⚾️Denise ♊️🌈🇬🇧🇺🇦🇦🇺

The world is breathing a collective sigh of relief tonight. Americans have voted to put a check on an era of cruelty and indifference, a government that watched its own citizens killed in the streets and answered with more cruelty, not accountability. In Texas, James Talarico took no AIPAC money and beat Ken Paxton despite more than $160 million from Elon Musk alone poured in against him. Democrats won across the country in spite of maps redrawn to stop them. They ran on unity and decency, not hate, and they won. Texas elected Democrats statewide for the first time in over 30 years. Kansas sent a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in nearly a century. South Carolina, for the first time since 1998. And the firsts kept coming: the first Black woman governor, the first Native American woman governor, the first Muslim senator, the first openly gay man elected to the Senate. Perhaps this is what these years have taught us: that a nation sometimes has to see the very worst of itself before it finds the will to choose something better. Americans looked cruelty in the face, and they refused to accept it as normal. As James Baldwin wrote, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." America faced it. This isn't the end of the fight, but it's the beginning of the end. Australia should be watching closely. The punch-down politics that is creeping into our country, the kind that asks us to turn on each other; to hate difference so much that indifference to pain becomes normalised, is straight out of the same playbook. Division has never built a better nation. Unity always has.