This Sums It Up Perfectly...Why We Grieve

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A Facebook friend was kind enough to post this blog post by John Pavlovitz and I just had to pass it along. It says all I've been feeling since late Tuesday night but I just hadn't been able to find all the right words to express my feelings. This guy nailed it! As he so articulately and eloquently put it, this isn't just about politics, it's not just about the person more of us actually voted for not winning the election, it's not about red states vs. blue states, urban vs. rural, Democrats vs. Republicans or right vs. left. We've all, if we've paid attention and voted in the past, experienced the loss of the person for whom we voted and while it was disappointing we moved on. This is so different. I have no problem accepting the fact that many people, nearly half of those who voted, feel differently from me on some major issues. I've always had many Republican friends and even a few family members lean that way and it's had no effect on our relationships or our love and respect for one another. They've voted for the candidate they felt most represented their views and I did the same, that's the way it's supposed to be in a Democracy. However, in the past these people haven't voted for someone who had spent a year and a half spewing hatred against every demographic group in the country other than white straight Christian men. So what do we do? Do we warn our daughters and granddaughters that they'll likely go through life being rated on a scale of 1-10 based solely on their looks? Do we tell them if they're sexually harassed or even sexually assaulted to just keep their mouths shut, that "boys will be boys" and, as our soon to be First Lady said, nothing should be said without "evidence" and then only in a court of law? What do we tell our sons and grandsons and will it matter what we see since they've seen what disrespecting and insulting women gets them, that being the position of "leader of the Free World? Since we now have kindergarten kids telling their HIspanic classmates they'll soon be sent away I guess the hope I had just a few short days ago that our younger generations were above the racism and bigotry of the past. As a woman I now can empathize more than ever before with blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, Native-Americans, Jews and members of the LGBT community, although only I can only understand a tiny fraction of what they've always gone through. I get, at least to a small degree, what it feels like to be marginalized, to be part of a group that it's acceptable to treat as something less than a person of worth. This is why I grieve for the America I thought I knew but obviously never did.