[Oe List ...] Hooray!

[David Dunn]

Greetings colleagues.


It’s too soon and a bit uncouth to shoot “Hooray!” I can report a great sigh of relief followed, however, by a deeply anxiety “Oh S**t, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”


Two thoughts:


1. I believe, on good evidence, that it is a statement of fact that, as of last night, of the 146,361,058 ballots counted, 50.5% were for V. P. Biden and 47.7% were for Pres. Trump. When we say President-elect Joe Biden, that’s really shorthand for the more exact phrases like Joe Biden is the "projected President elect" or the "putative President elect”?


2. But to be honest, no matter the turn of phrase, it seems probable that Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20.

I base that faith statement on an experience of fact, namely, that my colleague at Church of the Holy Family, Gayle C., who was an election judge this year, is a no BS but good-willed and conscientious guardian of free and fair elections. Gayle is the kind of woman, much like you, Susan, that some might call a force of nature. It’s a compliment: people who are forces of nature are the ones who get things done.

Gaye has checked in with me regularly to report on how things are going in Aurora where she is the Democrat on the Republican-Democrat team that verifies signatures on ballots against the official electoral signature books. She was also asked this year to be an adjudicator on a bipartisan team of election judges that look at ambiguously marked ballots and discern the intention of the voter when the markings are not clear. One by one, Gayle and her Republican partner examine the unclear ballots with the aim of forming a consensus about who that voter was voting for. As Gayle describes it, such adjudication, though routine, is universally understood to be a sacred trust and high honor to be entrusted with the adjudicator role at the most grassroots level of our electoral process: the precinct. Gayle and her Republican teammates do not mess around. They work long hours, day after day, to be sure that they can vouch for the integrity of the ballot process in their precinct. No one messes with Gayle.

I can easily believe, with full trust, that the vast majority of election workers across America are, in their own personal ways, like Gayle. Scrupulous. That’s why it seems to me that our president’s court challenges are the sideshow of a desperate man who is psychically unable to own the fact of loss. 

I wish I could recall who said yesterday that we really just need to relax and let the legal process play out in full expectation that the judges in the courts will be similarly, as we would expect, scrupulous in their devotion to fact and law.


That was rather long winded, but it boils down to this. Now I, personally, feel the weight of this challenge: to support spirit journeys that allow people to embrace both gain and loss as facts of life like birth and death, not linguistic inventions like victory and defeat.

It is so painfully obvious that our president, a manifestly broken man from a widely noted broken family, has not gone on the spirit journey that allows him to embrace what is real. His universe cracked when he was a child and he has not been able to rise above that childhood death.

Court challenges do not change the fact that our president has lost this election, denies this limit in his life, and inflicts that denial on our democracy. 

Individual sin has become social sabotage, which boomerangs back as self-sabotage of a political campaign.


David



> On Nov 8, 2020, at 10:43 AM, Susan Fertig via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
> 
> The world is not a monolith. 50% of the people did not vote for Joe Biden. I am in that 50%.
> He is not yet President-elect. There is still court challenges going on.

—



"Mystery, possibility, and the power to choose"

David Dunn
740 S Alton Way 9B
Denver, CO 80247
720-314-5991
dmdunn1 at gmail.com



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