November 12, 2024
It’s been quite a week.
Like you, I have a lot of thoughts about the election. I am also trying to ensure I don’t default to using the election to reinforce what I’ve thought all along. Instead, I am trying to follow what a friend said she is doing: “Sitting with the rebuke and trying to approach [it] with humility and rigor.”
Odds are good that a lot of what you think happened is right. But as SMPA students, you also know the importance of checking your assumptions, looking at the data, and not jumping to your favorite conclusions. You also know that a robust democracy requires a committed press, fearless storytellers, and relentless advocates. With this in mind, I encourage you to do a few things:
Remember what brought you to journalism and political communication. What stories do you want to tell? What world do you want to help create? Hang on to that.
Stand firm on your values. Do not become less than you are for the sake of political expediency. The moment you do that, you’re lost.
With that commitment to a world yet to come and to the values you bring into the world, have the confidence to question your assumptions. Don’t be afraid to change your mind, even about big things. Sit with the rebuke (or the victory, depending on your perspective) with humility and rigor. That isn’t always easy to do, but if this were easy, you wouldn’t be here.
Bring your whole self to understanding our political moment and what comes next. Bring curiosity and critical thinking, your history, and your hopes for the future. Ask what now, what next, and then what? In other words, be SMPA students.
My closing thoughts for this missive come from two very different sources: the late US Rep. Barbara Jordan and the late philosopher Richard Rorty. In 1976, Jordan was the first woman and the first African American to give a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. She told the delegates that, “We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community...We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present … but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America.” Two decades later, Rorty urged that “You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning.”
Onward into the research that helps us understand our world and ourselves, into the advocacy that will shape the future, and into telling the stories that help us make sense of it all.