Mary C. Curtis - Now What?: The Voters Have Spoken-Essays on Life After Trump

EDITED BY STEVE KETTMANN

WELLSTONE BOOKS

Copyright 2020 by Wellstone Books

Cover art by Mark Ulriksen

Book Design: Alicia Feltman of Lala Design

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION ISBN:

978-0-9600615-7-0

Wellstone Books is an imprint of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods

858 Amigo Road, Soquel, CA 95073

Distributed by Publishers Group West

SOQUEL, CA

STEVE KETTMANN is the co-founder, with Sarah Ringler, of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods (www.wellstoneredwoods.org)Northern California writers retreat centerand publisher of Wellstone Books. A former staff reporter for New York Newsday and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as Berlin correspondent for Wired.com and columnist for the Berliner Zeitung, he has reported from more than 40 countries for publications including The New York Times, the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, NewYorker.com, Salon.com, GQ and Parade Magazine. He conceived and edited Game Time, a collection of New Yorker baseball writing by Roger Angell; authored One Day at Fenway and Baseball Maverick; and has co-authored more than 12 books, including six New York Times bestsellers. He still hopes to run the Berlin Marathon one more time, all the better to try to keep up with his two young daughters, Coco and Anas.

BY STEVE KETTMANN

I t was one of many times that week when I thought the networks might call the 2020 election for Biden-Harris any minute and I didnt want to miss a thing. Id carried the girls little blonde-wood table and chairs into my work room, computer in the background tuned to election coverage as we sat down to dinner. We dont have a TV. For most of their lives, Coco and Anas had never seen us watching cable news on a computer. October 20 had been the first exception. Coco, six, came in at one point during the first Biden-Trump debate and sat on the sofa next to my computer. She gave the screen a few minutes of blank-faced scrutiny, more confused the longer she watched, then her face collapsed into a scowl. I dont like this! she wailed. Why are they so mad? I lay in bed with her that night for an hour before she had fully calmed down and could sleep. Now, two days after the election, the girls and I were discussing food preference. Or were we?

I hate parsnip! Coco, never halfway on anything, insisted.

Our conversation took a few twists and turns from there. Soon she was asking, What is hate, Daddy?

It was a rhetorical question. Or a philosophical one. Coco knew what the word meant. She wanted to hear me expand on the idea, which I did, giving her a somewhat sanitized answer about hate meaning really not liking something a lot. A light went on in her eyes.

Do you hate Trump? she asked me suddenly.

I stared back at her. Did I hate Donald Trump? I had to give my daughter an honest answer.

No, Coco, I said. I dont hate Trump.

At times, yes, I wondered. I hated, really hated, so much of what he said and did since he came down that escalator at Trump Tower. I once stood near Donald Trump on a short elevator ride at old Yankee Stadium in the late 1990s and saw him then, as I see him now, as a shell of bluster and bluff with sharp enough edges to try to prevent you from looking within to the hollow, pain-filled center. I dont hate the man. But I hate that his con, running for president as a publicity stunt, led to four of the worst years in the history of our country. I hate what his utter cynicism and naked racism did to bring out the worst in so many. I hate how his manipulation, shamelessness and craven bad faith challenged us to be better and do better, and so often, these terrible four years, we collectively came up short. As John Lewis once told me, removing Trump from office will be a down payment on our future, not more. Will Rayman, a 23-year-old who regrets not having voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, writes from Estonia, where hes a professional basketball player: The Biden-Harris victory is a step in the right direction, but in no way is it the end-all-be-all.

I think each of us has to look within and challenge ourselves to do better, be better, if we are truly going to move forward and find ways to connect with other Americans who might disagree on much but can agree on our common humanity. I hope the perspectives that follow can help kick-start that reckoning, a reckoning not only with the depths of depravity and corruption the Trump years unleashed and exposed, but also a reckoning with ourselves.

Leave it to Dave Chappelle, delivering a Saturday Night Live monologue the day the networks finally called it for Biden-Harris, to put the raw truth of the moment into perspective. I would implore everybody whos celebrating today to remember its good to be a humble winner, Chappelle said in closing. Remember when I was here four years ago? Remember how bad that felt? Remember that half the country right now still feels that way. Then Chappelle showed his empathy for those Trump voters, talking about the life expectancy of white people actually declining, for the first time. He talked about heroin and suicide. All these white people out there that feel that anguish, that pain, theyre mad, cause they think nobody cares. And maybe they dont. Let me tell you something. I know how that feels, he continued. But heres the difference between me and you. You guys hate each other for that. And I dont hate anybody. I just hate that feeling.

Among the most important things Joe Biden said during the campaign was to declare early on that he sees himself as a bridge, nothing elsea bridge to a new generation of leaders, a bridge to the future. The words were not the sort of clickbait incitement to light up social media, but they had the ring of truth. Eight months later, we could finally start to live out the reality of those words, with Senator Kamala Harris of Californiamy Senatorpoised to be sworn in soon as vice president, and young people inspired to turn out and vote in record-setting numbers.

On the Friday morning after the election, Coco stirred early and came into my work room, where Id been in the chair since 5 a.m. I had a lot of work to do, reaching out to people about this collection, but I welcomed her into my lap. She was happy, there in the chair with Dad. A few moments later came the news: Biden had moved into a lead against Trump in Pennsylvania. Our long, national nightmare was almost over. I smiled, and Coco smiled with me. It was a moment Ill never forget, and one Ill never stop working to honor, hoping that with imagination and courage and care, we can learn from the many mistakes of recent years and play our part, with Joe, in being a bridge to the future.