What next? For me at least…

By Ashley Bean Thornton

The following is a presentation I made at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Waco on November 17, 2024.  I think I’m a better writer than a speaker, but if you prefer listening to reading…The video is posted at the end.  – ABT

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Good morning!

First of all – let me say how honored I am to be asked to come and speak to you this morning!  I feel like you are such a wise and thoughtful group of folks – I should be listening to you instead of you listening to me! Thank you for having me!

I am going to talk about the election.  My topic is “What next?” And by that I mean, “What next?” after the recent election.

I had planned to talk to you about school vouchers – If you came to learn about school vouchers today – Sorry!  I will politely look away as you discreetly make your way to the exit!

I would be more than glad to come talk about school vouchers sometime if you want – But selfishly, I was looking for an excuse to try to get my thoughts together after the election and so I took advantage of this speaking invitation to force myself to do that.

Full disclosure – I’m a Democrat.  Knowing that, you might assume that I am disappointed with the results of the recent election… and you would be correct!

I feel like this is probably an audience that will have some sympathy for that, but I also want to be respectful of the notion that a fellowship such as this one is at least technically a non-partisan space.

The ideas I am sharing today will certainly be shaped by the fact that my team lost, and we are sad.  Still, I hope they won’t be too blatantly partisan.  And who knows, even if you are riding high right now, maybe I will say something that you might find useful when our positions are reversed….  as I certainly hope they will be as soon as possible…

Speaking for myself

Before I plunge into the topic at hand, I want to explicitly say — I am speaking for myself and to myself here – you guys are just along for the ride.

I am explicitly NOT trying to tell you how you should respond to this election.  It’s important to me to make that clear for a couple of reasons.

First, I am disappointed, very disappointed and maybe a little disillusioned because of the results of the election, but I am not feeling devastated or terrified.

That’s probably because I don’t have as much to lose as some people – or at least I think I don’t have as much to lose.

For example, I met up with a person the other day who I know casually through Baylor and Facebook.  I knew she had been partners for a long time with a woman who she loves very much, but I didn’t know if they were married – so I asked.  Her response was kind of ominous, “As of now…”

She was kidding a little bit… but that really made the point to me.

I am disappointed and worried, but there’s a pretty good chance I will make it through the next 4 years without too much personal drama.  I know people, however, who are deeply concerned this election will have very direct, very negative effects on their own lives.

If that is where you are – I want you to know this is not a “suck it up” “Rub some dirt on it” speech directed at you.  I am not telling you to “be nice” and “mind your manners.”   This is me figuring out what I plan to do myself from my particular set of circumstances.

Second, I am not trying to convince YOU to do what I plan to do.  We are in a complex situation, that calls for a complex mix of responses.  I tend to be a task-oriented person – I find comfort in hunkering down and figuring out some kind of plan that I can reduce to a checklist.

But I don’t think that is the only appropriate way to respond.  I think this situation calls for a full range of responses – we need people like me, sure.

We also need people on fire with righteous indignation and outrage.  We need people with more compassion than I am capable of for the people who are affected, and less tolerance than I have for the people who are doing the affecting.

We need people who respond with wailing and lament. We need people who respond with prayer and meditation, with poetry and art and music.   We need people who comfort us and people who demand more of us.

We need all these different responses and more.  I don’t believe there is one best response – we need to approach the challenges that are being presented to us from all sides and directions.

3 principles, a practice and a project …  

So down the road I go… What’s next?  What’s next for me at least. I have a lot of ideas.

Understanding that you might not want to sit here for a day and a half while I work through all my thoughts, I have winnowed my haystack of ideas down to three principles, a practice and a project…

I appreciate you making me do this – even though you didn’t know you were making me do this – because it has helped me get some more clarity.

So first the three principles…

I am hoping these three principles will serve as good guiding stars to help me find my way through the woods…

• Keep my eyes on the prize,
• Apply the Golden Rule, and
• Curiosity before Condemnation

Keep my Eyes on the Prize…

First, “Keep my eyes on the price….” Elections are not ends in themselves; they are a means to an end.

They are a way to help create the world we want to live in, an important way, but they are not the only way.

We also create that world through the way we treat each other, the ways we serve each other and talk to each other, by our ideas and our habits, and by the work we do every day.

The real prize is not winning the election – it is building the world we want.

I want freedom and fairness.

I want as many of us as possible to have protection from ruin, and a decent shot at a stable, comfortable life and a secure, dignified old age.

I want all kids to get an education that will help them become engaged citizens and wise, productive adults.

I want those things to be true today and for future generations.

The election did not go my way – but that doesn’t mean I can’t work on the kind of world I want for the next two years until I get another chance to vote,  It just means I have to wait a while to use that particular tool again.

Meanwhile, I need to keep my eyes on the prize.

 Apply the Golden Rule  

Next…Apply the golden rule. I learned the golden rule as “Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you.”

For this particular circumstance, I am modifying it a bit to say: “Do NOT do unto others as you would NOT have them to do unto you.”

In other words, resist the urge to “go negative.”

There are many things I do not want to do in response to this election. I don’t want to move.  I don’t want to give up.  I don’t want to be a sucker – beating my head against the wall wasting time with tactics that get us nowhere.

I don’t want to just “go along to get along.”

I also don’t want to go negative… even though that appears sometimes to be the winning strategy.

I don’t want to take comments out of context to make the other side look stupid or bad – when I know good and well that’s not what they meant.

I don’t want to post and re-post every time the other side has a bad hair day, or messes up somebody’s name, or trips.

I don’t want to tell lies about people.

I don’t want to turn my outrage meter up to 11 every time I disagree with something no matter how trivial the matter.

I’m not saying I want to be a humorless nicey-nice, goody-two-shoes.

I’m certainly not above an eyeroll and a good dig.   I enjoy a generous sprinkling of snarky sarcasm, a dose of healthy mockery  – we all need that to keep us sharp and to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

I am saying I don’t want to foment actual hate.

In the kind of world I want to live in we understand that we are one team. We split into two parties so that we can scrimmage with each other.    When the scrimmage is over, I want us to be able to say thank you to each other for playing hard because we know the purpose of the scrimmage is to make the whole team stronger.

I do not want to build the kind of world where “winning” is defined as obliterating the other side.

I don’t want to win by “doing unto others as I would absolutely NOT WANT done to me.”

Curiosity before Condemnation

The third principle I want to keep before me is “Curiosity before condemnation …”

In the case of this election – about half the people in the county did not vote.

Of those who did vote, most of them did not vote like me.

Honestly, I mostly don’t know these people.

That makes it easy for me to make general statements about “them” – “They” are ignorant.  “They” are racist. “They” are greedy autocrats and narrow-minded Christian Nationalists.  In the same way “They” generalize about me – I am a radical Marxist.  I don’t have good morals. I am always looking for a handout.  I want to murder babies.

Whichever side we are on, that kind of thinking leads us to write off half the country as irredeemable, evil idiots.

There may be some irredeemable idiots out there – but I don’t think it is half the country…

and I don’t want to start from that point with just about anybody.

For one thing, I don’t think it is a winning strategy.

I don’t find that telling someone they are “a special kind of stupid” is a particularly effective way to get them to quit voting their way and start voting my way.

At least it didn’t work on me the last time somebody tried it on me. So, I don’t have any really good reason to think it would work on anyone else.

“Curiosity before Condemnation” helps me remember to ask “what makes you say that?” instead of jumping directly to “you don’t know what the “bleep” you are talking about.”

To be clear, Curiosity before Condemnation is not some miracle drug for getting people to agree with me …oh that there were such a drug…  in fact, I can’t remember a time when I actually saw someone change their mind because I took this approach, and I have had plenty of experiences of people meeting my kind, gentle curiosity with a wrecking ball of condemnation.

Curiosity before Condemnation is more about my own salvation than about saving other souls.

By starting with curiosity…when I remember to do it… I have had some really good conversations with people who I never thought I would, and I have deepened some friendships with people who I love and respect, but who disagree with me about many things. I have made some connections that felt to me like at least an inch or two of forward movement toward the kind of world I want to live in.

In my experience, even the unsuccessful attempts at trying curiosity didn’t leave us any worse off, and the successful ones left us much better off, so it’s worth it to me to keep trying…when I remember.

A practice…listening

So, I hope part of “What’s Next?” for me will be to try to let myself be guided by those three principles – keeping my eyes on the prize, trying to apply the golden rule, and trying to remember “curiosity before condemnation.”

I also want to work on the practice of listening.

I feel like everything has been so busy in these months leading up to the election that I did not do as much listening as I should have.

In the next months and years, I want to listen more, and by “listening” I mean in person listening.

I like reading books and watching videos and podcasts and what not as a way to learn – but I feel like what is called for now is building more of the kind of connection that comes from in person, sitting across from each other listening.

I want to listen more to people who agree with me and people who disagree with me.  I want to listen to people who voted like me, who didn’t vote like me, and who didn’t vote.  I want to make opportunities to listen in person.  I want to build a practice of listening.

The project

So, three principles I am going to try to let guide me, a practice I am going to try to make into a habit, and finally a project I want to work on…

It doesn’t really have a name yet, but in my mind, I am calling my project the Center for Informed Civic Engagement.  The purpose of “The Center” would be to help more people in our community understand what legislation is being considered and passed by the Texas Legislature and how that Legislation is affecting our community.

This could become the basis for some fruitful conversations, and possibly some advocacy somewhere down the line – but the initial idea is community education.

I have gotten permission and blessing from my Church – Lake Shore Baptist Church – to officially represent the church in this effort and to get some practical support like using the church building and the copier and things like that.  I don’t have a budget…yet.

My idea is to get other faith-based organizations and other non-profits that are engaged in community building to join in this  – and through those organizations to find people who are interested in this kind of work and to help them find each other.

It’s in the earliest stages right now.  I am hoping that someone or “someones” from this fellowship will be interested in joining in. So, if you are at all interested in talking more about it – please grab me today or get in touch!  Sara has my number or I’m glad to give it to you today.

Concluding thoughts…Way leads on to Way

So there you have it. That is how I am thinking about “what’s next” for me – 3 principles, a practice and a project.

Of course I can only see a little way down the road, and we might be on a pretty rocky road, who knows how that might change.  Which brings me to a few concluding thoughts…

I have done more politics these last 18 months than in the whole rest of my 63 years combined.

This whole last year or so has been a constant firehose of new stuff —  Going to the capitol to visit offices, figuring out voter files, going to precinct chair meetings, attending the state convention, learning to be an election worker, helping with a campaign…

and while that has mostly been fun and exciting, it has also been kind of exhausting and a little surreal feeling, and at no point have I felt like I had any idea of what I was doing or whether it was doing any good.

As I have picked may way through these new and unfamiliar woods these last several months, I have used the phrase, “way leads on to way” as kind of a mantra.

I didn’t intentionally pick it as a mantra…I just kind of found myself thinking it in times when I was considering stopping because I couldn’t see a clear path to how what I was doing was going to make any positive difference.

In my personal vocabulary “way leads on to way” has come to mean — “I’ll do what I can think of to do, and then hopefully once I’ve done that, I will be far enough down the road to be able to see the next thing to do.”

I knew I didn’t come up with that phrase “Way leads on to Way” myself – but I had forgotten where I first heard it.

As I was getting ready to come speak to you today, I decided to google it.

As some of you have probably already immediately recognized, those words come from Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken.”

I’m sure you have heard it before – but I’m going to read it for you in case it has been a while:

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though, as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

This poem is one of Mr. Frost’s most famous.  It was written in 1915. People have been reading it now for over 100 years – considering the profound choice in the woods and all the difference it made.

You might be feeling that way now… like you are in the woods standing at a crossroads with a momentous choice to make.

As I went down the rabbit hole of googling about Robert Frost, I came across the story of how Mr. Frost came to write, “The Road Not Taken.”

It turns out, he meant it as a joke.

Frost and his friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas would often go for long walks together in the countryside.

Thomas had a habit of always regretting whatever path they took…always wondering if another path would have been better.

Frost thought that was silly. He wrote “The Road not Taken” and sent it to Thomas as a way of teasing him a little bit.

Thomas didn’t get the joke at all.  Instead he went on and on about how insightful and profound the poem was…  – as most readers have done in the hundred odd years since Frost wrote it.

According to the story I read, Frost was always a little disappointed that people did not get that it was supposed to be “a gentle joke” as he called it.

Of course, just because something is a joke doesn’t mean it can’t be profound.  It just irked him a little that it didn’t get as many chuckles as he had intended.

I love that story!  It gave me a new way to look at the poem.  I can still look at it  like I always have as a slightly melancholic poem about the consequential decisions we make in life, but now I can also look at it as a more playful poem about the irksome reality that sometimes when you come to a fork in the road you just have to squint and look as far as you can see, and then pick a direction and keep walking.

I am not in your shoes.  I am not standing at your fork in the road.

I cannot tell you what is – or should be – next for you.   If you want to walk along with me for a ways, maybe join me in my project, I would welcome the company,

But Godspeed on whatever road you take.  My only humble request is that you pick a direction and keep walking.