I was born in Cleveland on September 14, 1980. This was back when it was routine for dads to stay in the lobby while the mothers-to-be were in a back room somewhere, laboriously delivering precious bundles of evolutionary output. I have a vision of my own father on that day, watching football with one eye on the swinging hospital doors, an unlit cigar peeking from his front shirt pocket as multicolored leaves danced outside the window.
In eight days, the Iran-Iraq War would begin. In less than two months, Ronald Reagan would defeat Jimmy Carter in a race to become the 40th President of the United States. Back then a gallon of gas cost $1.19 and a pack of smokes was under a buck.
I’m told that I was a happy baby, a chatterbox who was relatively pleasant and easy enough to care for. Today, I am auntie to a beautiful baby girl — a whip-smart chatterbox who will bring more love and light to the world than it has ever seen. I think of her everyday, and will especially think of her as Donald J. Trump is inaugurated as our 45th President of the United States on January 20th, 2017.
Because of the emotionally-charged milieu that has engulfed us during this election, I chose to spend the evening of November 8th, 2016 tucked away at the San Francisco Opera.
Still, the events as they unfolded over the course of the evening were near-impossible to avoid. At intermission, I wandered to the third floor terrace with a $12.00 glass of syrupy west coast Chardonnay clutched in my hand.
Lalalala. Nothing significant is happening right now.
“Oh my God,” said a woman to my right, unintentionally breaking apart the intentionally-designed abstraction. I glanced over as she turned to her date, iphone glowing bright in the dark night.
It was then that I knew. That moment will be forever trapped under glass in my memory.
I looked around. It wasn’t just her. Countless others were also checking their phones to read the headlines.
I then looked away, out towards City Hall and the immaculately manicured lawn below. My $600+ iPhone was warm to the touch in my coat pocket. I was all-too aware of its presence as we milled about the extravagant Opera House in our fancy clothes sipping overpriced wine.
It was then that it dawned on me.
We are the problem.
We had all been too busy tapping into the addiction, turning our collective gaze towards niche-fied channels that supply us with easy reasons to opinionate and fear, laugh and criticize.
Somewhere along the way hard fact had been overshadowed by flashy headlines in order to draw wider eyeballs and repeatable clicks.
The segmentation of Americans had become emboldened — perhaps our greatness weakness as a country — pulling us far from the values that were supposed to unify us as a nation.
During the second half of Aida, our leading mezzo-soprano is grieving yet determined. She is about to sacrifice her newly-found freedom for the man she loves — Radames, the Captain of the Egyptian guard, who is about to be buried alive for assisting Aida and her father, the Ethiopian King, from lifetime imprisonment.
When 43rd President George W. Bush was re-elected to a second term I remember experiencing a vaguely similar sentiment.
Over matzo ball soup with then-colleagues I remember thinking Oh my God. I’m going to have to leave.
Was that dramatic? Probably. Still, as an American I wished for more than anything else to understand.
I feel the same way now.
My roommate scooped us heaping bowls of lemon cookie chunk ice cream.
We ate in silence, soothing the heated disbelief as we watched Donald Trump make his acceptance speech on YouTube.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones played in the background. I thought about Mick Jagger and the indefatigable Keith Richards. Maybe this one would actually do him in.
The next morning I did my best to resume life as usual. I took the train to the Belgian-American Chamber Of Commerce where I had very kindly been offered a desk. As I entered the room all eyes swung my way.
“What happened?”
I couldn’t bear to look at anyone, the token American who just yesterday was chatting excitedly about being on the brink of electing our first female President. I felt so ashamed, as though for some reason I had personally let them down.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
Despondent and dejected, I retreated to a conference room where I hid until lunch.
I should have known. I’m from Ohio, after all.
Granted, my adventures have taken me to Boston, Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco — I’ve lived in many places far from the traditional values embodied at many a Midwestern dinner table.
Still, that particular brand of ethos is in my blood. Whether I like it or not, its tangly wires wind indissolubly around my core.
You see, I grew up in the suburbs right next to a farm town. I like to think that I was a good Christian kid — I went to church camp and showed up for Bible study most Sundays. I knew all the words to Godspell.
My friends and I hung out in parking lots wearing oversized clothes with serious looks on our faces. One hot summer night the mayor’s son taught me how to drive. After I got my drivers license I made friends from other towns and it was then that I began my journey.
The town I grew up in was relatively small (back then it was, at least) and everybody knew each other.
Of course, my extended family was even closer.
We gathered every Sunday afternoon for dinner. (note: dinner took place at noon, and was not to be confused with supper, which happened much later in the day.)
I have fond memories of that dinner table but also remember that it was a healthy place for bias where densely-packed opinions and racial slurs flew around the table like an overinflated NFL football.
It wasn’t that we weren’t good people, we just didn’t know any better. I heard what people said around me and chose to also swim in that lane … until I didn’t.
Granted, that was all before the internet.
I’m not proud of some parts of that story, but those are my facts.
It’s where I come from.
And as the November 8th, 2016 election unfolded in real-time I felt a desperate need to connect with a core community, but mine seemed to be long gone.
I reached back into my pocket. I had been communicating with friends from Los Angeles and New York — alternate realities far in perspective from those former Cleveland spheres.
There are the communities we are born into, and the ones we eventually create for ourselves.
The next night I went to yoga class, the one I usually attend on Sundays. We affixed safety pins to our battered hoodies and stretched for hours.
I showed up for my other regularly-scheduled events: meditation practice, mobile industry meetups, pow-wows with women entrepreneurs, basketball and beers.
It was during this time that my communities held me up, tall and strong, in ways I never thought possible.
It was also then that my core identity seemed to significantly shift. I no longer felt beholden to the care or judgement, opinions or beliefs of others to whom I felt obliged simply because we were related or because we knew each other in kindergarten. The mechanisms for assimilation had become dismantled. I don’t know those people anymore.
How could I?
Still, as a result of this election I realized that there is a lot to learn from others who also discover their identity from new communities — particularly communities that are unlike, or no longer, mine.
People who were also duped by the media and the entire digital construct that drove us further apart.
Rather than turn away maybe I should instead seek to understand. To put down my phone and listen intently. To ask questions, rather than speak to someone with a closed-off heart and mind secretly wanting to whisper the words you’re crazy.
You might be reading this and think — what does she know, she sounds like a typical California yuppie with a gold-plated whistle around her neck and a silver spoon in her pocket who sips fancy lattes with one pinkie raised and sleeps with a copy of the New Yorker underneath her pillow.
You might read this and think, oh, she definitely works at a cushy technology startup that has a slide instead of stairs; she probably hires illegal immigrants to work on her Burning Man art car in the shape of an enormous dildo.
And I might think that you are a woman-hating, NASCAR-loving racist who shakes your fist at strangers telling them to get off your lawn, and that maybe you’d rather shoot shotguns at endangered species than get trained up for a job in the new economy.
Obviously, we are both wrong.
The funny thing about stereotypes is that they are most often always false.
Except for that probably, we both love our country.
And that both of us might appreciate a cold one at the end of a long work day, or at the end of any day for that matter.
Maybe we both like to watch our favorite sports teams with friends and go on vacation every once in awhile.
Maybe at some point we’ve both watched American Idol at the exact same time while wearing snuggies and eating pizza.
Both of us might also believe in hard work and fighting for what you believe in.
And we both hate it when bad things happen to the good people we love.
Last night there was a fire in East Oakland, just a few miles from where I now sit. Some people are missing and many more died. The death count rises as I type this.
Hours before the fire took place I was nearby at First Friday, a monthly celebration of the arts when the legitimate food trucks come out and all of the cosmopolite galleries are open late.
I was on Telegraph Avenue and 28th Street enjoying a $8.50 plate of Nepalese food and watching a soul band cover the Rolling Stones.
People from all walks of life were out and about, also enjoying the warm early evening. Many were eating or dancing together, laughing and taking pictures.
It was the America that, in my journey at least, I’ve come to know and believe in.
I awoke this morning to the steady buzzing of my phone.
What, I thought.
I yawned, rolled over and picked it up.
There was an unusually long list of text messages and missed phone calls filling the screen.
One was from a girlfriend who lived nearby. Another was from a close friend in Los Angeles.
The most urgent and persistent of the missives was from my dad, who had heard about the fire from someone in my family — incidentally enough, the person with the loudest voice at the family dinner table. They all wanted to know that I was alive and okay.
Within that circumstance specifically, my core community was in a way made very manifest.
Now, in a few short weeks I’ll travel to Ohio for the holidays to spend time with friends and family.
I know that at times the conversations will turn ugly, and I’m preparing myself for that — those underhanded comments that sting like a swarm bees when my fully formed adult identity, core values or beliefs are under attack.
I don’t want to argue loudly in an effort to be heard. Because that sort of environment, like a fire, has the ability to escalate quickly out of control.
And no, I don’t think that I should lighten up either.
Because we’re not talking about television shows or even sports — we’re talking about serious issues with endless unknowns that affect the lives of millions of people.
There are many people out there who care very deeply and are scared (myself being one of them). It takes a safe and structured container to communicate between those with strong opinions without a major misunderstanding taking place.
Perhaps this container is the kind of intentional design necessary for us to regain our values as a nation. Before someone else defines them for us.
Since Donald Trump began his run for President he never fully defined what it is that Makes America Great. Maybe we can define those terms together, even if we have to walk through hell and back to get there.
Somebody may become angry or irritated by reading this, but I’m not sorry.
Because whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together. And we owe it to ourselves to at least try to hear each other out in a civilized way.
I would do the same for you.
Besides, we’re all just doing the best we can.
This was undoubtedly a different kind of election but there must still be progress.
There must still be hope.