We Are Being Called to do Better

In the wake of the 2024 elections comes an inevitable reckoning for each of us

Danilo Vargas

07 Nov 2024 — 4 min read

I don’t usually suffer from writers block but because of my own personal story and convictions, the results of the 2024 elections have left me unbearably heavy and at a loss for what to say to you today.

I thought about saying nothing. Just swallowing my emotions and pretending like it’s business as usual; to recoil from the world of politics, as is my nature, and stick to what I know—marketing, sales, and small business development.

Sensing the threat at hand, however, I also thought about offering you some cold comfort, or gritty resolve in the style of Winston Churchill:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Or to reference the supposed battle ahead:

we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender

I also thought I might sprinkle in some fluffy reassurances or simple blind faith and tell you that everything is just fine and dandy; that everything will be A-okay.

Unfortunately, none of those facile responses rang true for me. This moment in our history is more complicated than any of that suggests.

That’s not to say, of course, that this is not a moment of imminent danger for all Americans, regardless of vocation, station, or creed. Beyond the perilous distrust we have in our public institutions, and the continued relentless erosion of that trust, we as a people are perhaps as polarized and distrustful of each other as we’ve ever been. What’s worse, both sides of the gaping political divide feel existentially threatened and are actively bracing for the eventuality (some say inevitability) of deadly physical violence, which, by the way, is not a figment of the collective imagination (recall the civil unrest in the streets of major cities, including Miami, during peak COVID-19).

And so it was that yesterday, half of all Americans who voted woke up jubilant and vindicated, while the other half woke up to an America they no longer thought they recognized.

But before we go flying off the handle arguing that either side has any sort of mandate, it bears keeping in mind that about 44 million registered voters did not participate in the presidential election, some (though not all) because they were hesitant to support either presidential candidate. It’s also worth noting that a further 77 million Americans of voting age weren’t eligible to vote. These numbers suggest that we should reject the current us vs them framing of our ideological dilemma. The political zeitgeist is more complex and multi-faceted. It defies simple, facile explications or responses.

That’s why we need to dispel the notion, once and for all, that this is potentially about Good vs Bad Americans. There are no enemies within, my friend, only your fellow neighbors. We may indeed have massive differences in political opinion but the things that divide us are microscopic compared to the things that unite us. We would do well to remember that and grant each other some grace.

But what if we don’t?

What if we foolishly choose go down this path of division, cruelty, mutual disparagement and even violence against one another?

In case you’re pondering that, let me save you some trouble by telling you that it ends in needless horrors.

I have suffered through this firsthand as a child growing up in Nicaragua during the early stages of that country’s savage civil war. That was a war which wiped out a whole generation of Nicaraguan men, my Dad among them. But in a surreal turn of fortunes several decades later, more than a few of my Dad’s war buddies, some of whom were grievously wounded during their counter-revolutionary campaign in the early 80s, frequently return to their homeland to vacation in a country led by the same person who decades earlier had tried to kill them. Though initially shocking to me, their behavior is altogether understandable. They had to forget to forgive. It was the only way for them to become wholly human again.

But what was the point of all that bloodletting and suffering? What was the justification for it?

For a fuller illustration of the horrors to which I am referring, and further evidence that there is no valid justification for violence, I beg you to read Clint Smith’s article in The Atlantic titled, How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family: Thirty Years After the Genocide in Rwanda, Survivors and Perpetrators Live Side by Side.

It will break your heart and make you shudder. But hopefully, it will also help you see the futility and downright stupidity of violence and of taking up arms against your neighbors (your very brothers and sisters).

The powerful, though extremely painful lesson I learned early on in life is that fighting is not the answer in the vast majority of cases and that I should instead stand up for what I believe, which is this: that the highest, most sublime form of patriotism is dedicating one’s life to serving my fellow Americans, not in disparaging or attacking them on any level; and that what’s good for my neighbor is also good for me because we are bound in this human odyssey to each other.

Though I understand the anger and the burning urge to make things right, or the overwhelming temptation to just say f*** it and disengage completely, the real way to make things better is to start by looking inward and working to heal the hurts within us, before we start pointing fingers (or guns) at each other. If our daily exchanges, our work, our activism, our organizations, and our movements are built upon foundations of unresolved pain and fears, and not on love, and compassion, and empathy, then we're destined to darken our future and limit the greatness that is possible for us and generations to come.

We can't allow that to happen.

To that end, I leave you with a checklist proposed by Prentis Hemphill whose book we are reading in my book club. I consider this my task list for the next four years and beyond.

So, regardless of who you voted for...

May you be: