At about 4:30pm on Election Day, I heard muffled screams coming from nearby my house and realized my 80-something neighbor had fallen on the street.
The first one to respond was my neighbor on the other side, a youngish man who lifted up the fallen woman and helped me walk her into her house. It finally took five neighbors, and my girlfriend from down the road, to cleanse her wound, call the advice nurse at Kaiser, drive her to the ER, stay with her through the ordeal, and bring my neighbor and myself back home.
And by the time we got home, we knew things were going against Vice President Kamala Harris. Then the news streaming on my computer told us Donald Trump had won.
“How could this happen?” my girlfriend asked. The only thing that made sense to me is that Trump is a renegade of sorts, and those who voted for him are would-be rebels looking for a cause.
First thing when I awoke the day after, I texted my daughter, “It’s hard to watch everything we have fought for go down the drain.”
You all know what I mean—racial equality, gender equality, a woman’s right to choose, the right to love and even marry someone regardless of race or gender, a nuclear-free future, a healthy planet, affordable housing, universal healthcare, a living wage—the list goes on and on.
“Sexism and racism,” my dear friend Mary Moore said when I called her. That was her explanation.
“Yes,” I thought, we live in a country born in ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The concept of a country being “great” sounds like something kids might say on a grade school playground. Countries are not great or anything else. They are geographic locations. What might be great are the people in a country, or a city, or a neighborhood.
Which brings me back to my neighbors who responded to one of us in distress, without a second thought. This is what we still have left, our ability to be here for each other, through the bad and the good.
Lois Pearlman is a contributor to the ‘North Bay Bohemian’ and other area publications.
