Election reflections

I started writing this post a while ago, when the election results were still a very fresh memory invoking very raw emotions. Since then, other priorities and activities mean reflecting on it has easily slipped down the agenda. There are still things I want to say.

Late on that Thursday evening, after the exit poll but while a small glimmer of hope was still alive before the results were actually confirmed, I wrote the following as my facebook status:

Tonight could be very depressing ...

Were it not for the fact that democracy is not just, and not even mostly, about what happens in the polling stations. It is about the choices we make every day. About the lives we choose to live.

So yes, I'll stay up shouting at the television tonight.

But tomorrow I will stand up and do my bit to create the kind of world in which I want to live. It might be a bit harder, but it will still be worth the effort. I am not giving up.

I wrote it because I needed to find a way to remain hopeful and believe I can still make a difference in a society which felt a little more broken than it did the day before. I wrote it because this is the reality we find ourselves in and I know that just blaming "the other" who voted for a set of values I find impossible to understand ultimately isn't helpful. Most of all, I wrote it because I really believe it to be true.

Those words remain at the heart of where I am at in relation to what happened on election night. They remain my most coherent reflection, but I have, unsurprisingly, had plenty of other thoughts too. Despite the elapse of time, my disparate collection of thoughts have not coalesced into some kind of succinct discourse; and if I wait until they form some kind of coherent reflection, the moment will have passed (to some extent,since I started writing this, it feels a little like it already has!), so I thought I'd just share them as random snippets, for what they are worth, just as they are:

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I know I am very privileged that my every day reality provides me with many opportunities to help try and create this 'better place' I say I believe in. The tomorrow of which I wrote on Thursday night, mostly involved teaching twenty-something refugee and asylum-seeking children who are waiting for school places. Some of them have been waiting several months for a school place in a system that is clearly not really able to cope, many of them are living in temporary accommodation, in some cases in one room in hostel accommodation with no kitchens, no washing machine. I know their lives are not about to get any easier, and I may not be able to do much about that. I also know that for those couple of hours they learned new words, they shared ideas, they built friendships with each other, they smiled and they laughed. I know that is a good thing.

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It feels like on Thursday simplistic certainty won over nuance and compromise. Whatever else one can say about the winning election campaign (and there is much I could write on the subject) it was unquestionably successful. Like the Brexit campaign before it, the strategy of choose a simple message, repeat it endlessly regardless of the topic you are supposed to be discussing, the question you have been asked, seemed to work. And if I found the failure to drop the stuck record intensely irritating ... I guess that didn't matter, because I was never the target audience. My immediate temptation, I think, was to wish that "my side" had perhaps done the same: found a simple, catchy repeatable message to hammer home. Given how election campaigns and media soundbite collection works, maybe some of that would have had value ... But at a deeper level, I know, ultimately, that isn't the solution. It is not what I want. I do not want a political game that is reduced to who can come up with the catchiest slogan. I do not want further polarisation of an already divided society. I want to remind myself not to give up on nuance, and complexity, and grey areas, and doubt.

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Fear is an extremely powerful force. I've written about that before. I probably don't need to do so again now, but this election reminded me again of how significant a force it is in the way our society operates, and therefore how important it is, in lots of different situations, to resist succumbing to it. The election result didn't happen in a vacuum: lots of other decisions and scenarios where fear is allowed to dominate discourse have brought us to where we are. I think the message that love overcomes fear, the challenge to not be afraid, lies at the heart of the gospel call. I will continue to aspire to heed it.

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One of the conversations I had with someone the day after the election was about the fact that I and others, were quite openly sharing our disappointment and disagreement with the election result. It was one of multiple conversations in recent weeks with those for whom government repression on a scale I in my privilege will undoubtedly never experience, has been a very tangible reality. Those conversations stand as a rallying call: that apathy or running away is not a solution. I remain in an immensely privileged position and it comes with a great responsibility to struggle for those who, in myriad different ways, don't share that privilege.

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If fear is an extremely powerful force,the desire to find someone to blame is an incredibly powerful temptation. 'Othering' and creating scapegoats to shoulder the blame has been a powerful political tool which has, in my opinion helped bring us to where we are... but for those of us who are unhappy with the results said election, the desire to apportion blame to those whose choices were different to our own is also a strong one. In some cases, and in some ways, that is possibly / probably justified. Democracy works on the assumption that people can take responsibility for their choices. But what to do when you have the deep sense that many of those who voted for the current government have and will suffer more as a consequence than I will, protected as I am by my privilege? And if I blame "them" in the way they blamed "the other" in the way they voted, am I not just perpetuating the same story that there always has to be someone to blame, and that someone is always someone else.

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I have struggled to try and understand why it seems so many people are voting against their own best interests. Don't get me wrong: I get that there's a place for voting or acting against your own interests: for choosing to take the "preferential option for the poor", choosing to do what is best for those weaker or more vulnerable or more in need than ourselves even when it is against our own personal benefit. But to vote / act for something that is less good for ourselves than it is for those already richer or more powerful than ourselves? I have really struggled to make sense of that. I have more to say on that subject, I think, probably. But that might be a post in its own right at some point.

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Enough. I think. For now at least.