feeling that no matter the weather his father would keep them safe. Encountering a snowstorm in the middle of his cross-country drive, Marshall is visited by the ghost of his father, who confesses that reality had been more precarious. “I couldn’t see worth a damn,” Marshall’s father relates. “I just kept driving forward, hoping for the best.”
For the past year I’ve often felt like Marshall’s father. The country seemed to be heading towards apocalypse, but I kept telling everyone that it was going to be okay. Empirically, all the polls and political science and past precedents told me it was going to be okay, and so when anxious loved ones came to me, I would tell them it was going to be fine. I believed it! I thought it was going to be a landslide for the Democrats, and I was mostly annoyed we didn’t seem to be taking enough advantage of it down ballot. The toxicity was bad, but we could hope for the best.
And here we are skidding off the road in a snowstorm. We’ve all trusted Dad too much. Every stop of the way, we assumed that a magical referee would step in and make things right. Surely, for example, a candidate “must” release his or her tax returns to run for President, right? Surely the system has checks on this sort of thing, right? Right? Nope. I confess that I thought that perhaps Christianity might actually, for once its life, come in and right the skidding car somehow. Yes, the evangelical patriarchy was all in for Trump, but there were all those heartening articles about “exvangelical” women speaking out, and I mean, for crissakes, Pope Francis himself warned us about Trump. Surely, the moral clarity of the situation would finally roust some deeply-slumbering sense of right and wrong in my fellow Christians? Nope. When presented with a cynical offer for all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, Christians knowingly sided with Satan.
There is no Dad making sure things will be okay. There is—if I may switch metaphors—no referee who will come in, call a foul, order somebody to the penalty box, and reset the clock. There’s no power out there whose self-interest lies in maintaining fairness. There’s just politics. Republicans have always worked to accumulate and wield power in ways the Democrats have never even fathomed. We mutter darkly and impotently about conservative Supreme Court justices; they respond by categorically refusing to even consider a Democratic President’s constitutional right to appoint one. Our country has been disenfranchised, suppressed, and gerrymandered from our very beginnings, and we still somehow hope that it will all just magically be fine. It’s not. We have to organize to change it.
Today in class I cancelled our exam—just for my own personal mental health; I couldn’t bear to sit there for an hour watching grieving students jump through hoops—and instead together we watched Beyoncé’s Lemonade film. Particularly therapeutic was the last few sections: Forgiveness, Resurrection, Hope, Redemption. Thanks to Robin James’s work I’ve thought more critically about the themes of resilience in Lemonade than I once did, but nevertheless in this moment, the progression from “Sandcastles” to “Freedom,” with the “Formation” video appended as an epilogue, was deeply therapeutic for me. Personal grief, both in the black feminist musical tradition of women wronged, but also in the images of mothers grieving sons killed by the state, is slowly transformed into collective action. In the famous closing scene, Beyoncé writes her own baptismal covenant on top of a police car sinking into the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina, “Mourn,” she seems to say, “and organize.”
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It doesn’t help that today is the third anniversary of the death of my own, literal and beloved, father. I miss my father not because of any magical comfort he might have provided about the election—I’m over comfort. But in the aftermath of this, I would like to be with my loved ones, and they are no longer all here. That said, my father had an inexhaustible source of good faith in other people, and so I’m sincerely glad he didn’t have to witness this.
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