Keeping Nevada Breathing

 Today is election day. We rose late today, past 6:30. It was already light out. We had stayed up past eleven last night to watch the last of the President's rallies, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is where he had finished four years ago, as he had told his crowds over the last several months. He had urged to go to Michigan one last time by the state party chairwoman there, on the hunch that one more rally might put him over the top. He won by the barest of margins there---ten thousand votes out of five million cast. 

Much has changed in four years. The state party chairwoman is now the national party chairwoman, having well earned the promotion. This year he expects to win by much more. 

Before going to bed I obsessively refreshed my Twitter feed. The early returns were already coming in from the midnight-voting communities in New Hampshire. Nearly the same results as four years ago. Not much to be learned from those, but everyone is hungry for real news. No more polling results. No more guesses. Just real results now. The nation hangs in the balance.

Today I'm not expecting to look at my feed much, at least until evening, when I will turn my attention to the news. Until then I plan on making it a calm, normal day as much as possible, devoted to work. For the past two months I've had a project building the back end to a web portal for neurologists that will allow them to conduct video exams of their patients. My part is all the plumbing in the database, and also all the architecture in the cloud. It has to be HIPAA compliant, which has made it a challenge---completely confidential and secure. I enjoy that kind of challenge. Usually I have to twist clients' arms to care about application security. This time I didn't have to. I have carte blanche to do it the right way.  Today I will work on the part of the database that stores the metadata about uploaded videos made by the patients.

Before work, and in the breaks between sitting at my laptop, I am doing lots of praying. I am praying that God sheds his Grace and guidance on the nation today, for our quadrennial ritual. I am praying that it is a clean decisive result, unequivocal, and that the nation's voice is heard loud and strong.  I pray that God spares us a drawn-out ordeal, or some hellish nightmare twist that drags on for weeks and months.

I pray for the people I know who may suffer mental health issues because of the election result. I pray God will grant them peace in the days ahead. 

I think about people I haven't seen in years, ones that I cannot talk to anymore for various reasons, wondering if they are in anguish over the election.  Most of them I will never see or talk to again. 

I think about the select group of people, seemingly random in composition, who seem to have "made it over the fence" to our side, sometimes openly and sometimes in secret.  In my own tiny way, I've become a small source of comfort to some of them, with the steadiness of my confidence in the election results. 

A couple weeks ago we had dinner at some friends of ours in Scottsdale, a woman with whom J went to medical school in Portland, who moved down here and convinced J to move down here as well. So she is the reason we are here. Her name is Heather. We sat on the patio with her husband and with her young son running around us as we ate. I shared my opinions on the election and they found great relief in it. I had put aside until yesterday evening until J reminded me of this by means of telling me that her friend had shared my confident opinion with her siblings in Reno.  J read me a text passed on from one of her friend's sisters: "Tell Matt that he's the only thing keeping Nevada breathing right now." 

It brought me almost to tears to hear this. I love Nevada, as I love all the states, in their own way. It stirs pride in me to hear this, but it is awkward. I am mostly uncomfortable with influence over others, outside of immediate family. Is this what it feels like to have others depend on you in a public way? "A lot of pressure on you," J tells me

 Of course nothing is certain. No matter how confident I am, and no matter how good all the signs look, the results are, as they say, "above my pay grade." It could all end this evening in bitter humiliation. If so, then so be it. Humiliation is something one should welcome. I pray every morning for the Lord to deliver me from the fear of it.

My imagination fills my thoughts with spontaneous horrible "what-if" scenarios. As I've learned from Jordan Peterson's lectures, this is a natural neurological phenomenon whereby our brain constructs fantasies of what lurks in the dark, or in the deep water, so as to give us the proper fight-or-flight response to save our lives from predators and other dangers. In my gut I feel as certain as ever. Part of masculine courage is learning to evaluate these neurological phantoms for what they are, and brush them aside when necessary,  It becomes natural the more one does it. As a man, it feels disgusting to be anything less than brave.