Eggshell-walking is... not a new experience for me. I feel like I'm doing a little bit of it now. We're all tense, a lot of us are enraged, a lot of us are grieving, and we're recovering from the immediate shock but we have suffered, continue to suffer, a lot of long-term hurts. And when we speak out of our grief, out of our hurt... it's something we need to do, but it's challenging, it's often threatening. Sometimes we lose friends we'd rather keep.
I've lost a lot of friends over the course of this year, and right now I'm working hard to make new ones. That's the most important thing to me right now. But it is hard, because there is a lot we don't agree on. We don't have a lot of monolithic views.
In some ways I do credit the feel-good speeches people like Colbert and Obama have been making, even though I don't interpret them in the same way they do. Everything they about how we should treat other people I wholeheartedly believe and endorse when it comes to everybody in this country who did not vote for Trump. We need to be tolerant, forgiving, constantly be open to reconciliation, when it comes to all non-Trump voters. We can't afford that luxury with Trump voters, but let's not confuse the necessary hatred we have to carry for them with normal or appropriate human behaviour.
And having said that it's not always up to us. Whether we call it "eggshell-walking" or whatever, it's exhausting, it's tiring, and sometimes we do our best and we still wind up denounced. That's hard. That's hard for us to forgive, being wronged in that way. But I would argue we need to do it, accept the consequences, just or not, and carry on.
