Stars in Our Lives

By Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

After 107 days of fierce campaigning for the 2024 American Presidential elections, it was election day November 5 at 7:00pm or 19;00 hours when voting closed. The whole country was tense and sitting on the knife’s edge. Who would win and be the 47th President of the United States? Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? The results began rolling in as TV reporters were reporting breathlessly. At midnight, the results were grim and looked like Harris was going to lose. The electoral count was Trump 122 and Harris 60. The winner needed 270 electoral votes. Harris was not doing well.

I reluctantly went to bed at midnight. I wanted to enjoy my last good feelings, fantasies, and dreams of what good could happen in America and the World if Kamala Harris had won. It was the feeling when you realize a loved one is near death; you just want to enjoy those last moments when they are still breathing; when there is still that glim of hope. I woke up at 4:00am to use the bathroom, but I did not want to check the news. When I woke up in the morning, I learned that Harris had narrowly lost all the 7 swing states, and Trump was going to be the next President. The grieving started.

I am familiar with grief because having grown up in the village in Zambia in 1960, I experienced grief with my family and village at a very early age. The next few days I just grieved. You do not suppress grief. I talked with family members, friends, and sometimes prayed with others who were similarly grieving and were seeking solace in the company of like-minded people; what is called kukhuza in Tumbuka language. This grief is different from the aftermath of 9/11 because that grief involved the entire nation.

Harris had 71,144,667 and Trump had 74,672,841 votes. In this election result, the only people who might be grieving are the 71 million Harris supporters. After all, the 74 million Trump voters won. I am seeing online though, isolated cases where spouses are divorcing marriage partners who voted for Trump. Apparently, many family members will be bitterly separated and will not talk to each other during this Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Which is tragic. There are apparently terrible fall outs from this Trump win. These fall outs are being felt and discussed as you are reading this right now because Trump had promised and threatened to do so many horrible things if he won.

I am glad that a week after the peak of my grief, I feel optimistic and invigorated. I attribute this to people through whom God works. I believe that text messages and other electronic internet means of being with other people is a weak substitute to being actually with other people face to face. My grief is abated because I purposely talked face to face with other people. Where I could not, I called. For example, I called my 40-year-old niece in Zambia so I could find out about loved ones back home. Today, I had to go to a dental appointment where our conversation was what we would do this Thanksgiving. I said of course we will eat turkey. That’s how rituals work so effectively by doing the same thing every year.

Our conversation drifted to football. I told her I was looking forward to the Detroit Lions Thanksgiving Football game. She asked me who the Lions were playing. I said the Chicago Bears and I added that the Bears are not playing well this season. Putting her forefinger to her lips she immediately whispered: “Shhh!!!!! Don’t say that. Dr. Grey is a Chicago Bears fan. If she overhears that you are a Lions fan, she may use a hammer to knock out all your teeth.” I feigned laughing under my breath as if we were two kids trying to keep a secret. A few moments later, Dr. Grey walked in saying: “I heard that!” We had the biggest laugh.

I will never forget what Vice President Kamala Harris said in her concession speech on November 6. She quoted an adage: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” I found out this week that it was during my dark moments of my grief over the election loss that I appreciated and was able to see the stars of my soul that other ordinary people around me are in my life. Most of the time when the sun in my life is very bright, I cannot notice these other human beings that are stars in my life. We often fail to notice these mundane looking blessings of stars that might be all around us in our lives until when our lives get dark enough.