In an online discussion regarding badgers, I found a post that seems meaningful at this moment in history:

“Badgers are incredibly dangerous. I’ve been chased out of a cotton field by a pissed off one, and there isn’t any way I’d want to mess with one intentionally.

“One of my parent’s friends found a baby one (no mother in sight, not sure why it wasn’t in a burrow) with its eyes still closed and took it home. They raised it and had it in their home with their dogs.

“One day they were giving the two dogs and the badger a treat, all of them got one, but one dog ate his faster and decided to take the badger’s snack from it.

“The badger gutted the dog in the living room with its claws and returned to eating the treat like nothing happened. …”

Many, many of my friends are in shock that the voters of the United States would choose to vote for a man whose disrespect for women is now legendary.

Here is what they are saying:

“Yesterday, I couldn’t think or speak through the tears. …

“I don’t know yet how I can best help, but I can offer sanctuary to any friend who feels unsafe or undone. If you want or need to leave the U.S. in the coming months, (my husband) and I have a guest room in our home here in Portugal, and we would be happy to share it. We chose to retire here for lots of reasons, and we have loads of resources to recommend if moving makes sense for you. Take care, my friends.”

Then she referred to words written by John Pavlovitz …

“Kamala Harris didn’t lose, America did. As a nation, we collectively failed her — and in doing so we failed girls and women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, Jewish people, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the people of Ukraine, and Gaza, and the planet.

“It’s unthinkable, that instead of being able to celebrate a beautiful, hopeful new chapter in the story of this nation with a leader who appealed to the best of our natures — we will instead be holding a postmortem for democracy as we enter our 250th year, stewarded by a malevolent sociopath who despises empathy and shuns the law.

“I truly thought we were better than this, that our shared humanity would show up. I thought we would reject this hatred and ugliness once and for all.

“I hate being wrong about the majority of the people of this nation. I don’t know what’s ahead. All I know is that good-hearted human beings are more necessary now than ever. We did all that we could to avoid this moment, but now that it’s here we’ll just have to decide who we will be.

“There is no way to comprehend or measure how grievous an error this is, but the only thing the decent people of this nation can do is wake up tomorrow and fight like hell for what we still believe is worth the fight, and we will.”

I know many of you will disagree with me for printing this. You know what? You can despise me all you want.

I invite you to despise me because I have Jewish, gay and transgender friends whom I truly love.

I invite you to despise me because years ago I had a miscarriage. I was married, working as the first female managing editor of a venerable old New England newspaper, and then underwent a D&C so I wouldn’t die.

You are also welcome to despise me for leaving a dangerous marriage supported by my father’s prediction: “He’ll either kill you or ruin your life.”

Or, say, why not despise me because I was never formally baptized, instead taking to the streets my quest for a personal relationship with the spiritual power that passes all my understanding?

While you’re at it, despise me for doing my job here.

You can despise me, say, for never running a pro-Trump political cartoon in the lead-up to the election, even though I was cautioned to do so via email by a local officer of the law, albeit in a veiled passive aggressive manner.

Heck, you can even pre-despise me — or probably I should say disrespect me in this instance — like in the case of a local candidate for office who, in an email, referred to this paper as the Daily Freeman Judah.

You can despise me for reporting the news. I mean, why the heck not?

So what?

I remember huddling in my bathrobe after a rape in my own home. There was a gun involved.

I also remember how I felt when I was huddling for so long afterwards in that same bathrobe. Frozen. Hopeless. Terrified. For me, the world in those days had ended.

That’s how I felt Wednesday morning when I learned the election news. You can despise me all you want, but I sat in my home office, which was the bedroom in which I was raped so many years ago, and for a few brutal moments the end-of-the-world feelings conquered my soul.

Then I remembered that I am a badger.

I opened this column with a quote from an online post about them. Here’s how it ends:

“A guy I worked for loves all those cowboy sayings, and his favorite one to apply to all manner of critters was ‘don’t corner something meaner than you.'”

That, of course, includes a badger.

Jane Curtis is interim editor of the Daily Freeman-Journal. She is a 2024 Iowa Newspaper Association Master Columnist.