Posts in the Commentary Category

Not too long ago, I got Step Nined on Facebook.

If that didn’t parse as regular English for you, Step Nine is part of the twelve-step program offered by Alcoholics Anonymous. It states, with edits for out-of-context clarity:

“[Make] direct amends to [people you have harmed] wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

And so someone I knew back in the town where I grew up, a classmate all throughout my pre-college education who I’ll call John, sent me a private message on Facebook apologizing for how he’d treated me, stating that he’d had no reason other than just having been a mean kid, and hoping that things were going well for me and my family.

I’ve pondered this message quite a bit in the interim. The message brought me neither upset nor relief, though I can well imagine that many people in such a situation would feel one or both. I bore no mental or physical scars with his signature upon them. There was no need of closure, or of re-opening, or really of anything, at least from my point of view. He and his actions toward me, positive or negative, are one thin thread in the complex skein that was my childhood, lost in the overall pattern.

In truth, John’s message aroused more pity in me than anything else. I thought as I read it, What must he have endured as a child, that hurting other people seemed normal to him?  And in that thought, I felt an echo from the past, as though the question had come to me before. Perhaps my parents made the observation, as I struggled through growing up, and I was finally able to hear it now. I’m not sure. It doesn’t really matter. If his message is anything to go by, whatever John did has been far more damaging to him than it ever might have been to me.

Still, I keep coming back to John’s message and pondering it further. What I’ve thought about, far more than its contents or the history it references, has been the simple fact of how it happened, and what that means.

Had John wanted to offer amends in, say, the late 1990s, he would have had to actively seek me out. It would have taken the effort of calling my parents to ask for contact information, or other people he thought might have it, and then making that call to me. The social distance would have been a barrier to contact, one whose surmounting signified the importance of the act to him. And then, when he did make that call, he would have talked to me, able to gauge my reaction. There would have been a feedback loop to tell him whether or not his amends were injurious in some way.

And yes, of course, John could have done exactly that today. He could have kept his process entirely off Facebook and gone through those efforts, as an act of personal penance or just as a useful social signifier. Or, perhaps, he could have contacted me on Facebook to ask for my phone number, with a brief statement as to why he was asking for it, and then let my decision to allow the contact or not be a measure of whether it would in fact be injurious.

But he didn’t. Because the internet has disintermediated social effort.

What I wonder about, as I ponder this small signal, is the depth of his remorse. How much does John really mean it, and how much is he going through the motions, trying to get through Step Nine as quickly as possible so that he can reach Step Twelve sooner? Is he working through his personal pain, or is he grinding the leveling process? It’s impossible for me to say. I know it’s a lot easier to send a bunch of “sorry” messages to your contacts than it is to talk to each person you feel you’ve wronged, one on one, one by one, and go through that painful process over and over and over again.

I wonder if that simple ease of contact has robbed him of a critical component of his healing process.

Or, if you want to be more accurate, I wonder if that simple ease of contact lured him into a course of action that was harmful to his healing process.

The things we build are almost always meant to make things faster, more efficient, easier. Perhaps, sometimes, they should be harder.

This genie will not go back into the bottle. The internet isn’t going away and Facebook still has a long way to go before its fall. Even then, something will have replaced it. There’s no reason to think these sorts of connections will become more difficult to make, technologically speaking.

I wonder if they will become more difficult, socially speaking — if an act like that will become frowned upon, as we might frown upon a form letter condolence note. I wonder what sort of protocols and expectations, what social mores, will emerge over time in response to the disruptions our work has caused and will cause, and how they will shape personal interactions at all levels.

I wonder how much effort we should be putting into influencing the evolution of those emergent social constructs, whether through our work or our personal interactions, and how much of that effort would be ultimately fruitless.

I wonder how intentional people are about what they do, online as well as off; and how intentional they should be.

I wonder what I should say to John.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 March 2015.

• Taking Steps was published on Monday, March 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Culture, Tech, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

R: “What are you playing at?”

G: “Words, words.  They’re all we have to go on.”

My recent-inbox counter incremented by one, and I was between tasks, so I went to take a look.  It was a notification from Facebook:

Jesse Gardner commented on a link you shared.

"*gets some popcorn*"

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

I couldn’t figure out what would have provoked that sort of comment, so I went to look at the link I’d shared and came away even more confused.  What about the link was popcorn-worthy?  It wasn’t even a case of being an inappropriate response: it was so out of left field, it seemed literally disconnected from the post.  I seriously wondered whether it was a reply meant for some other post, accidentally dropped onto mine by some combination of multiple browser tabs and mental distraction.

So I asked, and it turned out Jesse was actually replying to an earlier comment on that link.  Once he clarified, his comment made perfect sense, and it was in fact quite funny.  What had seemed like a complete non sequitur was revealed to fit seamlessly into the conversation.

Words have such power, but none of it their own.  The words “commented on a link you shared” are so neutral, they make the Swiss look hyperpartisan, and yet they were sufficient to fit into my mental state in such a way that I was led completely astray.  I was so taken in by the idea that Jesse was commenting on the link, I never stopped to ask if he was participating in a conversation.

It wasn’t the words that led me astray, but my interpretation of them.  I led me astray.  Everything I brought to that moment of reading, all my experiences and biases, took the incredibly banal concepts encoded in those arbitrary marks and came to a conclusion that had nothing to do with Jesse’s original intent.  An entire flowering construct of incorrect, misleading assumptions grew out of that simple moment of unconscious interpretation.

No matter how hard we work to be clear, no matter how many words we spend on precision, no matter how carefully we choose our words, what people find in our words is more a product of their views than our efforts.

This is the dilemma of communication: we cannot control how people hear us, and yet cannot declaim all responsibility for what they hear.  If we express ourselves badly, or in a way that is misinterpreted by many, that is on us.

This is the dilemma of communication: we cannot control how people speak to us, and yet cannot declaim all responsibility for what we hear.  If we misinterpret another’s intent, or listen in bad faith, that is on us.

Words have such power, but none of it their own.  We invest them with all the power they have, each in our own way.  We rarely think about it, rarely make conscious decisions about what power we invest in which words.  I think we think far less about what we hear than what we say, and still less about why we hear what we hear.

Nothing about communication can be entirely one-sided.  We bring ourselves to the words that pass between us, every node in the network running on a unique protocol, striving for clarity in a landscape that seems built for confusion.

This is dilemma of communication: words.  Words.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 February 2015.

• Words, Words was published on Monday, February 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Tech, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Everything begins, and everything ends.  Sometimes the beginnings are hard to define, and the endings are hard to accept.  Other times the beginnings are clear, and the endings are welcome.

We have a lot of beginnings and endings in our lives.  Beginnings are usually easier than endings.  In fact, some of us dislike endings so much that we avoid them by any means possible.  How many projects have you started, and then let fade from attention, denying them a proper finish?  I’ve done that so many times, I should be ashamed.

This is so common to our industry, though.  Plenty of projects and even programming languages get launched, gain favor, start a buzz, and then gradually fall by the wayside, but they never really end.  There are still people making a living writing COBOL.  There are so few of them left, in fact, they’re probably making a better living than you and me.  COBOL will only die when the last machine shuts down, or else when the last COBOL programmer does.

We see the same dynamics at play in design.  Remember drop shadows?  Some day, we’ll say the same thing about flat design, even responsive design as we now understand it.  Something will build from them, whether as a reaction or an evolution, be given a snappy new name (snappy names are critical to the adoption of design trends), and we’ll look back and say, “Remember…?”

But there is no standard definition of what constitutes the end of a trend.  It’s probably just as well, since in the absence of such a definition, we can support a thriving industry of thinkpieces on The Death Of whatever the thinkpiecer wants to declare dead.  They’re never definitive, but they do generate traffic, which generates ad revenue, which generates higher stock prices for Google.

That is, until some confluence of factors causes Google’s stock to drop, which will in turn launch a thousand breathless thinkpieces on The Death of Google.  They’ll sail off toward the intellectual horizon, questionable axioms and unquestioned assumptions fluttering gaily in the hot air, following in the wakes of the fleets of thinkpieces on The Death of Apple, The Death of Microsoft, The Death of Dell, The Death of IBM, The Death of Kodak, and The Death of Digital Equipment Corporation.

If you live long enough, you start to get a sense that it’s all just a little bit of history repeating, as Shirley Bassey once put it.  The towering crises of youth, both the personal and global, are eventually seen to be iterations on a long-running theme.  When our elders say that youth is wasted on the young, a big part of that observation is the realization that the time of life at which you are the most energetic is also the time in which you’re most likely to expend all that energy taking everything so damn seriously, as if the world is coming to an end.

Which it will, at some point.  Everything does.

The best we can hope for is that an ending comes at the right time, for the right reasons.  We don’t always have the ability to make that happen.  Other times, we do.

Here’s to the last year of The Pastry Box.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 January 2015.

• Sunrise, Sunset was published on Friday, January 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Tech, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

This post is probably going to be a little bit scattered, because I’m still reeling from the overwhelming, unexpected response to the last post.  I honestly expected “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” to be read by maybe two or three hundred people over the next couple of weeks, all of them friends, colleagues, and friends who are colleagues.  I hoped that I’d maybe give a few of them something new and interesting to think about, but it was really mostly just me thinking out loud about a shortcoming in our field.  I never expected widespread linking, let alone mainstream media coverage.

So the first thing I want to say: I owe the Year in Review team in specific, and Facebook in general, an apology.  No, not the other way around.  I did get email from Jonathan Gheller, product manager of the Year in Review team at Facebook, before the story starting hitting the papers, and he was sincerely apologetic.  Also determined to do better in the future.  But I am very sorry that I dropped the Internet on his head for Christmas.  He and his team didn’t deserve it.

(And yes, I’ve reflected quite a bit on the irony that I inadvertently made their lives more difficult by posting, after they inadvertently made mine more difficult by coding.)

Yes, their design failed to handle situations like mine, but in that, they’re hardly alone.  This happens all the time, all over the web, in every imaginable context.  Taking worst-case scenarios into account is something that web design does poorly, and usually not at all.  I was using Facebook’s Year in Review as one example, a timely and relevant foundation to talk about a much wider issue.

The people who I envisioned myself writing for — they got what I was saying and where I was focused.  The very early responses to the post were about what I expected.  But then it took off, and a lot of people came into it without the context I assumed the audience would have.

What surprised and dismayed me were the…let’s call them uncharitable assumptions made about the people who worked on Year in Review.  “What do you expect from a bunch of privileged early-20s hipster Silicon Valley brogrammers who’ve never known pain or even want?” seemed to be the general tenor of those responses.

No.  Just no.  This is not something you can blame on Those Meddling Kids and Their Mangy Stock Options.

First off, by what right do we assume that young programmers have never known hurt, fear, or pain?  How many of them grew up abused, at home or school or church or all three?  How many of them suffered through death, divorce, heartbreak, betrayal?  Do you know what they’ve been through?  No, you do not.  So maybe dial back your condescension toward their lived experiences.

Second, failure to consider worst-case scenarios is not a special disease of young, inexperienced programmers.  It is everywhere.

As an example, I recently re-joined ThinkUp, a service I first used when it was install-yourself-and-good-luck alpha ware, and I liked it then.  I’d let it fall by the wayside, but the Good Web Bundle encouraged me to sign up for it again, so I did.  It’s a fun service, and it is specifically designed to “show how well you’re using your social networks at a more human level,” to quote their site.

So I started getting reports from ThinkUp, and one of the first was to tell me about my “most popular shared link” on Twitter.  It was when I posted a link to Rebecca’s obituary.

“Popular” is maybe not the best word choice there.

Admittedly, this is a small wrinkle, a little moment of content clashing with context, and maybe there isn’t a better single word than “popular” to describe “the thing you posted that had the most easily-tracked response metrics”.  But the accompanying copy was upbeat, cheery, and totally didn’t work.  Something like, “You must be doing something right — people loved what you had to say!”

This was exactly what Facebook did with Year in Review: found the bit of data that had the most easily-tracked response metrics.  Facebook put what its code found into a Year in Review “ad”.  ThinkUp put what its code found into a “most popular” box.  Smaller in scale, but very similar in structure.

I’m not bringing this up to shame ThinkUp, and I hope I haven’t mischaracterized them here.  If they haven’t found solutions yet, I know they’re trying.  They really, really care about getting this right.  In fact, whenever I’ve sent them feedback, the responses have been fantastic — really thoughtful and detailed.

My point is that ThinkUp is a product of two of the smartest and most caring people I know, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash.  Neither of them comes anywhere close to fitting the Young Brogrammer stereotype; they are, if anything, its antithesis, in both form and deed.  And yet, they have fallen prey to exactly the same thing that affected the Year in Review team: a failure to anticipate how a design decision that really worked in one way completely failed in another, and work to handle both cases.  This is not because they are bad designers: they aren’t.  This is not because they lack empathy: they don’t.  This is not because they ignored their users: they didn’t.  This is such a common failure that it’s almost not a failure any more.  It just… is.

We need to challenge that “is”.  I’ve fallen victim to it myself.  We all have.  We all will.  It will take time, practice, and a whole lot of stumbling to figure out how to do better, but it is, I submit, vitally important that we do.

• Well, That Escalated Quickly was published on Saturday, December 27th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Web, and Writing categories.
• There have been ninety-nine replies.

In the face of tragedy and grief, it’s hard to know what to say or do.  And one thing I’ve noticed is that some people — not most, maybe even not many, but more than enough — say and do what they think would help them, without really considering what might be helpful to the person who’s grieving.

I don’t really want to get into the doing side of things at this point, but I can definitely talk about the saying.  The most basic rule is:  don’t let your discomfort with tragedy and grief push you into saying whatever comes to mind.  A person’s grief is not a wall against which you should throw a spaghetti pot of nostrums, hoping that one of them will help.  Maybe one will, but the harm likely caused by the others will outweigh it.

The second most basic rule is:  don’t assume that a grieving person believes what you believe, or even that they believe what they believed before the tragedy.  They may surprise or even shock you.  The atheist may suddenly talk about an afterlife; the theist may angrily reject the existence of higher powers.  These may be temporary shifts, or not, but they are raw, honest expressions of grief.  Apply this rule in the exercise of the most basic rule, above.

Right now, I can only address this from the perspective of a grieving parent, so I will, though this all does apply to anyone who’s grieving — the child of a dead parent, the close friend of the recently deceased, and so on.  Let’s start out with things you should say to a grieving parent.

“I’m so sorry.”

You’ve let them know you feel sorrow for them, are thinking about them, and are generally there in support of them.  It seems like a lot for so little a sentence, but it’s all there.  I think this is just about the most universally acceptable thing you can say to a grieving parent, and it also has the benefit of being the most appropriate thing to say.

Be prepared for them to say “me too” or something like that; otherwise, they’ll probably thank you.  Do not tell them that no thanks are necessary.  Let them acknowledge your care and support in what is likely the only way they can manage, with the only words they can find.  Which leads us to the next thing you can fairly safely say.

“There are no words.”

Because after expressing your sorrow, there really aren’t.  There are no words that can explain it, no words that can make it better, no words that can take away their anguish.  I doubt there ever will be.

Beyond those two things, you can offer to help in some way — which is part of the doing that I said I wasn’t going to get into, but I’ll say here that you should only say this if you’re willing to do laundry or dishes or whatever else they request — or just sit quietly with them until they speak.  Then follow their lead in the conversation.  They may not speak at all, even if you sit with them for hours.  Be okay with this, or be somewhere else.

---

All right, so what do you not say to a grieving parent?  Honestly, we could be here all day with that, but I’ll skip over the ones that are obviously Just Wrong and address some of the most common ones that seem to pass by without comment.  And yes, I’ve had all of them said, tweeted, or Facebooked at me, or at least very near me.

Of course, all of these are dependent on the parent in question.  If they say their child is in a better place now, you can absolutely agree with them.  In fact, you should agree with them, or at least refrain from disagreement, regardless of whatever you personally believe.

Because that’s what you do if a grieving parent expresses a belief you don’t hold: You agree with them.  Now is not the time to be undermining whatever framework is holding them together; they have little enough of that as it is.  If you’re religious and a non-religious parent says that their loved one is gone forever, not existing at all, you go along with it.  If you’re non-religious and a grieving religious parent says their loved one is in a better place, in the arms of God, you go along with it.  This is about them, not you.  Adhere to the Ring Theory at all times.

That said, here we go.

“How are you doing?”

How do you think the parent of a dead child is doing?  Okay, I admit that this might be acceptable if you know them very well or if enough time has passed — though how could you know if enough time has passed? — and because it comes from a place of concern for their well-being, this might get half a pass.  Except what it usually does is force them to either lie conventionally (“I’m okay”) or tell the painful, probably swear-heavy truth.  Better would be “I’ve been thinking about you” or even “I’ve been worried about how you’re doing”, though not by very much.

It’s also very much the case that this has been culturally ingrained for many of us; it’s just a longer way of saying “hello”, fired off without thinking, and so it just slips out.  Grief creates an extraordinary circumstance, though, and you need to go into it challenging all of your preconceived notions about how to interact with other people.  Be aware of what you’re about to say and how it might affect the person in front of you.  (I mean, you should probably always do that anyway, but make sure you do it in this situation.)

“It’s all part of God’s plan.” / “God has a special plan for them.” / “Everything is in God’s hands.”

You just told the parent of a dead child that God planned the death of their child.  That God meant for it to happen, wanted it to happen, and in fact arranged events so that it would be sure to happen.  This is not comforting.  It is very much like the opposite.

“God needed another angel in Heaven.”

You just told the parent of a dead child that their loved one is gone because an all-powerful deity took their child away from them, on purpose, for its needs, not caring what it did to them.  Also, if they don’t believe in God (or even a version of God sufficiently similar to yours), you just said the equivalent of “Santa needed another elf in his workshop.”  Would you say that to a dead child’s parent?  Then don’t say this either.

“Now they’re watching over you.”

You just reminded the parents of a dead child that for all their care and efforts, they could not protect their loved one from untimely death, which is pretty much the most basic responsibility a parent feels.  Furthermore, it is the job (some would say calling, others would say privilege) of parents to watch over and protect their children, not the other way around.  Telling them that this arrangement has now been inverted does not help.

“They’re in a better place now.” / “They’re where they belong.”

You just told the parent of a dead child that there is a place better for them than the home that sheltered them and the family that cherished them.  That the child truly belongs somewhere other than with the people who loved them most.  Don’t do that.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

You just implied that the child is dead because something their parents did resulted in the death.  That wasn’t the intent, but it’s still in there, easily picked up on by parents racked with overwhelming regret and, very possibly, guilt.  (Even parents who did everything they could in a no-win situation are likely to feel guilt that they didn’t do more or couldn’t find a way out.)

“Maybe it’s for the best.”

You just told the parent of a dead child that it’s better their child is dead than still alive.  No.  Just no.

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The one I almost included was “I’m praying for you”, because you don’t always know what the other person thinks of prayer.  In general, though, I think most non-religious people (even grieving parents) will mentally translate it to “I’m thinking of you and care about you”.  Of course, if you know for a fact the grieving parent is non-religious, you should probably think hard about skipping this one.  You can still pray for the non-religious, obviously, but say that you’ve been thinking about them.

There are a bunch more that are borderline.  “At least they aren’t suffering any more” is very risky, for example, even if the child was in fact suffering greatly before they died.  It reminds the parent of their child’s suffering, for example, and they may feel guilt as well as grief about that (see above).

As a last note, be careful about what terminology you use regarding death.  Some parents won’t want to say or hear that word, preferring instead phrases like “passed away” or “passed on”.  Others actually find phrases like “passed away” or “lost” to be more painful.  Again, take your cues from the griever.  If possible, don’t use any death-related terminology until they do, and then use the words they do.

To sum up:  think hard about what will help them rather than what will soothe you; do not contradict expressions of grief even when they conflict with your beliefs; be sure to adhere to the Ring Theory; take your cues from the griever.  And be prepared for just about anything.

My thanks to Gini Judd, Kate Kikel, and TJ Luoma for their pre-publication feedback on this post.

• What Not To Say to a Grieving Parent was published on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014.
• It was assigned to the Cancer and Commentary categories.
• There have been thirty-eight replies.

From the wise and insightful Amber Fisher, who credits The Rocket Science Group’s Voice and Tone as an inspiration:

One of the things I teach tech writers: it’s okay to have fun with your audience most of the time. But never joke with frustrated people. If you’re delivering bad news, an alert, or helping a new user troubleshoot a problem, be straightforward and transparent.

As I’m sure Amber would be the first to say, said rule is not just for tech writers.  In any online interaction, synchronous or asynchronous, with someone you don’t know really, really well, that rule applies.  Always.  And the defense “Hey, man, where’s your sense of humor?” is usually the reddest of flags that you have already screwed this up, and should consider apologizing.

(I’m especially looking at you, Twitterers.)

• No Laughing Matter was published on Wednesday, March 20th, 2013.
• It was assigned to the Commentary category.
• There have been two replies.

(In television, the “stinger” is the clip that plays during or just after the closing credits of a show.)

On Friday, the Web Standards Project announced its own dissolution.  I felt a lot of things upon reading the announcement, once I got over my initial surprise: nostalgia, wistfulness, closure.  And over it all, a deep sense of respect for the Project as a whole, from its inception to its peak to its final act.

In some ways, the announcement was a simple formalization of a longstanding state of affairs, as the Project has gradually grown quieter and quieter over the years, and its initiatives had been passed on to other, more active homes.  It was still impressive to see the group explicitly shut down.  I can’t think of the last time I saw a group that had been so influential and effective recognize that it was time to turn off the lights, and exit with dignity.  As they wrote:

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

I have a long history with the WaSP.  Way, way back, deep in the thick of the browser wars, I was invited to be a member of the CSS Action Committee, better known as the CSS Samurai.  We spent the next couple of years documenting how things worked (or, more often, didn’t) in CSS implementations, and — and this was the clever bit, if you ask me — writing up specific plans of action for browsers.  The standards compliance reviews we published told browsers what they needed to fix first, not just what they were getting wrong.  I can’t claim that our every word was agreed with, let alone acted upon, but I’m pretty confident those reviews helped push browser teams in the right direction.  Or, more likely, helped browser teams push their bosses in the direction the teams already wanted to go.

Succumbing to a wave of nostalgia, I spent a few minutes trawling my archives.  I still have what I think is all the mail from the Samurai’s mailing list, run through Project Cool’s servers, from when it was set up in August 1998 up through June of 2000.  My archive totals 1,716 messages from the group, as well as some of the Steering Committee members (mostly Glenn Davis, though George Olsen was our primary contact during the Microsoft style sheets patent brouhaha of February 1999).  If I’m not reading too much into plain text messages over a decade old, we had a pretty great time.  And then, after a while, we were done.  Unlike the WaSP itself, we never really declared an end.  We didn’t even march off into the sunset having declared that the farmers always win.  We just faded away.

Not that that’s entirely a bad thing.  At a certain point, our work was done, and we moved on.  Still, I look back now and wish we’d made it a little more formal.  Had we done so, we might have said something like the WaSP did:

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now…

And so it is.  These last years have shown that the job is in very good hands.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” said Margaret Mead.  I see now that the way those small groups truly change the world is by convincing the rest of the world that they are right, thus co-opting the world to their cause.  Done properly, the change makes the group obsolete.  It’s a lesson worth remembering, as we look at the world today.

I’m honored to have been a part of the WaSP, and I offer my deepest samurai bow of respect to its founders, its members, and its leaders.  Thank you all for making the web today what it is.

• The Stinger was published on Monday, March 4th, 2013.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, History, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been two replies.

[FOR PUBLICATION WEDNESDAY 7 NOVEMBER OR WHENEVER ALL THE COURT CHALLENGES ARE SETTLED]

After a campaign season that seemed even more vitriolic and interminable than any before it, America finally made its choice for President.  To many, that choice was surprising, even unthinkable.  To his supporters, of course, the win was a welcome vindication after so many difficulties and setbacks.  Between the deluge of attack ads, the debate stumbles, and the lackluster polling, it must have seemed at times as if the odds were insurmountable.  Despite all the roadblocks, however, things moved his way in the late stages, providing enough lift to secure the election.

Of course, nothing will be easy: with a divided Congress, the President will have a tough time making progress on his legislative agenda, and overseas challenges are no less acute now that the U.S. election has been settled.  The budgetary situation is still a major problem, with the “fiscal cliff” and the prospect of yet another bruising Congressional showdown looming ever larger in the country’s headlights.  The one bright spot is that — assuming the will is found to avoid plunging over the cliff — the economic recovery is likely to continue, albeit as slowly and cautiously as ever.  To a populace wearied by the campaign, any positive news will be more than welcome.

(With apologies to The Economist.)

• Election Day Results was published on Tuesday, November 6th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Commentary category.
• There have been four replies.