Election 2016, The Morning After

My note this a.m. to colleagues at Share Our Strength and Community Wealth Partners:

            I wish I had the wisdom commensurate to the searching and questioning you have this morning. I trust you know I don’t mean this as a partisan comment, but rather to acknowledge that many of us, like many Democrats and Republicans across the country, are left nearly speechless by the results of the presidential election. 

            There will be time enough in the coming days to better understand the implications for our work. For now, my instinct is that quiet reflection will serve us better than immediate armchair analysis. But one dynamic worth trying to understand better is the degree to which the election was decided less on the basis of political party, and more on the basis of income, class and education.

In the days ahead it will be incumbent on us to rededicate ourselves to doing our work in ways that unite not divide, that heal not harm, that share strength rather than exploit weakness. Most of all we need to seek to better understand our own country.  I keep thinking of the words of the late Czech playwright and president Vaclav Havel: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”