Excerpts from morning conversation:
M: Did you see the news?
Anand: Trump was elected.
M: How are you doing? Feel okay?
M: What’s more worrying to me is it looks likely that Republicans have both the House and Senate, so there won’t be as many checks and balances on what the White House can do.
Anand: I wasn’t worried about that. Now I am.
Anand: Can Congress do things without the President?
M: Yes. If they were scared of a presidential veto, that would slow them down a lot, because they’d need to have enough of a majority to be able to override a veto. If they’re not scared of a veto, they can quickly make a lot of changes.
Anand: I’m not sure what he’s actually going to do. He seems so chaotic and confused.
M: Well, maybe that’s actually going to work in our favor. If there were a smart, competent hyper-conservative Republican president right now, with this Congress, they could do a massive amount of damage.
Anand (laughing): So you’re saying it’s a good thing that Trump is incompetent and chaotic?
M: Maybe.
M: Do you have any trans friends? You may want to check in on them today. They might be affected by Trump’s presidency pretty quickly.
Anand: I don’t think so? I have some non-binary friends.
M: Well, check on them too.
M: We’re very lucky that we live in Oak Park. It’s a very blue suburb, so we’re likely to be somewhat insulated from the worst of what he does. Daddy and I chose this place deliberately for that. Oak Park is famously liberal.
Anand: I didn’t know Oak Park was famous for everything.
M: It is. It’s been on the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights, it’s been welcoming to immigrants, it fought redlining (which is a racism thing). There’s a lot that happens on the local level that’s really important.
Anand: So I guess what we do now is try to mitigate the worst of what happens.
M: That’s right. It’s called harm reduction. For the next four years, we’re going to be in harm reduction mode.
Anand: I can’t believe that in the next election, I’ll be nineteen, old enough to vote.
M: Yes. And I hope that even before that, you get involved with politics — volunteer for a campaign when you’re eighteen. Learn about what’s going on. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics until much later in my life, and I regret it.
Anand: It seems like if you pay a lot of attention to politics, it’s going to make you upset all the time.
M: Well, it could. You need to balance that with taking care of yourself. But also, you like history. The more you read and understand how these things happen, the more you’ll be empowered to actually make effective change — to push the right lever at the right time to get something done. I think you’d like being involved with politics; all the arguing and thinking things through is well-suited to your personality. And if it gets too much, too draining, just take a break and go do something that fills you up and calms you down.
So far. He’s doing okay, I think. Kavi is still sleeping. She’s going to be more upset.