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The night of the election, I was so oblivious to a different outcome that I was not only confirming travel approvals for tech people I’d help recruit to the Clinton transition team, but my husband and I also had dinner plans with a friend. We figured the whole thing would be wrapped up by 7. For dinner, we ordered the special, which was octopus for two. It was prepared in a way I’d never seen before: basically just an octopus, not cut into bits, so you could see its shape and picture it swimming around, doing its beautiful octopus thing. Later, when another friend told me she’d stopped eating octopus after reading about their deep but different intelligence and capacity for human-like emotion, I felt like I’d eaten the family dog, or a dolphin, or a chimpanzee I’d met and hung out with.
The octopus became a metaphor for every thoughtless injustice I’d inflicted on others — friends, family, colleagues, collaborators; those who voted for Trump, those who voted for Clinton, those who hadn’t voted (hi, Uncle Bob!)—and I thought about the price we must pay for our thoughtlessness, for our failure to account for and pay our debts, to acknowledge our past crimes, to stop slip-sliding toward a future we hadn’t quite anticipated, an accidental version of ourselves we didn’t mean to become. Those first weeks, I awaited the coming reckoning.
Reckoning
n. the action or process of calculating or estimating something.
n. a settling of accounts
Just before the election, my friend Eric Liu wrote about reckoning, which he calls “facing history and ourselves.” He reckoned why reckoning is so hard in the United States, as compared with, for instance, South Africa after apartheid, when reckoning was necessary for the “truth” part of truth and reconciliation.
In South Africa, the truth-telling, though painful and courageous, was in one sense simple. The system of apartheid was fresh in the memory, it had been created by the state, and it was dismantled by the state. Its victims and its perpetrators alike could unburden themselves of the moral and psychic costs of their roles.
In the United States, reckoning is by orders of magnitude more complex. There are no clean breaks in recent American history between good and evil, no single line of culpability that leads to a single large group of living…
