History has its eyes on you

I told my child that Donald Trump was a bully. I told my child that Donald Trump was a bigot. I told my child that Donald Trump was the wrong choice.

This morning I had to tell my child that Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

He burst into tears. "But I wanted Hillary Clinton to be the president," he sobbed. "She was going to be the first woman president and now she never will!"

I was, frankly, unprepared for the depth of his emotion. I wondered if I had done the wrong thing by being such an unabashed cheerleader for Clinton, so partisan in my distaste for Trump. Like many of us, I had treated it kind of like a game: Ha ha, can you believe this crazy buffoon thinks he's going to be president? Good thing us reasonable people will see right through his rhetoric!

Van Jones on CNN said it for me: “It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids don’t be a bully. You tell your kids don’t be a bigot. You tell your kids do your homework and be prepared. Then you have this outcome. How do I explain this to my children?”

Being a parent is hard, and not always for the reasons I expected. I expected the sleep deprivation and the impatience and the casual disregard with which I would come to interact with certain bodily fluids. I did not anticipate how hard it would be to instill those prized values in my child that we all strive for: decency, kindness and respect. I used to think those values were innate; you were either born with certain moral standards or you were not. But since Eli was born it's become clear to me that those values can be taught; must be taught. He needs to see me going out of my way to help others. He needs to hear me explain what it means to be impoverished, to be marginalized, to be powerless. It can't be as simple as "Our side is right and the other is wrong."

Because how did we get here? Something ugly has been festering in America that maybe I as an educated northeastern liberal have failed to acknowledge. My America is supposed to look like "This Land is Your Land," like the cast of "Hamilton," like "If I Had a Hammer." This is not my America.

But the problem is, this is my America now. This country where Trump supporters kick the wheelchair of a disabled kid at a rally, where dissenting Jews are taunted with photoshopped images of their biracial children in ovens, where presidential candidates say maybe it would be a good thing if their opponents were assassinated. This is our America too. I have to come to grips with that.

But I don't have to make peace with it. Because I bear some of the responsibility. I can't say that I did everything I could to make sure Clinton got elected. Because I honestly didn't think this could happen. Even though history tells us that the "it can't happen here" mentality is our enemy, I thought it couldn't happen here.

When I woke up this morning, I had that Harry Potter line running through my head: "Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face a choice between what is right and what is easy."

So I'm strapping myself in. I'm getting organized about my charitable giving. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Every time I read something online that enrages me, instead of drowning myself in a cesspool of online vitriol, I will make a donation to a cause I care about. I encourage you to join me. (So we can all go broke by 2020 together.)

Early in the evening, before we could bring ourselves to turn on the news, we watched Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead. There's a character named Negan who's truly a bad hombre, and his army of followers has been trained to embody his philosophy so wholeheartedly that if you ask them, "Who are you?" they will answer "Negan." At the episode's climax, after spending an hour trying to break the spirit of a long-beloved character named Daryl, Negan gets in his face brandishing a baseball bat covered in barbed wire.

"Who are you?" he asks. There's a long pause.

"Daryl," says Daryl.

Who are we, America? We are not Trump. We are not xenophobes, misogynists, racists. We are not Trump. We are better than this. We have to be.