Reflections on the Alabama vote

I saw that woman on Alica Keys' instagram feed. I don't know who she is, but she's stunning. I'm posting her here because I've been thinking a lot about the fact that so many people in the country of my children's birth cannot see her beauty. 

I'm thinking that the 66 percent of white voters in Alabama who cast their lot with the child predator Roy Moore—the candidate who believes our nation would be better off if we simply eliminated all the constitutional amendments that came after the tenth, including the 13th which prohibits slavery; the 14th which grants all people equal rights under the  law; the 15th which gives African Americans the right to vote; and the 19th which gives women the right to vote; and who believes all LGBTQ people are an abomination, and that America was only truly great during slavery days—well, maybe all those people who voted to send this man to the United States senate can't see what is luminous in the woman whose photograph is posted here. 

To all those women who voted for the child predator despite his belief that they shouldn't even be allowed to vote, and to all those men who supported him based on little more than his Republican party affiliation, which has become a blaring trumpet for the supremacy of whiteness, I'd like to point out that it was women and men with skin the same rich blackness as the woman in that photograph who helped eke out a win for the Democrat, Doug Jones. Black folks showed up at the polls in numbers that exceeded even their turnout for Obama, because they knew just how dangerous a Roy Moore/Steve Bannon/Donald Trump win would be. And they helped Doug Jones secure the victory. They made sure that the candidate who is that increasingly rare breed, a true public servant, would win the Alabama senate seat. That made me almost as happy as I was a decade ago when Obama won the Iowa primary on a freezing cold January day, and I realized that he had a real shot at the presidency. 

It is the memory of that win, and of that fundamentally decent president's eight years in office that helps me to believe now that despite what went down in Alabama these last few weeks, and what has gone down in the White House and the Republican-led Congress this past year, America is not lost. This is still the same country that voted for a man named Barack Obama—twice. Maybe we're now just experiencing a necessary convulsion, lancing the diseased abscess of hatred and evil, getting all the muck out, getting ready for the courageous and the neighborly and the good.