The End of the Beginning…

Winston Churchill said after the Second Battle of El Alamein[1] that “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

This morning, the first minor outlets started calling the U.S. Presidental Election for Joe Biden. I remember seeing the first indication that Biden had actually taken the lead in Pennsylvania just after 9:30am:

The long-anticipated lead for Biden in Pennsylvania finally happens:
The long-anticipated lead for Biden in Pennsylvania finally happens:

This had been predicted by many observers, and we had been seeing the slow march in this direction for days, as the mail-in votes in Pennsylvania were being counted:

The day before, when Biden was still catching up:
The day before, when Biden was still catching up:

But it’s one thing to know almost for certain that something is coming, and another thing entirely to see it actually happen.

If there’s one thing that I feel that we’ve learned during these last 9 months of pandemic isolation, it’s that there is a significant difference between understanding something intellectually, and the full-on emotional experience.

People were saying that this election might not be decided until late this week, and that it might be a nail-biter…[2]

…similar to ‘life will not go back to normal until there is a vaccine, and that will not happen until late 2021 at the earliest’…a nail-biter that one is living through is very different than one that one is merely discussing in theory. I would posit that people around the world lost a significant amount of sleep (and not just those counting ballots) from the stress over the starkly divided U.S., perched on a ‘knife’s edge‘.

But it now looks like we have a way forward. The current numbers are juust over the biggest barrier, and the overall trend is good. Barring some catastrophe[3], Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, and as he alluded to in his ‘not-quote-a-victory-speech-speech’: “We believe when the count is finished we’ll be the winner“, that it is time for the country (really, the world), to come together to heal.

“What brings us together…is so much stronger than anything that can tear us apart.”

We need to keep up the pressure, so that our politicians implement what they said they would do, and we need to watch for shenanigans around every corner (and do everything we can to win both Senate seats in Georgia), but there is light at the end of the tunnel…and if we play our cards right, we[4] could end up with a president that can bring together a consensus on programs that rival the New Deal in scope and progress.

Stay safe and keep pushing…

[1] The Second Battle of Alamein (and indeed the entire African campaign and WWII) are fascinating in their own right, but are far too large and out of scope to address here.

[2] To be precise, fivethirtyeight.com predicted that:

“…it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting. Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.”

While many were undoubtedly hoping for the latter, undoubtedly record Republican turnout meant that we ended up with the former.

[3] #knockonwood

[4] I wonder if this is how empires happen…that those in the hinterlands are so affected by the decisions made, or the culture projected, that they start to identify with the leaders, rooting for them as they root for themselves…

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