A Few Things

Hello, Friends. What a week! How are you holding up? Did anyone get enough sleep the last few days? As I write this, we still don’t have an official winner for the presidential election — though I’m confident, based on where the numbers are right now, it will be Biden. I look forward to celebrating and analyzing once the call has officially been made.

Something I’ve found really helpful this week: I’ve stopped looking at maps that fill in an entire state with either blue or red. They give such an inaccurate representation of what is actually happening in our country. Land doesn’t vote; people do.

Here’s another helpful map:

In many states it’s way harder to vote than it should be. In fact, voting should be super easy throughout the country. Anytime someone is working to make it harder to vote, assume they are up to no good.

Ready for your link list? Here are a few things I’ve wanted to share with you:

-A long and really good essay on tolerance, being offensive, justice, and civility. “In a just society, civility would always be preferable. In fact, civility would be a natural result of a society based on justice. It would not need to be called for; it would simply be. But impoliteness is not injustice. And justice will offend the unjust. Let it.”

-Scientists have identified time cells in the human brain that place a sort of time stamp on memories as they form. That allows us to recall sequences of events or life experiences in the right order — much like a movie.

-Woah. This seems extremely targeted. The USPS “processed 94.5 % of ballots on time [the expected rate is 97%],” but in the “9 postal districts spanning 5 states — AZ, NV, PA, NC & GA — that have yet to decide the presidential race, the on-time rate was 84.6 %.”

Old Japanese firework catalogs.

From Roxane Gay: “And then there are the other Trump supporters, the ones who are ashamed. The ones who want to seem urbane. The ones who want to be invited to all the good parties. They lie to pollsters. They lie to family and friends. And when they fill out their ballots, they finally tell the truth.”

The Little Editors is a lovely online gallery of kids drawings from around the world.

Craving Brussels Sprouts.

-ICE Attempts to Deport Multiple Witnesses in Gynecologic Surgery Scandal.

-I loved and appreciated this essay about growing up conservative and seeing what happened to a lot of women I loved.

The Navajo vote was key in turning Arizona blue. (The Latino vote too — see link below in the tweet section.)

-Want to thank Stacey Abrams? Let’s buy her book, Our Time Is Now.

Here are some tweets I saved for you:

-If you are discouraged, read this thread (7 tweets).

A quick reminder.

https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1324379444916690945?s=20

-Wow! Check out this thread (30 tweets) on how ancient geology affects our elections.

-I learned a lot from the responses to this tweet. Some of the terms were familiar to me, but others I hadn’t considered. Click here to see the responses.

https://twitter.com/BlairImani/status/1324571108448718850?s=20

-Please read this thread (10 tweets) written by a non-partisan poll challenger in Detroit.

-There’s a lot being written about how the “Latino vote” is not a monolith. In Arizona, Mexican Americans are a key part of the blue surge.

-Related, we know white Americans continue to choose racism and Trump. If you’re curious why some Latinx voters also chose Trump, here’s a thread (19 tweets) with thoughts on why some Cuban-Americans may support him.

-Thinking of our sisters in Poland this week.

-I’m trying hard to ignore exit poll numbers. They are bound to be way off this year, when so much voting was done by mail weeks ago. But I will be very curious to see accurate data in a few weeks/months when it’s available.

-I can’t stop thinking about this very positive thread (18 tweets) about what it means to get out there and work on local elections.

-I am worn out of calls for civility.

-This blew my mind! Sharks are older than Saturn’s rings.

I hope you have a good weekend. I’ll meet you back here on Monday. I miss you already.

kisses,
Gabrielle

9 thoughts on “A Few Things”

  1. Yes, the Latino vote is not a monolith. However, I wish we would stop talking about how *some* Latinos voted for 45 and instead how the Latinx community helped deliver Arizona and Nevada.
    How about the tens of millions of white people who chose to embrace white supremacy – AGAIN? The white vote failed Democracy.
    Also, I never wanted to read about a sympathetic Tr*mp voter again. I want to read about the Black and brown people who spent the last four years organizing and turning this out.
    xx
    a Latinx voter

  2. Phew!! Today, I am relieved and celebrating! I am grateful and glad. I know there are many, many problems still and scary things ahead, but I am giving myself the day to enjoy this moment. Goodbye to that loathsome man! Goodbye, Bill Barr! Goodbye Betsy DeVos!! Phew, what a relief!

    Blasting my happy playlist and dancing his one out!

  3. To be honest, today is the worst I have felt all week. I was sure that once Republicans realized that Trump had lost, they would be reasonable. But clearly I was naive. The idea that they are continuing to put Trump ahead of country (Cruz and Graham on Hannity last night, other Republican leaders tweeting their support for him and their completely baseless claims of widespread voter fraud), and that over 70 million people voted for Trump-I actually feel sick.

  4. I wish I could paste an image in my comment because I have really liked USA Today’s graphics related to the election. On the front page on November 5, they had a Tetris-like depiction showing each state as a bar of the correct size based on electoral votes, showing Trump and Biden each with a box that holds 270 units, with the six remaining states as gray bars at the top. They did something similar here.

  5. thanks so much for the tweet on Poland. With the elections here this week, I haven’t kept up with that story and so glad to see that women are rebelling. I am going to look it up in the news now.

  6. From the Slate article: “The protection the men offered was theoretical, but the sacrifices the women made … were real.” This felt like a punch to the gut.

  7. Thank you for the great links per usual. I always learn something from them! I appreciated the thread on “euphemisms for white people” and also about what a landslide this election actually is — it felt like a defeat at first because so many truly awful senators stayed in.
    Up waiting for more states to be called for Biden. It’s like the networks are afraid of Trump’s reaction-? It will be SO WONDERFUL not to have a president who always, instinctively, takes the low road.

  8. There are a lot of important points in this post – but for anyone who wants to support Stacy Abrams by buying her books, don’t forget that she is also a romance writer who writes under the pseudonym Selina Montgomery

  9. Feeling immense relief and gratitude today! I know there is still _much_ work to do to make the US a country of “liberty and justice for all.” But, today it feels much more possible than it has in the past four years! Today and tomorrow we can enjoy the victory and then we can get back to work!❤️

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