On the bookends of my 20's

Well, there is one thing of which I’m entirely sure at this inflection point in history:  my 20’s have been one hell of a wild ride.  And I find it incredibly peculiar that they are ending with the same phenomenon with which they started:  the massive bursting of a self-created bubble.

In February 2008, I was 20 and in my very last undergraduate semester at the University of Florida, where I was about to graduate a year early.  I had an offer letter in hand, including a full-tuition scholarship, to Carnegie Mellon, in addition to an internship offer from KPMG in Miami.  I was taking a relatively light course load, had a great group of friends in Gainesville, and attended a French conversation group every Friday at a local café right off University Avenue.  I was an Obama supporter, and he was doing well in the polls.  I had come out of the closet as gay three months earlier in November 2007 and was exploring my first romantic relationship with another man.  Life was, in other words, idyllic; a giant bubble of bliss which I had created after a rather miserable youth spent as an outcast in the conservative rural America of the Florida Panhandle.  And then, over the course of a frantic series of phone calls on February 22^nd, I learned that my mom had suddenly and unexpectedly died at home from a rare kidney condition which she had developed a year earlier.  Across the next few months, my entire life and many of my basic assumptions about it would be completely upended.    What I most vividly recall about that dark, troubling period in my life was the series of physical feelings which pervaded my daily existence over the first few weeks.  My appetite plummeted, I ran through my days despite only being able to get 2 or 3 hours of sleep at night, I entirely lost my desire for sex and my libido, and I awoke each day under a dark cloud of dread which literally felt heavy, as if I were going through the day carrying a 75-pound bag on my back.   It took a long time for those sentiments to completely subdue.

Now as a more mature person about to enter my 30’s, I am waking up each day to the prospect of spending at least the next four years in Donald Trump’s America – and the physical sensations I am going through now are 100% identical to the way I felt when my mom died nearly 10 years ago.  On Tuesday night I probably slept for a grand total of an hour and a half.  It doesn’t help that I’ve been getting over a cold this week, but my appetite and sexual drive are gone.  As I watched Hillary give her beautiful concession speech on Wednesday morning I felt physically ill, to the point where I had to excuse myself from a conference room at work to openly weep in the bathroom afterwards.  Imagine that:  me, a grown man and a tough, nasty son of a bitch, openly sobbing in a bathroom at my office.  The adult bubble I had created for myself, living in Manhattan and working in an elite industry, had burst violently.  In that respect, my 20’s are ending just as they begun, and I question where we will begin to go from here.

I.                   Nous vivons l’horreur

I want to be very clear to the folks who are calling those of us who are mourning Hillary’s loss “babies”:  you need to back the fuck off, and you need to understand why we feel exactly how we do.

It was one year ago that the terrorist attacks took place in Paris which claimed nearly 150 lives.  After that horrific event Marine Le Pen – of whom I am absolutely no fan and against whom I hope my French friends vote in their election next year – uttered a phrase which stuck with me and I’m sure many French folks as well: “Nous vivons l’horreur.”  Translated to English, it roughly means “we are living through horror.”  And that phrase basically describes how many of us feel right now.  Indeed, we are living through an American horror.

Donald Trump ran a campaign that was rooted in hate, in an inchoate rage which bordered at times on pure destructive nihilism.  In his quest for electoral power, essentially no segment of the American population was off-limits as a target of his unbridled rage:  women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, the mentally disabled, immigrants, war heroes and veterans like John McCain, Democrats, establishment Republicans, and on and on.  We are living in horror, and it was a horror to watch this election unfold as it did.  The question, of course, is how we arrived at such a dark place.  And much of that line of inquiry should be directed squarely at the white working class voters who just elected Mr. Trump.

II.               To the white working class

I have a perspective on white working class voters which very few of my fellow blue state liberals share, particularly those liberals who are of ethnic minority backgrounds.

I understand and would like to address Donald Trump’s white working class voters in the industrial heartland and small town America, particularly those whites without a college education, and most especially the subset of that latter group with socially conservative values on issues like LGBT rights.  Let me be very clear about how I feel.  At this incredibly painful moment in my life, it would be so easy for me to hate you, to loathe you, to disparage you, to mock you, to boast about the superiority of my income or education or wealth or good health in relation to yours, and on and on. I’m not going to sit here and lie and say that I haven’t done all of those things – and more – in the past; in fact, I’m not even going to deny that my subconscious – burning hot as it is with the fires of rage and indignity – is pushing me to do all of those things at this very moment. But I will not do any of those things, at least for this moment.  And there’s a good reason why:  again, I know you, the white working class, better than you might believe.  And as hurt as I am right now, I understand that you are economically and materially hurt far, far more than I am.

In fact, the funny thing is that you and I are cut from basically the same cloth. The per capita income of the rural, predominantly white working class county I grew up in, Calhoun County, Florida, is $12,379; my single parent mom never made more than $47,000 per year in her entire career, and in most years she made barely more than $30,000.  My dad wasn’t around and provided basically no support from the time I turned nine in 1996.  My mom spent years commuting 100 miles round trip each day to cities like Tallahassee to provide for me growing up; I saw the exhaustion in her face by the time the end of the week rolled around.  There were short periods in my early youth where my family relied on food stamps and other forms of public assistance.  From 1994 through 2002, I lived in various trailer parks.  Even though I finished high school as my class Salutatorian with straight ‘A’ grades and standardized test scores well into the 90^th percentiles nationally, I never applied to any Ivy League or other elite school for undergraduate admission, because I never imagined that I would be able to afford to attend one of those places. 

And let me be unambiguously clear:  beyond the shitty economics, I did not enjoy growing up in Calhoun County, Florida because the white working class was generally unkind to people like me.  My family was an outsider one – my single mom, Marsha, ended up in the Florida Panhandle in the 1980’s on an internship doing agricultural development work after she finished her Master’s degree, and she ended up falling in love with the place.  Eventually, she even ended up being elected as the Mayor of the small town in which I grew up by a narrow electoral margin; that reflected that her likability and compassion far surpass the degree to which I am ever likely to develop those attributes in my adult life.  Regardless, being an outsider family in a socially conservative region like the Florida Panhandle was not easy, and I – as basically a derivative of Marsha’s personality in a more modern variant – was even more of an outsider than she ever was.  In high school, I was more than once called a “nigger” and a “faggot.”  My mom, a working professional in many ways cut from the same mold as Hillary Clinton, was labeled a “transvestite” across her career in the Panhandle.  I was told on no small number of occasions growing up that my family and I should “move back up North”, even though I did not step foot into the legitimately Northern United States until I was 13 years old.  Those memories still burn me to my core today.  There’s a reason why I, as a warm weather aficionado, pack my sunglasses and flip flops to fly 6 hours west to Southern California on vacation, as opposed to booking a much shorter 2.5-hour flight due south to my home state.  That choice is very intentional on my end.  The hurt I feel is still very real, and very raw.

III.            Seeing beyond ZIP codes starting with 0, 1, and 9

So yes, I have extremely pointed criticism for white working class folks like my former high school classmates from rural America who just voted a reality television star with no previous political experience into the most powerful public office in the world.  My criticism for my educated peers in coastal Blue State America, however, is not much more relatively muted.  More on that in a moment.

Let’s be clear again, though, first of all:  Hillary Clinton won a majority of the popular vote.  More Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump, and that fact makes me extremely proud of my nation.  The Electoral College is an institution which must be abolished or radically reformed; in my short 29 years on this earth and as an American citizen, I have witnessed two Presidents elected – in the 2000 and 2016 elections - who only won a minority of the actual vote.  When a minority of the population routinely elects the President, that does not describe a healthy, functioning democracy - it describes South Africa under the white minority rule of apartheid in 1950.  If nothing else, it means that the United States has become the first nation on this planet to grant the franchise to empty land.

Hillary was nevertheless a deeply flawed candidate, for sure.  One hundred years from now, students aspiring to high office will still be reading case studies about her ethically dubious – and frankly, downright stupid - choices to continue to accept foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and to deploy a private email server while serving as Secretary of State.  And in the end, 30 years of harsh and often unfair public criticism of every single aspect of the Clinton family proved to be far too formidable of a barrier for her to overcome, particularly when those criticisms were exacerbated by some of her own unique character flaws.  As the son of a professional working single mother and politician myself, I was deeply saddened – and frankly enraged – to see Hillary fall into the exact same old gender role traps which trip up so many qualified, intelligent, ambitious women, when she of all people should have known better and which she should have known how to avoid.  The hurt of this loss stings, it stings me in a personal and profound way, and it is going to take me some time to fully recover from it.

But even with all of Hillary’s flaws, she won a majority of the popular vote – and she should have easily won this election.  And I think a big part of the reason for her loss lays squarely at the feet of cultural liberals who cannot comprehend the sentiments of folks who live far removed from coastal and urban America.  Americans in the interior of this country decided that they could no longer tolerate perceived second-class citizenship, and I deeply understand their frustration as a person who spent the first 20 years of my own life as a second-class citizen in many aspects.

I am a political moderate who has long been critical of movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street; rest assured that my criticism of the far left aspects of those movements will continue after this election.  Among all the diverse objections I have raised regarding the views of those groups, none has been more prominent and more persistent than my criticism of what I refer to as the “privilege dialectic.” This is the narrative, rooted deeply in the critical theory (read:  the Marxist dialectic) prominent on Ivy League and liberal arts campuses, which holds that people with white skin – and particularly people with both white skin and male sexual organs – are at the root of all societal inequity, are unambiguously the beneficiaries of the modern societal order, and must be held to task for the collective sins of their ancestors, regardless of their actual degree of wealth and power in society.  In order words, these folks need to be continuously humbled and made to “check their privilege.”  This privilege dialectic is particularly prominent in the ZIP codes of our country which begin with the numbers 0, 1, and 9; and it is even more particularly prominent among liberals who were born and raised in one of those ZIP codes.

So, let me be very clear to Democrats and progressives today:  to the extent that you continue your fanatical embrace of this destructive privilege dialectic, so will you continue to lose eminently winnable elections.  The reason why is rather simple and rather clear to folks like me:  the working class white people around whom I grew up in the Florida Panhandle and my summers in Kentucky may hold some views on social issues which I find objectionable, but they do not enjoy any sort of “privilege” at all based on their skin color.  

You cannot understand the rage which you unleash in these working class folks when you smugly tell them that they enjoy “privilege” from your lofty coastal perches; you cannot understand how these people feel, as they watch all of their dreams and hopes slip away for both them and their children in a globalizing world, when they are being castigated as “privileged” by folks in California with six-figure incomes and degrees in comparative literature from colleges which their own children will never be able to afford.  I, as a gay black man, am far more privileged than nearly all of them will ever be because I happened to win the lottery of American have/have-not economics through the tireless efforts of my single mom, my own hard work, and some really good luck.  Unlike me, most of my white classmates from high school generally do not travel in business class to spend vacations in Bali or the French Riviera.  Unlike me, most of my white classmates from high school do not routinely spend $250 on spa treatments.  Unlike me, most of my white classmates from high school do not have a full year worth of emergency savings in the bank and a decent amount stashed away in their health savings account for medical emergencies, if they even have health insurance to begin with.  Unlike me, most of my white classmates from high school would be deeply at unease putting on a $1,000 suit and walking into a Fortune 500 corporate boardroom to give a presentation on growth strategy.  Like many Americans, I was deeply moved when I read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy this summer.  Probably unlike many Americans, my emotions were more intense because in that autobiography I read a description of the people around whom I grew up, and I recognized just how blessed I have been.  But for the metaphorical grace of God, I could have ended up as one of J.D.’s peers, as could have he.  Had I ended up with a conviction for underage drinking on my record; had I not gotten a full-ride scholarship to the University of Florida; had I not been successful in my interviews with ExxonMobil and KPMG as an undergraduate – any of those things, and many more, could have derailed my life before it even had the chance to get started.  The pain, exacerbated by the loss of cultural identity and power, being experienced by the white working class right now is a national trauma.  It is the problem of all of us, regardless of our skin color.

When you, progressive Democrats on the coast, tell these white people that they are “privileged” and that they need to repudiate their privilege to make way for folks with a different tone of skin, you end up alienating the very working class people whom I believe you aim to help.  I grew up around these people and yes, I know that there are indeed those among them who are deplorable racist, homophobic bigots who are not redeemable.  The great majority of them, however, are not.  And I hope that we will learn that as a nation, and move forward in an inclusive way which fully recognizes this.

IV.             To President-elect Trump and my Republican friends

Congratulations, first of all, to those of you who voted for Trump and who hold Republican ideals.  One of the many great beauties of American democracy is the competition of ideas, and your side won this time around.  You now control all three branches of the Federal government, as well as the vast majority of state governments.  You wield an awesome power – similar to what Democrats wielded back in 2008 – and we will be expecting you to act judiciously and aggressively with that power to improve the lives of everyday working class Americans, including those in the white working class who just propelled you to power.

What I sincerely hope that you avoid, however, is over-reach.  I’ve been thinking quite a bit this week about what may have happened with the administration of George W. Bush – campaigning as he did on a theme of “compassionate conservatism” – had we not witnessed the attacks of September 11 within his first year in office.  History will never know if President Bush might have gone down as one of our most unifying and impressive leaders in that scenario; instead, he will go down in history as the man who drove our nation into a state of hyper-partisan dysfunction which lingers to the present moment (a process started, I might add, seven years before Bush’s election when Newt Gingrich and his peers took the reins of power in Congress.)  In whatever event, we know the outcomes of this vicious pattern, and I am hoping that we break it this time around. 

So, let me be very unambiguously clear to the right-wingers who supported Trump, and who now believe he has a “mandate” to remake America in the mold of itself from the 1950’s.  To the extent that a President Trump attempts to roll back civil rights and break up families through mass deportation, he risks inciting nothing less than a second American civil war.  I may not agree with some of the incendiary language deployed by my coastal liberal peers over the last few days, but I am absolutely united with them in my vision for America’s future.  Donald Trump has lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by approximately one million votes.  Per exit polls (if we can believe anything called a “poll” these days), he will be entering office with a 60% disapproval rating and with a similar percentage of Americans viewing him as wholly unfit to be Commander-in-Chief, myself among them.  Reflecting the rapidly changing demographics of America, red bastion counties like Orange County, California, Cobb County, Georgia, and Fort Bend County, Texas all voted for Hillary this year.  That archetype of suburban white conservatism itself, Orange County, voted this year to legalize pot with 51% of the vote.  Let that sink in:  a majority of voters in Orange County, California have just voted to legalize pot (perhaps they presciently recognized a need for it to cope with this election.)  I hope that your side recognizes this; you do not have a mandate to remake America in some dystopian, white supremacist, Breitbart-esque vision from Newt Gingrich’s twisted mind.  If you do not understand this, you should fully expect that my senior Senator, Chuck Schumer, and other congressional Democrats, along with those of us marching in the streets, will make your life nothing less than a living hell of endless congressional obstruction, limitless lawsuits, and massive protest over the next two years, and you will suffer an electoral bloodbath in the 2018 midterm elections.  If you govern in an inclusive, middle-of-the-road manner which empowers all Americans and lifts all boats, you will have our unlimited support.   Count on it.  The choice is yours.

V.                And when that dawn will come:  my love for and faith in America

Where do we go from here?  Believe it or not, I’m actually optimistic, at least when I frame my thinking, correctly, in the long-term.

First of all, let’s address the legacy of Barack Obama.  President Obama inherited two mismanaged wars – one of which we should have never been involved in – an imploding economy which was shedding more than 800,000 jobs per month, an American auto industry on the brink of extinction, and a nation whose moral legitimacy around the world was in tatters due to the criminal war misdeeds of the Bush Administration.  He ran on a message of positivity and hope which drove many of us, myself included, out of a deep malaise and state of despair in 2008.  Once he entered the Oval Office, he faced nonstop Republican obstruction of his agenda from day one; let us not forget that his first major bill, the stimulus, only garnered three Republican votes in the Senate, despite the aforementioned imploding economy and the fact that Obama’s team refashioned the stimulus to make it much less Keynesian, much smaller, and much more tax cut-driven than many of us, myself included, would have preferred.  Obama extended the olive branch to the Republican establishment; in return, they coldly suggested that he dig out his Kenyan passport and return to his homeland.  I want my white conservative friends who are good-hearted, average folks to understand how profoundly that hurts people like me.  As a black male who went from living in a trailer park as a kid to being in the top 2.5% of American individual income earners before turning 30, it has been incredibly hard for me to accept the amount of residual racism in America; I am deeply committed to the American ideal of meritocracy, and I have always seen my own life narrative as proving that meritocracy to be a valid one.  I live in a wealthy majority white neighborhood of Manhattan and most of my friends are white, after all, as have been all of the men I have dated.  Watching the egregious mistreatment of Barack Obama over the last eight years slowly started to alter my views in this area; Tuesday’s election results were the final straw which broke the proverbial camel’s back.  Around 1 AM on Wednesday morning, for the first time ever I posted the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on my Facebook wall in solidarity with that movement.  And I likewise stand in solidarity with Barack Obama, the President who cut the unemployment rate in half, who doubled the capital market indices, who took out Osama bin Laden, who saved the American auto industry, who worked to enshrine equality for LGBT citizens, who reformed healthcare, who reformed Wall Street, who raised taxes on the wealthy to provide for the poor, who started the long overdue process of drawing America out of perennial warfare in the Middle East, and who has sought to constructively engage nations like Cuba and Iran.  Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart President Obama.  I have no doubt that you will go down in history as one of America’s best, most consequential Presidents.  Your soaring approval ratings during your twilight in office suggest that even today.  Your legacy is secure, your legacy is a brilliant one, and I hope that President-elect Donald Trump understands that loud and clear.  President-elect Trump, as you crawl bloodied and crippled over the finish line having lost the popular vote – something Obama won twice – I pray that your 70 years on earth have given you the wisdom to understand that America did not just hand you a mandate to undo the progress of the Obama Era.

I can only imagine how heartbroken Hillary Clinton must be at this moment in time, and I will be sending her a handwritten thank-you note sometime this week.  If you supported her campaign, I strongly encourage you to do the same.  Hillary, wherever you are this week, I hope you know that you did not let any of us down.  We are so incredibly proud of the work you did in this campaign, as well as the tremendous, trailblazing career you have had since your bold speech at Wellesley back in 1969.  You are one of my strongest role models, as a person who aspires to a position of high influence in society by the time I will be your age 40 years from now.  From the children who get health insurance through SCHIP to the September 11 first responders whom you helped, your career has been one of incredible positive influence on our nation.  And though you certainly deserve a vacation at this point and some private time with your family, I hope that you are not yet done being a public figure.  At this pivotal moment in our nation’s history, we need strong, wise voices like yours more than ever before.

And what of President-elect Trump?  Yes, to the shock of my more liberal friends I’m sure, I have hope even in this area.  We New Yorkers know Donald Trump, and we know that if nothing else, what he is extraordinarily gifted at – indeed, best in class at - is being a master of selling bullshit to fools as diamonds, and America clearly has no shortage of naïve, dimwitted fools in search of those diamonds.  This is how he could convince droves of ordinary Americans to spend many tens of thousands of dollars to attend Trump “University” when they would have been far better off getting an Associate’s degree at their local community college for a fraction of the cost.  So, in short, we have elected a Bullshitter-in-Chief, and none of us know the road down which he is about to take us. Like a good management consultant who naturally thinks in three’s, I see three possible scenarios unfolding in the Trump Administration.  The worst case – and I believe, or at least pray, by far the most unlikely – is that Mr. Trump truly does believe everything he said on the campaign trail, and is about to attempt to turn America into Vladimir Putin’s Russia with a Breitbart accent.  As I noted earlier, that scenario will result in nothing short of the second American civil war, and I will happily volunteer to be one of the soldiers on the front line to defend my precious liberties and freedoms.  The middle ground, perhaps the most likely scenario, is that we are about to return to the policies of George W. Bush with a more dysfunctional Federal government, since I fully expect many dedicated civil servants to resign or retire as opposed to working under the executive orders of a man they find abhorrent.  That would not be fun but it would be entirely survivable, particularly because it would result a Democratic tidal wave in the 2018 midterm elections.  Make no mistake, the policies of George W. Bush were a disaster for the white working class voters who just propelled Mr. Trump into the land’s highest office.  If he and the Ayn Rand-idolizing crackpots in today’s Republican establishment attempt to take away health insurance from 20 million struggling Americans through a hasty repeal of Obamacare and privatize Social Security, the 2010 midterms will look mild by comparison to what will happen in 2018.

The best-case scenario – and I do have some hope it may unfold – would fully validate my assessment of Donald Trump as the Bullshitter-in-Chief.  In this scenario, Mr. Trump – a lifelong New Yorker and serial philanderer with an obsession for material wealth and power – simply said whatever he needed to say to get elected, and he doesn’t believe in a word of it.  In this scenario, he is probably waking up each day right now in pure shock at what our nation has just done, he is awed by the incredible responsibility the electorate has now placed on his shoulders, and he is not beholden to any interest groups.  If this version of Donald Trump is motivated by the values which are prevalent in his native New York City, he may end up going down in history as a transformational, positive President who institutes reforms which truly do level the playing field for working class Americans through amending and extending the best parts of the Obama legacy. 

Time will tell which Trump scenario plays out, and as Americans our sacred duty now is to be vigilant, to love each other, to have deep conversations, and to recommit ourselves to the survival and the integrity of our nation more so than we ever have before.  I’m hopeful that we will do exactly that.

Some of you may have noticed the general theme of hope which pervades my thinking about the future, and it may startle you.  You may wonder how in the world I – a gay black atheist and Clinton supporter, living in Manhattan, who experienced racial hatred growing up in the rural Deep South – could possibly be hopeful at this moment in time.  There are two reasons underlying my mental state, one driven more by the empirical reality of American demographics, and another – the far more profound and important reason – driven by my understanding of our national soul and the American Dream.

On the wonkish question of demographics, there can be no doubt:  2016 is likely the very last year that a Presidential candidate will be able to win the election by solely appealing to one racial group.  At some point before 2050, America will become a nation where no racial group constitutes a majority of the population.  In states such as California, New Mexico, Texas, and Hawaii that reality has already arrived.  Earlier, I pointed out how numerous red bastion counties, such as Orange County, California, flipped blue in this election.  Those types of counties may continue to be hard-fought, but the general direction of their transformation is clear, and that direction will not be changing.  Mr. Trump may squander our taxpayer money building the second coming of the Maginot Line on our southern border if he wishes to, but no wall is going to stop the speeding train of American demographic change.  Any political party which does not recognize and act on this fundamental transformation of our nation is on the fast track to extinction.  And again, if not for the peculiarities of the Electoral College, we would be sending Hillary Clinton to the White House right now, despite her myriad flaws.  The Party of Lincoln must decide if it wants to board this demographic train or get run over by it.

Much more fundamental to the hope that I feel at this moment, though, is my understanding of the United States of America, and the overall trajectory of human progress which our country has always represented.  President Obama’s favorite quote, from Martin Luther King, Jr., notes that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  In her beautifully poetic concession speech this week, Hillary Clinton turned to Biblical scripture (Galatians) to remind us, particularly the young like me, that we should “not grow weary of doing good, for in good season we shall reap if we do not give up.”  For me personally, in dark times like this I have always found solace in my favorite fiction novel, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.  Cry, a story of human redemption, is set in a South Africa on the verge of instituting apartheid.  It recounts the narrative of a black rural pastor whose son is sentenced to the death penalty for murdering a white farmer’s son in Johannesburg; as it turns out in a horrible twist, the farmer’s son was a racial liberal working to end the racial caste system in his country, while his father begins the novel as an avowed racist.  Over the course of the novel the white farmer and the black pastor get to know each other, and as they both realize that they have lost their sons, they begin a process of reconciliation.  Eventually, the farmer is so moved by his son’s own work in racial justice that he changes his views.  However, the pastor’s son is still sentenced to die by hanging for having committed the murder.  Before dawn on the day that his son is to be executed, the pastor ventures to a nearby hilltop and begins to reflect.  And just as the sun begins to rise in the distance and his son is to be hanged, the pastor falls to his knees in prayer.  Closing the novel at this point, Alan Paton delivers a final paragraph which still moves me nearly to tears and produces cold chills each time I read it: “For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”

As Alan Paton penned Cry in 1948, radical Afrikaners in South Africa elected D.F. Malan and the avowedly white supremacist National Party; this party would soon begin implementing systematic apartheid.  In that year, a young lawyer by the name of Nelson Mandela was around my age - 30.  We all know, of course, the greatness that Mr. Mandela would go on to attain in due time.  But at age 30, my age, Mr. Mandela could have not possibly known what was ahead for him in his life, and the long, horribly violent road his country was about to go down.  He could not possibly know how far South Africa was from seeing the dawn of its emancipation, nor the instrumental role he would play in that eventual outcome.  Yet he believed, and he persevered.  He never succumbed to the cynicism, the bitterness, the hatred, and the recriminations which would doom many sub-Saharan African nations as they began to gain freedom from European colonialism from 1950 onward.  Modern South Africa, a pluralistic and stable democratic state, is a testament to his character, and to his astonishing ability to orient himself at any given point in time on history long’s arc of moral progress.

And here I am now, at the end of my 20’s and living through this troubling time for my own nation.  It would be so easy for me to fixate on the bookends of this decade in my life given how similar those two bookends are:  the death of my mother then, the election of Donald Trump now.  Both events left me feeling emotionally empty and physically sick, numb to all sensations around me.  But fortunately, I know history, and history tells us that fixation on the bookends is a fool’s choice.  For indeed, if I look at what has happened in-between age 20 and age 29 in my life, what is revealed is an incredible amount of progress, growth, fun, and happiness.  The overall trajectory is clear, and that trajectory is one that is trending up at a steady pace.  When I hit nasty bumps, I take the time to reflect, dust myself off, and get back up to continue on the path.  “Onward and upward”, as I am known to say in times of both celebration and tragedy.  Our nation will do the same.  I have incredible faith in and love for our nation, the nation which elevated me from trailer parks in the backwoods as a child to where I am today.  America is stronger than any setback which can be placed in front of us; we Americans know this, and we know it really damn well.  It is a core part of our identity.  It is the American Way and the American Dream.

Indeed, Hillary, you have it right - there are more seasons to come and there is more work to do before we can reap, but we will not lose heart, and we will reap one day.