Uncertainty

This morning I walked up the street to my polling location, as I’ve done on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November for the past 20 years. Election Day. Never before have I felt quite so jittery on that short walk. Nor so grateful for the familiarity of the faces of the poll workers at those long tables, half-hidden this year behind masks.

As I’m writing this, we don’t know who our next president will be. 

It’s possible that, when you’re reading this, we still won’t know. But whether we do or not, it’s safe to say the anxiety of the last months will still be with us.

The uncertainty I feel today seems like one thread in a vast fabric of confusion and uneasiness we’ve been living with for a long time. The pandemic has taken many lives and upended countless others. It has stripped us of most of our familiar joys and consolations, from family gatherings to evenings at the movies to attending funerals.

Of course, even in the best of times, we can’t know what’s going to happen. Catastrophe may strike any minute. Nevertheless, 2020 has felt more dire than any year in my half-century of memory. In the last week alone, we’ve been buffeted by a flurry of blows: the rising tide of COVID-19 in Delaware County, the confusing litigation about vote counting in the commonwealth, and the killing of Walter Wallace Jr. when his family called for an ambulance but the Philadelphia police got there first.

The stakes of this election feel immense. Whatever the outcome, many people will doubtless be furious and despairing. And COVID-19 will continue to stalk us. And Black men and women will continue to be killed in disproportionate numbers by the pandemic and the police alike. 

Whatever deliverance we’re waiting for, we’re unlikely to find it in the election results. It will take a tremendous amount of work to unravel the patterns of animosity and fear surrounding us. To begin to reweave the fabric of our lives. 

I’m getting ready to do that work.

Rachel Pastan
Editor