The Day After

 I thought, as a post election note, to give a view of The Day After - because it was completely unremarkable from where I was.

There were no mass wailings or tears.  There was no gloating or shouts " USA!  USA!" filling the hallways.  There was no post-election paraphernalia being worn or dangled from clothing or backpacks (everyone has a back here, I assume because rain is a thing so often).

The company put out a somewhat expected "Many of us are feeling stress and this is where to find support" e-mail - which was not a surprise to me in the least: it is a very large company and ticks all the current modern thinking boxes.  But it was a restrained e-mail, not even mentioning why people were feeling stress (the election, of course), and so was pretty non-offensive.

What happened instead?  People worked.

To be fair, it was the end of a manufacturing day and a 24 hour day at that, but none the less we had a task.  People worked in the facility.  People went to meetings. 

People did their jobs.

For the rather large amount of wailing and cheering I have seen on the InterWeb, it was not indicative of my experience.  For all one would have known, there simply was no election at all.  And honestly, that is how it should work.

I am mulling over the non-political lessons of this election - I think there are several - but one of the biggest to me is simply the fact that I wonder if this election represents a potential turning point in our culture on the cult of attention.  I have pondered on it before, this need to make everything about one's self to every extent possible - but in the post days after election the only people actually paying attention to such things were the ones publicly having breakdowns or the ones publicly gloating.  Neither is particularly helpful of course:  one election is not a reason to make one odious to one's friends or one's enemies.  

If I have any wish over the next two months, it is that people simply move on with the work that needs to be done.  I realize that is unrealistic of course, but public screaming sessions or public victory laps do not solve any of the rather large problems facing us as a country.  

And that, at least for me, is what I care about.  Solutions and getting things done.  I saw that at my place of work The Day After.  Would that all adults could actually act like adults and, as Steven Pressfield says, Do The Work.