A Really Long Walk Home

The bikepath on the way to the vote. Peaceful and free.

At 11am yesterday, I decided it was time to vote. The polling place is less than a mile from my home, and I thought it might be a good idea to walk it. The day was warm, as pretty much the entire fall has been warm. My fitbit said I'd been pathetic lately with the steps. Most of the leaves were down, and it was colorful and beautiful outside. I took some snapshots. "This is what my America looks like today." Regardless of who would win this thing -- and I had severe doubts -- this place, at this time, seemed a good place to be and good time to be here.

I walked around the corner, and up the next street. It started to rain, just a little rain. I didn't have an umbrella, and I was too far to come back home, so I kept going. I thought of walking songs, and the first one that came to mind was "This Land is Your Land." One of the most openly -- and great -- political songs of the last century, and I thought of that 5th verse, one that was cut out of the original recordings and discovered only in the 1990's:

There was a big high wall there

That tried to stop me

The sign was painted

It said "Private Property"

But on the back side

It didn't say nothin'

This land was made for you and me

I looked around, and noticed I didn't really see any signs at all. Typically when the elections roll around, there are lots of signs. I live in a reasonably diverse neighborhood: politically, nationally, religiously, racially. For the township primaries a few months ago, there were signs all over the place. And that was just for township clerk and treasurer. Yesterday, the 3 little signs that Lori put up at the corner of our lot seemed... lonely. There was just nothing to see. No Clinton signs. No Trump signs. Whatever excitement there might have been about this election, it had bypassed my little part of West Bloomfield.

I made it to the bike trail leading to the primary school hosting the 7th precinct. A neighbor was walking his dog. He was going to vote, too... but first he had to walk the dog. The walk was quiet, and free, and peaceful. The bike trail passed over a little branch of the Rouge River just before I reached the school; the same branch that passes under my house. We've had rain lately, so the river was a bit swelled.

Ever since Brexit I felt that Donald Trump was likely to win the election. There were too many single-issue (or nearly single-issue) voters: The voters who would vote Pro-Life. The voters who would vote Gun Rights. The voters who would vote Supreme Court (often in support of Pro-Life or Gun Rights or "Religious Rights"). Too many disaffected, who wanted to hear that magic word: "change." They were going to vote for him so long as he seemed to speak for them, even if he was personally a scoundrel or worse, even if he lost every debate. Then there were the scary ones, the ones who spoke in dog whistles, of dark things to come for immigrants and minorities and people like me. Running against this, we had a lifer establishment candidate who excited... nobody, it seemed, running with a Vice Presidential candidate who somehow excited even few people than her.

The campaign was ugly and stupid. Instead of issues, we got a diet of hacked emails and leaked videos, fake investigations and unreleased tax returns. Some people I knew were totally passionate in their positions; probably more just tuned the whole thing out. To them, one candidate was simply "corrupt," facts be damned, and that was the end of the story. Along the way, I'd lost a bunch of facebook friends. The further they tilted to the right, the more likely they were to slip away from me... or for me just to unfollow them. Some people I thought I knew revealed themselves to be racists or conspiracy theorists; others just didn't want to read about the election on social media. Oddly, I didn't lose any left-leaning friends.

The school was busy but orderly. The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes. There were no poll watchers. I'd read the League of Women Voters guide to the candidates. One Republican candidate for Township Supervisor started off his "top priorities" by writing, "The voices of the people were being ignored or overturned by the courts or shut out by minority special interest groups." He wasn't getting my vote anyway, but to see someone in town leading off with such openly paranoid racism was disturbing enough.

Where do we go from here? Where is there to be?
Trump will likely be a disaster for the environment, for international relations, for civil rights, for the economy, and more. There is talk that he might put Sarah Palin in his cabinet, and there is just no suitable joke to respond to that. I always felt that a Clinton election might only have delayed the sort of hostile takeover that began last night, but I wanted that delay.

Bruce Springsteen performed at Hillary Clinton's campaign event in Philadelphia the night before the election. He performed "Long Walk Home." On the surface, it may seem a song of healing: "everybody has a neighbor, everybody has a friend, Everybody has a reason to begin again." He introduced it as "a prayer for post-election."


But when Bruce first performed that song, almost exactly 10 years ago tonight, it had one extra final verse:

Now the water's rising 'round the corner, 

there's a fire burning out of control 

There's a hurricane on Main Street 

and I've got murder in my soul 

Yeah well when the party's over, 

when the cheering is all gone 

Will you know me, will I know you, 

will I know you

We might need to re-learn that one.