My wife and I sat down on Wednesday night to watch TV. We just wanted some quiet. We flipped through on-demand to find something to watch, some bad TV to take our minds off everything.
Except that during the first commercial break, this ad appeared on our TV. It was an ad the Hillary team aired across the country on the night the show originally aired — the night before the election:
The day after the election, it was a very hard ad to watch.
But we watched anyway. And then we paused our show and talked for a long time about this one thing she said (italics mine):
“First, it’s not just my name and my opponent’s name on the ballot. It’s the kind of country we want for our children and grandchildren.”
And then this one, from Hillary’s concession speech on Wednesday morning:
“We have spent a year and a half bringing together millions of people from every corner of our country to say with one voice that we believe that the American dream is big enough for everyone, for people of all races and religions, for men and women, for immigrants, for LGBT people and for people with disabilities. For everyone. So now, our responsibility as citizens is to keep doing our part to build that better, stronger, fairer America we seek, and I know you will.”
I want to remember this week, and all of the confusion and the anger and the sadness I feel. But I also want to remember Hillary’s words: We have to fight for the America we want to live in — a more just, a more equal, a more loving America. We have to work for it.
There is much more work to be done. And as we say in my family: Today is a work day.
Let’s get to it.
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That photo at top is one that I took eight years ago on the quad at the University of Missouri. It was four days before the election, and then-Senator Barack Obama came to campus to campaign. We had more work to do then — and we have even more work to do now.