One year from today will be my fortieth birthday but nobody will care because one year from today is also the 2020 Presidential election.
I’m thinking about going to Ireland that week. No man should have to ponder his own life’s meaning with Chris Matthews yammering in the background.
I always get contemplative around my birthday, especially the milestone ones. When they coincide with an election, I usually have lots of company.
Election contemplations, however, are hypersensitive and full of we-changed-the-world bravado or doomsday proclamations.
People buy into the rhetoric and believe outrageous claims like we’ve either leaped forward into a post-racial society or lurched backward to embrace the crassest impulses of our predecessors.
If you’re not careful, this will screw you up. The example I think of most happened fifteen years ago when I saw an election break a person.
It was my twenty-fourth birthday and the morning after George W. Bush’s re-election. A crying woman came into the common area of the office I shared with some staffers for the Kerry/Edwards campaign to let them know that her partner, who was a hardcore volunteer with their campaign, was despondent and placed on a suicide watch.
A few days later, her partner came into the office for closure; it was abundantly clear that she wasn’t well. She was trembling and gaunt; her face was contorted into the clearest expression of grief I’ve ever seen.
If she were an actress the director would’ve said to tone it down. But nothing about her felt staged: sorrow emanated from her pores.
I think about her often. I don’t know her name or occupation. I just know that she was a lesbian activist from Vermont who drove into New Hampshire every day to volunteer against George W. Bush because she believed that everything she valued would be lost forever if he was re-elected.
She traveled to New Hampshire because it was a swing state and she wanted her efforts to make a difference. And they did! But it turns out she was needed more in Florida or Ohio.
I hope she didn’t end up killing herself because a lot of the things she was working for were so much closer than she ever could’ve imagined.
I hope she experienced the excitement, just four years later, of seeing the first African American elected President. And I hope one year after that she celebrated when her state finally recognized her right to marry the partner who (presumably) helped her through that darkness.
If her shadow ever lifted, I hope it left behind the added perspective necessary to separate the personal from the political. As someone who spent fifteen years working in politics, I know it isn’t easy.
On the morning of my thirtieth birthday, I woke up to every media outlet in the state declaring me a loser. Every few minutes it scrolled across the bottom of my TV. It was listed in the newspaper right next to my hometown’s name along with the State Representative position I had sought: Chris Gaffney, loser.
It sucked, but I spent a long weekend in the mountains with my girlfriend then dusted myself off and moved on. This really stung because three months later I moved across the country for unrelated reasons (remember that girlfriend from the last sentence?) and narrowly missed a great chance for an epic Irish goodbye.
A lot of good people will face similar upsets this week in local elections. My town has an exciting race for Mayor pitting an energetic up-and-comer against an entrenched incumbent who has spent decades devoting himself to this town.
Their teams are putting their all into it, both for the sake of improving my town. I hope all of them will land gently no matter no how it plays out.
On Wednesday, those results will seem life-defining. But they aren’t. They’re just milestones that we need to pass through in order to keep on going. Like a fortieth birthday that nobody else cares about.
Elections have consequences, don’t be one of them.
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