The Trauma of the 2020 Election Will Stay With Us

Let us make sure we take the right lessons from it

Photo by Lucy Chian on Unsplash

I spent Election Day braced for violence.

I had dropped off my ballot weeks earlier, so my girlfriend and I sat at our home offices, trying to work while scanning the news for signs of unrest near a polling station.

I was a mere spectator, with no power or qualifications to do more than wait. For maybe the hundredth time these past four years, I questioned my choice of career, having chosen a job so lacking in influence in the real world, an engineer instead of a lawyer or activist.

I let my tense torso muscles relax when the polls closed. “No one got shot,” I said to my girlfriend, and we exchanged tight smiles.

I opened the Washington Post, New York Times and FiveThirtyEight in three tabs on my work laptop, which was raised by several books with the keyboard tucked into a desk drawer to jerry-rig a semblance of ergonomics.

There’s not likely to be a winner tonight, I told myself. I dragged my code window over the browser to hide the news sites from view.

The worst is possible

I’d read all the articles warning of a ‘red mirage’ and urging everyone to wait for the final election results.