I Can't Change Your Mind
It’s Election Day.
Oh, holy hell. I’ve been panicking over those words for months.
In the last blog I wrote as part of the introverted leadership series, I said an “average Tuesday now feels like the whole fucking world is cartwheeling over a waterfall of jagged glass and rubbing alcohol, inside a flaming dumpster filled with syphilitic rats.”
The problem is, while it can feel like that, it's not actually true.
I’ll admit that after the loss of heroes like John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and amidst the pandemic and protests, I punched the gas pedal and left Election Anxiety in the dust only to collide head-on with Election Existential Dread. I was splayed out over some dark metaphorical pavement when I wrote those words.
I can’t change your mind about who to vote for. If there was ever a time you were on the fence, it’s long gone. But I can offer some hope if, like me, you’ve been wondering whether it's all a lost cause. Hint: it's not.
One thing that I’ve learned to love about my brain is this little spark in there that never lets me stay in the dark for too long. It finds the silver linings or things I’m overlooking and forces me to see them. It reminds me to look at the facts, not the feelings. Thankfully, that spark got a little added kerosene courtesy of Steven Pinker yesterday.
Pinker is one of my favorite modern minds. He’s a thinker, that Pinker! I go full-nerd when reading or listening to him and morph into a cartoon with hearts for eyeballs over his veneration of reason in service of humanity. Feeling dread on Election Eve, I went for a long walk and listened to an interview with Pinker on a recent episode of Hidden Brain. It reminded me of how easy it is in the era of doomscrolling to forget about the good stuff.
We hear about the bad because a tragedy can happen in an instant—and we live instantaneous lives. Most often, the good happens over time. It’s all too easy to ignore the infinite when we’re focused on the immediate. Yet, despite all the apparent evidence to the contrary, the world is getting better.
Don’t believe me?
During the interview, there’s a reference to a speech wherein President Obama said: "If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be—what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into—you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now.”
That’s not a rainbows and unicorns statement, and seeing the truth of it doesn’t minimize the pain that still exists. It gives us the energy to make it better.
Mask up and go vote today—if you haven’t already. Then, listen to the podcast. (You don’t have to live in the U.S. to benefit from the podcast’s message. So if that’s you, I recommend listening too.) Let it remind you of what you already know. We’re not doomed and we’re not powerless. Not when we use our voices where it matters. Like at the ballot box.
We become powerless only when we give in to fatalism. When we let doomscrolling skew the truth of the world. When we believe it’s all for naught and become complacent in our inertia.
No matter the result of today’s election, we still have a lot of work to do. When we see how often we’ve succeeded in the past, it’s easier to find the courage to do it.
Sometimes we just need a spark.