Now what.

A drunk, unstable, angry 16-year-old demands the car keys, and his parents give them up because it’ll be okay. Their smart daughter, who pays attention, confronts them but they ignore her. You know how girls can be, and it’ll be okay.

As of this morning, more than 71 million of my fellow American citizens elected for US president a convicted felon, an unrepentant seditionist, a sexual predator, a bigot, a misogynist, and an emotionally unstable grifter. A man cognitively impaired to the point of being unable to spontaneously string together three coherent sentences, and openly contemptuous of the fundamental principles of America’s constitutional democracy. They said okay, 71 million times, to handing the keys to a man who will validate and instigate an aggrieved subset of his supporters, a gang of belligerent people in this country who hate blacks, hate immigrants, hate women, hate Jews, hate Muslims, hate queers, hate the free press, hate environmentalists, hate higher education, and hate people like me. Who sneer at economic equity, social justice, science, history, human rights, restraint and sacrifice for the common good, and social democracy. And who, by the way, have anger issues and own a lot of guns. But it’ll be okay.

This was the most dismal electoral outcome in US history, and if you scan the American story you will see that we’ve elected a few real beauties over the years. Nothing rivals this one. I went to bed heartsick and woke up heartbroken. It will not be okay.

Facing your true self is a fraught endeavor. It requires a long gaze at all your embarrassing, humbling shortcomings. One thing I know about myself is that I live in and through my head. By making art, especially photography but also these essays, I try to engage my heart and yours, but what I mostly do with my day is think, learn, question, read, listen, think, analyze, critique, reason, and think some more about what I’ve been thinking. I value smart over emotional, reason over impulse, and regardless of how hard I try I may never fully understand irrationality. I nod when my wife says it’s just human nature, it’s how we’re constructed, people do ill-considered things when they are scared, and I know she is right but I still cannot fathom so much irrational behavior. The best I can do is acknowledge it. I have a better grasp of quantum physics than I have of the average American voter.

The voters who handed Donald Trump the car keys yesterday have convinced themselves that he and the greedy, vindictive punks who surround him care about them, have their best interests in mind, speak for them, will protect them from people with accents, and will fight for them to make their lives better. Thirty minutes of sober reflection on Trump’s first term in the White House would shred that conviction, but the majority of the American electorate can’t be bothered. I like to compliment myself as an acute observer, but I’ve been caught by surprise, and not for the first time, by the depth of American resentment and conservatism, and the size of the population who can’t shrug off a $120 grocery bill. There must be more of them than I’d realized. It’s been one rude awakening.

So, what to do? Several years ago at a writer’s conference, I was asked to list the three things that get me up in the morning. I wrote, “Love, beauty, and language.” (I know, I know, two of those three are heart, not mind, but work with me here.) All three are still there today and will be there tomorrow, ever-rich raw material for making a life that means something. There’s solace in that.

When the evangelical preacher Rick Warren published The Purpose Driven Life in 2002, I had no interest in reading it. But pondering purpose seemed like a pretty good idea, so prompted by the book’s title I began thinking about my purpose. I ended up with another three-item list: love my wife, love my friends, and tell true stories. I’ve not wavered from that and I don’t intend to now. The coming years are going to be rough and it’s tempting to go for a walk until I hit the Canadian border. I don’t relish what I have to do now. There’s a lot of hatred in my heart and I will have to deal with that while I figure out how best to protect the people I love, wrestle with my own mind and its limitations, and find some way to stare down the malevolence.

We could always disengage and languish and say, Fine, you brought this on yourselves, now enjoy the havoc you’ve enabled. Or we could work.

I choose to work. See you at the office.