The Titanic. That’s how a colleague described the election tonight. Hillary Clinton, we believed, was an unsinkable campaign. Perfect? No. But undeniably ready, steadfast and ambitious. What we didn’t realize from where we stood: there were a whole bunch of people in the engine room, rooting for the iceberg.
So, we’ve hit the ice. The nightmare has come true. And, like any once-in-a-century, slow motion catastrophe, we have time—a punishing amount of time—to weigh our collective options.
My first instinct, like many of us who didn’t see this coming, is to jump. All those jokes about fleeing to Canada—suddenly, a very real scramble for that absurd lifejacket. So much so, it appears we crashed the Canadian immigration website. Because we thought we understood the country we were living in. We believed it was a country that was increasingly defined by a commitment to social progress and shared prosperity. We believed that because of the undeniable progress we have witnessed in the past eight years. We thought we were the winning majority.
We were wrong.
This election has laid bare how broken our country really is. Nearly half of the Americans who voted have backed a man who has repeatedly and shamelessly denigrated women, demonized immigrants and minorities, rejected science, and urged us to turn our backs on the rest of the world. We put the smart, qualified woman up against the ignorant, unqualified man. The man won.
So why didn’t we see the iceberg? Maybe we’ve been seeing only the best of ourselves — emphasizing the positives in an effort to wither away the negatives. We’ve been in a warm bath of optimism. This election is cold reality. We now have two choices: give up and flee, or get angry and fight.
Ten years ago, at the height of the Bush era, we embarked on this mission with a single rallying call: America – Love It or Fix It. We committed ourselves to the Fix, and launched GOOD in order to celebrate and elevate an emerging movement of people who shared that commitment. We will dedicate ourselves once again to that mission, but with a fire and focus like never before. Because we aren’t going down with this ship.
