A Change of Pace in the U.S.

Earlier this evening I did what I'd done fifty times or more this past week: refreshing the main page of the New York Times hoping that the bar of electoral college seats for Joe Biden would pass the threshold of 270 required to win the U.S. presidential election.

Much to my surprise, enough votes had been counted in Pennsylvania (and soon thereafter in Nevada) to be able to declare that Biden and Kamala Harris had won.

Of course I was greatly amused to read that Trump had tweeted within the past hour or so that he had 'WON, BY A LOT!!'. This was an attitude I'd rarely seen since I stopped playing board games or sports with hyper-competitive children who invented their own rules as they went along. But for once I felt that playing golf was the most constructive thing he could have been doing at the time. In the meantime it was edifying to watch videos of streets with cheering, whistling and honking cars in New York City.

Due to my nerdy instincts I played Beethoven's variations on "God save the King" on the piano from start to finish for the first time, because the melody is the same as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."  (These variations are definitely not his finest compositional achievement, by the way.)

There was tangible relief on the Tagesschau evening news here in Germany, both correspondents' smiling faces betraying them a bit and only the anchor keeping her composure. Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of course have all said they were looking forward to the Biden presidency, and I'd really love to have been a fly on the wall to hear what they said in private.

It is still peculiar to think back to all the US elections I remember. Bill Clinton's presidency was so full of animus at the time of the 2000 election because of the Lewinsky scandal that George W. Bush's election seemed inevitable. That intelligence, independent thinking and skill would be in such short supply in future, and that a president of greater moral turpitude would be greeted by the Bible-thumping establishment fifteen years later, was not clear to me. Then, of course, John Kerry's loss was pretty inevitable but a strong blow nonetheless, one I absorbed on a Canadian university campus with lots of other disappointed students and professors and (per email correspondence) family. Followed by the moral purity (in a way) of Barack Obama's decency, the experience of seeing him speak in person at the Siegessäule in Berlin after going through Secret Service security portals, and the televised sight of the Bushes lifting off from Washington D.C. in a helicopter and Cheney also sliding into the historical record. Then the shocking blow of Donald Trump's election when Hillary Clinton's election seemed almost inevitable.

This time I didn't feel like singing "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" as I did 'in honour' of G.W. Bush's leaving the White House. But I think that's also because there was better, stronger opposition to the absurdities of the Trump administration. I feel that once the person is gone, the bad policy will follow suit; and the good thing about a single presidential term is that the spirit of wrongdoing doesn't have time to settle in lastingly. So there was far more to 'kick out' after the Bush administration; and I still think it paved the way for the Trump administration to a great degree, e.g. because the manipulative role of the polemical rightwing media was embraced as part of the more 'respectable' political establishment.

Besides, the important point of this election was not the win or loss. It was about finding a president who is going to be actively better for all voters. Biden won't negligently kill thousands of his citizens per purposefully bad coronavirus policy. Biden won't shrug at paid contracts to kill his soldiers (in Afghanistan) and at a Washington Post columnist's death (Jamal Khashoggi's) and at the torture of an American citizen until he was brain-dead (Otto Warmbier) in North Korea.

What I really hope is that wise coronavirus policy in the US will also lead to a lessening of the pandemic's effects internationally. Of course this would be more on the economic than the medical front, since US citizens have been forbidden from flying to many countries anyway, and so I presume most contagion is not taking place across the US's borders.

Lastly, I suspect that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be able to speak to the President of Japan without harassing him for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Now I'm interested to see what President Biden will do in the first 100 days in office.

***

As for work, the workload is still high but the 'political' tension has decreased. My team has been given as much time as we need to take care of Black Friday work and do solid planning, and I feel that our autonomy is respected more.

But I need to have a person-to-person talk with a colleague in the extended management board, I think, to make sure that the board begins consulting more people before implementing plans.

Much as I appreciate how much colleagues often like and watch out for me, I'm not entirely sure sometimes why this same kindness isn't extended to other colleagues as well. And even if he's caught on to the fact that I have feelings, I'm not sure if he's caught on to the fact that e.g. the rest of my team has them too.

Anyway, a second conversation with the manager took a huge burden off my mind and has calmed me down considerably, as it has convinced me that my team is appreciated and safe.

I've also been asked to help give input for a mental health plan for the company. I intended to set aside time to filter through the material that the HR team has gathered, this weekend. But I am not a huge fan of advising people on how to deal with their mental health if 1. I'm a little hypocritical if I pretend I know the answers; and 2. I am not a qualified psychologist. I've gotten so much medically inadvisable advice over the years about how to lose weight, what healthy nutrition is (e.g. that a weight loss trick is surviving on soup made from bouillon powder ....), and so on and so forth, that amateur tinkering in anything medical horrifies me.

(Besides I am too conservative to approve of New Age methods, [Edit: or, rather, I'm not well-informed about them and perhaps I struggle with being reminded how much any form of spirituality is 'choose your own adventure' rather than easily verifiable] but these might really help others. Having read that meditation has been proven to help veteran soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress disorder has given me a healthy respect for it; but I really dislike any implication that one regimen can fix one's life or that this is even desirable. It might be trivial of me, but I don't really like that we are in a secular world where organized religion is seen as obsolete, but then replaced with other belief systems that in some ways have similar forms and aims. This feeling that we must live and think correctly or else we deserve the ills that fall upon us. What if we live correctly and we still have bad things happen to us? what if there is suffering that nobody deserves?

I like the idea that thinking carefully of the happiness of others and of one's own ethical standards is a good 'pathfinder' in life, but hopefully I do not believe that this is a way to guarantee my own happiness. And I don't think there is a bulletproof way to remain healthy (or that morality should be applied to one's own health), although one's chances can be improved. Seeing people whom I am fond of, losing their grasp on reality and dying as pale shadows of themselves, through no fault of their own, has convinced me of this.)

What I didn't mention is that there were structural causes of stress, one of which is unanticipated changes at the busiest time of year. But I did ask the manager if there would be any more changes before 2021. (Because I want to be mentally prepared.) And he kindly reeled off three developments that we could expect, the third of which was secret. Because one of the non-secret ones was sad and now everyone knows it anyway, and of the other two I couldn't remember which one was secret, I haven't blabbed.