Scarf weather update: the gray wool one with the frayed corner, because Wednesday morning felt like a morning that had stayed up too late.
I’m so glad it’s over. I mean that with both hands wrapped around my mug. The yard signs are coming down, the ads have stopped, and my phone quit asking me for three dollars before midnight. Give it a month and we’ll be back to complaining about the weather, which is how a town ought to sound.
But I made the mistake of reading the news. Just a little, and with a cinnamon roll, as a safety measure.
Since the third, the headlines have read like a guest book. Tennessee elected its first woman governor. Florida elected its first Black governor. Michigan sent the first Muslim senator to Washington. New Mexico picked the first Native American woman to be a governor in this country, and Minnesota sent the first Native American woman to the Senate. Georgia elected a Black woman as governor, which no state had done before. A young woman from Colorado is headed to Congress as its first Gen Z congresswoman. Then Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Texas, South Carolina. I’d scroll past one and find another waiting underneath, like nesting dolls when you keep thinking you’ve reached the little one.
I didn’t count them. Somebody with a spreadsheet will. But it felt like half the offices on the ballot this year, the thousand or so of them, went to someone whose kind of person hadn’t held that job before. In a country two hundred and fifty years old. That’s a long time to keep one chair warm for one kind of person.
The firsts came from both parties, too, and from voters in red states and blue ones. Somewhere between the coffee and the roll it stopped feeling like a scoreboard and started feeling like a family photo with more people in it.
Thinking about it, it’s been like this since Obama was elected. Something opened up that year. The country took a breath of new air, and things that had seemed impossible turned into plain old Tuesdays.
There have been a couple of pieces here on the site about the singularity, the idea that we’re reaching the point where the machines get so smart the future can’t be predicted anymore. They make their case on technical grounds: chips, code, charts that go straight up. I’m not the one to argue with the charts.
I just see it happening somewhere else. I see it in people starting to look each other in the eye. In holding up one empty hand, the old way of saying I’m not carrying anything, I’m here as a person. In letting someone new sit in the chair and finding out the chair holds.
We aren’t repeating ourselves this time. Humanity is maturing.
I finished my coffee. It was still gray outside. A month from now we’ll be grumbling about the sleet together, and that’s how you’ll know it’s working.
Small joys are big deals. Some of them get sworn in.
