The Calm in Calamity

Nina Mogilnik
4 min readNov 6, 2024

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I did not follow pre-election coverage in the United States. I did not follow day-of coverage, nor will I follow post-election coverage. I went to sleep not knowing who won, and I woke up still not knowing.

I thought to try to go through the day that way, but then I realized that the only person I wanted to hear from was my husband, who also went to bed not knowing. He joined me last night in binge-watching a show filmed in Mallorca. However, he chose to find out the election results this morning. We had a brief conversation. No histrionics, no “oh my god” wailing. Just simple facts about the outcome. We briefly wandered into “theories of why” territory, but only very briefly. We both think the truth is quite simple: Donald Trump is who we really are as a nation. We are violent, misogynistic, race-baiting, Jew-hating, immigrant-hating, fraud-loving, democracy-despising, wisdom-hating, expertise-dismissing, climate change-denying, education-devaluing people. And there are hundreds of millions of US.

I feel sorry for the forests that will die as the armies of commenters among us write article after article, op-ed after op-ed seeking to explain to us how and why this happened. Again. Only with greater commitment this time. No tree should die for these pointless analyses, but that’s America, where untold numbers of people make a living providing pointless analyses.

Let me take a different approach. I feel calm the day after. No, I am not heavily sedated, although people who’ve seen me in my passionate moments might assume so, if they saw me now. I feel calm because, as I wrote only recently, I am the same person today as I was yesterday. And I will, god willing (as my mother, Z”l might say), be the same person tomorrow.

I have done the truly hard work. No, not canvassing or calling for Harris. I did that in past campaigns, but not this one. Not donating to her campaign or that of other democrats. None of that. I just voted. And I took my disabled son with me. We voted for the candidate who does not mock him, or hate families like ours. It was an easy choice. It wasn’t an especially enthusiastic one, but it honestly rarely has been in my voting life. Still, I did my civic duty.

But the truly hard work I have done, alongside my husband, is having gotten my adult son to a voting site (his third time voting, given his age). In addition, we have together raised his siblings with an acute commitment to education, knowledge, public service, and the ethical underpinnings that make any decent, worthy society, function. If you don’t think that’s hard work, you have never raised children. There is no harder job on earth. How do I know? Because young men my sons’ ages voted in large numbers for a man who represents the diametric opposite of all the qualities essential to building and living in a decent, worthy society. Every single one. And they eagerly and knowingly embraced the worst qualities a human being can possess: cruelty, dishonesty, hatefulness, immorality, and so on.

I am not suggesting that the parents of all these young adults are failures. Parenting is incredibly hard, and you can put all of yourself and then some into raising stand-up human beings, and be brutally disappointed in the outcomes. It happens all the time. Which is why I am not only calm today, but incredibly, indescribably grateful. My children are exactly who I hoped they would be. Who I prayed they would be. Who I worked like a crazy person to help them become. Which is why I turned this day-after-election-day to the loving partner who has co-piloted our family vessel with me all these years, wanting only to learn from him if enough other parents out there were feeling the same kind of gratitude today that I am feeling.

It seems we fell short. Tragically, devastatingly short. We will soon learn the scale and severity of our self-inflicted wounds. I will not follow the lamenters, the breast-beaters. I dwelled for too long in anger the last time around, and it changed nothing. My path will be the one I am affirmatively choosing, not one that circumstances compel me to react to. There is too much at stake for my soul to sacrifice itself on the alter of rage. I do not want to hear the woulda, coulda, shoulda complaints and accusations. I want to dwell in family and friendship, my safe harbors. Not because I am a coward or a denialist. But because nothing matters more in the most difficult of times than turning to those who hold you fully in their love as you hold them in yours. Especially my children.

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Nina Mogilnik
Nina Mogilnik

Written by Nina Mogilnik

Thinker, Writer, Advocate, Mom of Kids with special needs, Dog Lover, Wife, Partner, Orphan

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