We have reached “stage 1” of “the after.” When I talk to my transplant patients I explain that evaluation for an organ transplant is a series of hoops that they have to jump through. As you might imagine there are those who want to rush the process, but the patients cannot directly do this. Though the speed sometimes does depend on how sick the patient is, there are all sorts of considerations that have to be vetted in order for a transplant to happen. So it is important that I lay out the process, to the extent that I know it, there is still so much to learn. Transplant, like all complicated processes, was made for checklists for all parties. American democracy is also in the middle of such a complicated process, though each side wants to rush it, and it is a process that cannot and should not be rushed.

Joseph Robinette Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States. Though some will claim the election was close, and the machine of the national media earns more money if this is true, in reality it was not. Biden will likely win by about 5 million votes with the highest number of Americans voting for a candidate ever. The Biden team assembled the broadest coalition ever, earning votes from the African American community, those in the industrial belt, women (though I still cannot fully explain white women or maybe I can, and it is just more complicated), and young people. In the “just desserts” department after Trump demonized John McCain, Arizona will turn blue, even in the Senate. Another delicious dessert came in Georgia, where John Lewis’s district was responsible for putting Biden in the lead in that state. In a reminder of history, the Democrats used to be the party of the Ku Klux Klan until Strom Thurmond switched parties, and then the Democrats became the party of civil rights and the Republicans became the party endorsing/ignoring systemic racism. Also keep in mind that Stacey Abrams would have been the governor of Georgia had current Governor and former Secretary of State Brian Kemp not put his thumb on the scales a few years ago. If there was fraud in the Georgia election, it was done under the aegis of a Republican state government. Like most of the Trumpian arguments, that dog won’t hunt.

As I sat there on Tuesday night clenching my jaw while reaching for a chill pill, my legs shook with anxiety. What happened last election cannot happen again. As middle aged and older white guys mansplain that people have nothing to fear by a continuation of a Trumpian presidency, brown children still sit in cages perhaps never to see their parents again. Dreamers await…