"You don’t whistle against an ocean."

A short letter to the PREVAIL community

Dear Reader,

I have no grand words of wisdom this morning, just a bitter cocktail of toxic emotions: sadness, disappointment, anger, disgust, shock, contempt, fear, and whatever the feeling is called when you’ve been betrayed.

Also, I feel bad that I projected such confidence and hopefulness on these pages. I felt confident and hopeful, and I wanted to allow myself to indulge those feelings, rather than let fear and uncertainty ruin my anticipatory joy. If in doing so I generated a feeling of false hope in you, I apologize.

What hurts even more than him winning is how many voters clearly wanted this outcome. I figured if she lost, it would be because of a quirk in the Electoral College, or some chicanery in the House. Not once did it even cross my mind that he would win the popular vote. It breaks my brain that that happened. My longstanding faith that Americans are good and decent—hell, my faith that we will prevail—took a big hit these last 24 hours. The damage, to our democracy and our society, is incalculable. What some people did yesterday is unforgivable, and we are under no obligation to forgive them. I don’t “go high” anymore.

Today I’m thinking of Kurt Tucholsky, who saw early on what the rise of the Nazi Party would mean in his native Germany. He wrote a poem in 1922 calling out the politicians then running the government: the non-Nazis, whom he found weak, effete, reluctant to stand up against the burgeoning authoritarian movement:

You are about to take your last breath.
Show what you are. Judge yourself.
Die or fight!
There is no third way.

But that government failed him, and Hitler rose, and he fled, and once he left, he stopped fighting back. “You don’t whistle against an ocean,” a defeated Tucholsky wrote to a friend.

There’s a lot to unpack with the election, and today is not the day for that. The wounds are too fresh, the threat too real, and I don’t want to say something I will later regret. But I wanted to write to say, first, that I’m sorry to have let you down, and second, that I’m not yet ready to stop whistling, no matter how perilous the waters.

We will do a show tonight, as promised. It’s not the show we expected to do, and it’s certainly not the show we wanted to do, but it’s the show we need to do. There will not be a guest; instead, the third segment will be a place to take questions from the Five 8 community. If you have anything you’d like us to address, please let me know. We hope it will be a safe space for us to gather.

Finally: do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself today. It’s going to take time to heal from this, insofar as we ever can.

Much love,
Greg

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Photo credit: Matthew Barra.