A Guide to Being Helpful Over the Next Four Years

Think about positives — what you can do.

The first real public event I attended after Election Day was a Georgia football game, on November 16, an important home game against Tennessee. Like a lot of people who were stunned and staggered (if not entirely surprised) by the results of Election Day, I’d mostly gone inward for the fortnight afterward: Staying home, watching a lot of sports and movies, hanging out with my family, avoiding political news entirely. But I was excited about the game. It was an important game, and I was ready to get back out into the world. It is, after all, where we live.

I expected a few stray remnants of the election to still by laying about. Just three weeks earlier, after the most recent home game, I’d written a piece for The Washington Post about how the tailgate scene had grown more explicitly Trumpian over the previous decade, in a piece that no one read because it was posted within seconds of the Post announcing that it would not be endorsing a candidate for President, which didn’t exactly put the reading populace in the mood for a rumination on bourbon and Southern politics. But the game was still just a game, and I was, and still am, very much in need of some games. I didn’t expect it to be a particularly triggering event for someone trying to forget the election, and it…