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 wasn’t. I texted my friend Michael, who worked for the Harris campaign and is a diehard Georgia football fan, a picture of me and my son at the game, and we both agreed that a football game was just about the only thing that felt normal right then. And it did feel normal. We gathered with friends before we went in the stadium, we bundled up for an unusual November Athens cold, and William even played catch with a Tennessee staffer over the Hedges before kickoff. It was a nice night. We all needed it.

I did notice something, though, something I’ve been thinking about ever since, and probably something I’ll be thinking about for a long time. I’ve written about the national anthem before, how the act of singing it before public events has changed over the last decade, so I’m always very attuned to the environment, and context, in which it is sung. And I noticed, on this night, the first big event I’d attended after Election Day, something different. The crowd was…