I'm sad and scared too

Switching off for today

Politics is truly broken. The first convicted felon to hold the highest office in the United States, and therefore arguably the world. He avoids jail by becoming President. His party now hold the Senate, which means his laws will pass through with fewer obstacles. It’s genuinely very scary. Worse than last time.

Keeping up with the news today does no one any good. I am so glad I don’t have to work in a newsroom anymore. Quite a few people reading this do, and I’m sorry about the night / day you’re having.

If you can unplug from the internet for the rest of the day, or just for an hour, do it. Go for a walk. Listen to something or read something that isn’t about this or him.

Allow your imagination to leave off from those anxious visions of the future, and to create instead something comforting, or even beautiful. We’re going to need this ability to figure out a future that’s different to the one that seems inevitable.

When you are ready, in days or weeks to come, please bookmark the ProPublica reporting on the women killed by the abortion bans so far, and read the stories. America voted yesterday for more of this.

The exceptional reporting gives voice to the people who loved them and undoes their post-mortem transformation into bleak statistics. If our imaginations insist on being involved with anything to do with this giant glowing orange failure of the political system, let it be in imagining who they were, who they could be now, if they had been treated with dignity.