"The Guardian, CNN's Van Jones brought to tears as Joe Biden wins US election"
Mark Sumner, "America is celebrating like a cloud has left the skies and a weight is off our hearts":
Right now, a pandemic is raging. Right now, the economy is in recession. Right now, the nation is suffering from four years in which Donald Trump did everything possible to rewind decades of progress and tear at the foundations of democracy.
But right now. Right now. All of that has to be set aside. Right now, it is time to shout. To cry in joy and in relief. To jump. To dance. To celebrate.
And then Mark Sumner follows those sentences with a wonderful array of video clips from various places, which folks shared today on Twitter, showing the celebrations, horns honking, people dancing in the street, shouting in jubilation. You may want to click and see some of those: they lift the spirits.
Here's my on-the-ground account from our neighborhood, where even now as I type this when night is falling, I'm hearing fireworks and people shouting happily:
Steve has just come upstairs from his continuing work on our new garden room, and I told him Biden had won.
He said, "Well, I wondered why I heard a big scream from some house not far from us — someone shouting at the top of her lungs in jubliation."
We’re setting off right now on our walk. When we stepped out of our house, our neighbors across the street were shooting off fireworks. When they saw us, they said, “This batch is for you two! A man walking by at the same time whom we don’t know stopped to say, “It’s like a weight has been lifted off our shoulders!” Then we got to the top of the hill to see that one of the neighbors up the street that had a Trump-Pence sign has already yanked it out of their yard.
As we reach the park, horns honking wildly and people shouting excitedly down the hill on the big four-land street running therel. Sounds like they’re shouting, Biden has won! We just passed a couple, a man and woman, smiling and dressed in bright blue. His shirt said across the front, Hanukkah.
And, in order to provide context to the happiness and celebration in our neighborhood today, I should perhaps share the following account that I wrote yesterday and posted on social media — an on-the-ground report from two different spots in the country, illustrating the complex crazy quilt of American culture and the somber and even pernicious political effects of a certain kind of religion in many parts of the country:
1. The precinct in which Steve and I live and vote in Little Rock voted just a hair short of 80% for Biden and a hair short of 20% for that other man.
2. Our county, Pulaski County, voted some 60% for Biden and 28% for that other man.
3. Arkansas as a whole voted — predictably — 62.6% for the loser. We love to be on the losing side of history's moral arc.
4. The county in which Steve grew up in northwest Minnesota, Red Lake County, long considered an island of German and French Catholics in a sea of Scandinavian Lutherans in surrounding counties, voted 66% for the loser and 33% for Biden. So Steve's brother tells us.
5. That county historically supported the Democratic Farmer-Labor party, but has been moving inexorably right-wing Republican for some time now, and we've seen the effects of that shift in Steve's siblings, most of whom are rabidly right-wing Catholics (and members of the schismatic SPPX movement). They will not speak to us, they send cards to Steve informing him he's a sinner headed to hell — and when Steve's brother visited them after the 2016 election, they informed him that he's going to hell for having voted for Hillary Clinton, a monstrous babykiller unlike their man, who is as pro-life as they come.
6. That same county has been hard hit by Covid, despite the belief of many people in the county that Covid would not reach fine, upstanding, Christian, white farm people like them. So, as they walk through a hard hit from an uncontrolled pandemic, they decided to say to their pro-life leader, "Please, sir, four more years of this."
7. The state of Minnesota voted 52.6% for Biden and 45.4% for the loser.
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