How America Got Its Mind Back

So, Roy Moore lost the special Alabama Senate race.  A creepy old man whose public image flaunts so many of the characteristics a lot of Alabamans love (a love of guns, racism and bigotry, pseudo-Christianity, ignorance as a virtue) was decisively beaten by Democrat Doug Jones.  That's a pretty big deal, since Alabama is part of the deep red South, a state where "Democrat" is a 4-letter word in many rural and smaller urban areas.  It's a big deal since Alabama is casually open when it comes to implementing voter suppression measures specifically targeting POC, and those POC still turned out in droves to cast ballots for Doug Jones.  That's what democracy looks like.  Also, huge "thank you" to all those POC for pulling this off - the Jones victory wouldn't have been possible without them.

Add tonight's election outcome to the results of the November 7 elections, and it's clear there's a trend emerging.  There were several elections that day, so here are a few of the important ones.  Ralph Northam defeated Ed Gillespie in the Virginia gubernatorial race.  Also in Virginia, Danica Roem became the first transgender candidate to serve in the VA legislature.  Maine residents passed a Medicaid expansion initiative.  St. Paul, MN, elected its first black mayor (Melvin Carter) and Seattle elected its first lesbian mayor (Jenny Durkan).  In many ways, the November 7 elections were a repudiation of Trump's first year in office.

A lot seems to have changed in a year.  In November of 2016, American citizens let their guards down, got complacent, bored, and disinterested, and let a raving racist moron sneak into the White House.  That was our dead serious, "Oh shit, we need to reexamine our lives" moment, and we've had a lot of time to clean up and ditch the destructive behaviors in the year and change since.  The results of November's and tonight's elections tells me that America might have learned a thing or two.

There's still a lot of work to be done, though. First, not electing a racist and accused pedophile isn't a high bar to clear for democracy - there shouldn't have ever been any doubt that a candidate with that baggage would lose.   So, we all need to keep taking that hard look in the mirror.  Second, the institutional corruption still runs deep throughout our government, at all levels.  Trump just brought it to our attention because he was so brazen and clumsy about it - like when a nagging ache becomes so excruciating that you can't put off seeing a doctor any longer.  Let's not pretend that replacing Republicans with Democrats solves some of the most pressing problems, like military interventionism or unsustainable spending; but putting the Democrats back in power is a repudiation of what Trump and the modern GOP stand for - which are some of the worst parts of human nature: intolerance, greed, cruelty and selfishness.

America's realized it has a problem, and has taken the first baby steps to correct it.