About the Biden-Harris Win

Please write down or record as audio or video what you have done, what you have felt and what you have thought over the weekend since Biden and Harris were declared President-elect and Vice President-elect of the USA. This is history. The outpouring of celebration not only in the States but in other countries testifies to the significance of this event.

It will blur in your memory. You will want your notes in later years to help you remember and to help you answer the questions of next generations. Regardless of which side of the political spectrum is yours, you will want your notes. Archivists and historians will want a copy of your notes too if you are willing to share them. (They love such material from all walks of life and are disappointed when they can only get it from people in elite positions or only from one side.)

I am on the side that believes in science, loves diversity and strives for an equitable, compassionate society. For me, the past 40 years have mostly been hard, with a couple of breathers. That is not a typographical error. Forty, not four. The past four have been in a league of their own, but as a young woman I recognized the election of 1980 as a turning point. I considered leaving the USA then. Instead I chose to stay and do what I could to try to save my country. I put all I could into that until my health took a dive.

Eventually all the insurers told me that they were no longer willing to sell me health insurance in the United States at any price. Look at that wording and do what I do. Analyze it. The Affordable Care Act wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eye, so I solved the problem by leaving the United States. I’m a dual citizen now, living an ocean away from my birth country. But that does not make me any less American. It makes me an American with a broader perspective and a deeper sense of what the USA is and can be.

This past Friday I understood how the math was going to turn out. For the first time in ages I went through the day wearing a smile. On Saturday the Presidential race was called half an hour into a Zoom session with most of the inner layer of family back in the States. A commotion started on Denver streets below my brother’s condo. He lives close to where this year’s demonstrations have focused, so at first it wasn’t clear what the commotion meant. A quick check of the news told us. It was a wonderful way to find out. We spent the next hour happily talking about it.

The GOP will shout, flail, try to stir an uprising, obstruct the transition of power… and they will fail. We could recount in every jurisdiction and that is what the numbers would still say. They could become squatters in the White House and that would not keep the Presidency in their hands. The loser is not required to concede. The incoming President is not required to take the oath at any specific location and does not have to be in the Oval Office to govern.

I won’t try to speak for my kin, but for me, this Biden-Harris win means the concept of America is not dead. We have a chance to not only repair the damage, but improve the nation. We can make it a More Perfect Union. It won’t ever be complete. It is too audacious an experiment to ever be complete. At best, it will always be a work in progress. But that’s how it is meant to be. And the important thing now, for me, is that it has not been completely destroyed. It is alive and my heart is full.