So this is the moment they all talked about. The moment of waiting. As Tom Petty once said, it’s the hardest part.
The pandemic hit in March and since then, if we’re lucky, we’ve built up a protective layer against the agony of waiting. Some call it patience but it’s not quite that. It’s more of a kind of maintaining, of self-preservation. We’ve waited to return in some way to normal life, where one doesn’t have to hold a comprehensive risk management flowchart in one’s head every time one steps outside. We’ve waited for a plan, some direction, something to hold onto, even when none has come.
We’ve waited for help. We’ve waited on the unemployment phone lines only to be told eventually that help is not coming for a while, if ever. We waited for those with a little power and a badge who killed others to face justice and when they never did, we stepped into the streets.
We knew we’d have to wait again this November. We knew we’d have to sit on our hands and twiddle our thumbs and rend our hair and clothes while we waited for the beats to play out, even though we knew the beats. Especially because we knew the beats. We knew that major networks would have to fill time with a lot of words. We knew not to take any of it very seriously. We knew you can’t trust early polls, you’re dead in the water if you read the polls. This aged oracle told us exactly what would happen, and on Jimmy Fallon no less:
We know now that we’re in the five second to 1:48 part of the video, in which Bernie Sanders described what’s happening right now sometime in the past, when we were waiting to vote. The mail-in ballots in key states have not been counted yet (because they can’t be, because of exhausting reasons) and the president has still absurdly, insidiously, undemocratically claimed victory. We’re now waiting on the minutes 1:50 to 2:12 part of that video. We’re waiting to start the fight once more.
So I don’t know what to say. We’re made to sit with that agonizing feeling of just holding tight once again. It’s something we should be used to, and in some ways we are. We know exactly what jokes to tell online (bad ones) and we know who to text (trusted friends yes, ex-boyfriends no!)
You could read something bullish into this kind of fretful waiting. Like, despite knowing exactly what will happen, we’ve retained some hope that it will turn out differently this time. That the election gods will have mercy on our nerves, and we can begin immediately the incredibly difficult work of putting this episode behind us, and becoming better, all of us. That at least it’s unlike four years ago, when we didn’t wait at all. We were sure, until we weren’t. There’s something to be said about the way we manage to still feel so much, even horrible things. It’s a little remarkable.
We can be forgiven for feeling frayed and tired. We can be forgiven for yelling about our exhaustion. But we still have to wait. We know by now how to do that.
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