How Does Goodness Win?

Election Day in our neighborhood was splendid and sunny. At the polls we encountered the usual diversity -— recent immigrants proud to be citizens, African Americans, working class white folks — the people who supposedly can't get along, all greeting each other and feeling proud and hopeful about voting and democracy. I took my 100-year-old mother to vote — "I vote straight Democratic," she told me. My talented young next-door neighbor, only a year or so out of college and trying to make a career as a dancer, showed up and voted right before my mother did — their two names next to each other on the voting register: a 100-year-old daughter of Italian immigrants, a 23-year-old African-American man trying to make it in spite of the burden of college loans.

That joy in purpose, solidarity, and freedom was knocked out as the election results rolled in. What would the Trump presidency mean not only to our country, but to the Earth community?

So my silver lining was this: my family. We came together to mourn the outcome of the election and to ask ourselves, "How does goodness win?" One answer came from a close friend of my eldest son and his wife. My daughter-in-law copied her Facebook post and sent it to me: "... these past years of raising 3 kids and having Obama in the White House have made me complacent ... but now is a great wake-up call ... we've resubscribed to Sojourners magazine as a start. I don't know what our next move will be, but I hope we've woken the great slumbering social justice bear that's been hibernating in our household all these years."