When they ask me, many generations hence, inshallah, how this happened, I will tell them: we failed to listen to each other’s pain. As I watched the campaign with as much distance as I could muster, I wondered who each side was trying to convince. Maybe I just don’t understand the undecided voters, but I struggle to believe there were that many people who really weren’t sure whether to vote for Hillary or Donald. If people were undecided it was likely between a major party candidate and a third party candidate, or between a major party candidate and voting for a presidential party candidate at all. And is mudslinging really going to win those votes? From the start, I blamed the media for all the free coverage Trump received by being just so ludicrous. At first they thought it was funny - we all did, I think. But then it stopped being funny. If anyone was surprised by the kind of scandals that rose up around Trump, I don’t think they were paying attention.
I was devastated by the results of the election, but I wasn’t shocked. I’ve spent enough time amongst Libertarians and in the Heartland to know how frustrated people on the right and left are with the establishment. A vitriolic comment from a pregnant dental hygienist who had me watching Fox News while my teeth were being cleaned gave me a sense of the anti-Hillary animosity that runs through conservative communities. And of course voters are not rational actors, and never have been. Poor whites voted for Donald Trump for the same reasons they defended slavery nearly two centuries ago. Back then it was the largely inaccessible American Dream of one day owning slaves themselves; today Trump represents the Dream of having great wealth such that one can refuse to be beholden to anyone or accountable for one’s words and actions - a perverted freedom.
I experienced my sorrow over the election results by crying over shrimp. That’s what burst the little hazy bubble I’d been living in for the first couple days post-election. My mom has some moral reason she has forgotten as to why she doesn’t eat shrimp. I usually eat shrimp without thinking twice about it, because it can be so difficult to eat in a way that truly reflects one’s moral values in this world and I have to draw the line somewhere. But that day I paused in contemplating the shrimp soup. One of the many reasons I was hesitant to move into the dorms was because I didn’t want to lose control over my food ingredients. I have access to only a small and grimy shared kitchen, and while though I suppose I could put forth a moral argument that would get me out of the meal plan, the truth is I enjoy the company of dining with my fellow students too much (which has its own redeeming moral value) to want to opt out. I don’t eat the meat but I do eat the fish. That post-election day, I stood there pondering whether the shrimp soup would be delicious and nourishing enough to compensate for its moral, ecological cost, and suddenly I thought to myself, “We’re all fucked. At this point, what does it matter?” I served myself a bowl of soup. I took the soup and a plate of food to the table with my friends, and realized the weight of what I was feeling. I couldn’t eat until I named it, and in naming it, the tears came.
The tears passed, I ate my dinner. Since then, on occasion, I’ve prayed “estaghfirallah” (forgive me god) before consuming something of particularly questionable moral origin. Not that god cares, but it helps me. In truth, my life felt more clarity and resolve in the post election days. I followed my heart and my dreams - in my schoolwork, in my own life - and pieces fell in to place as the semester drew to a close.
But January is hard. There’s all this energy about new beginnings and recommitments on an arbitrary cold dark day, when one is still recovering from all the feelings that Christmas with (or without) the family brings. The first week brought incredible highs - soaking in the baths at Esalen, listening to the ocean crash on the cliffs below - and tragic lows - the death of a co-worker. And throughout, this creeping sense of doom that I’ve tried to keep at bay but can’t anymore. I’ve blocked out as much of the political hogwash as I can, because I don’t see how this game of coverage is any different than the pre-election one, which clearly didn’t work. If I don’t listen, if I don’t hear about white supremacists in the cabinet (and who knows what will happen to the Supreme Court!), then maybe it won’t affect my sheltered little California daydream. I can take care of myself, grow and love and challenge and most of all increase beauty in the world around me. And then we’ll be okay, right?
For all my extensive studies of social movements and the Holocaust and evil and altruism and change, I feel woefully unprepared for this moment. But maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I would bet that most true heroes of the past did not sit around wondering, “How do I make sure they won’t judge me in the future the way I judge my racist, colonizing ancestors?” Rather, they said, “In the face of horror, how do I maintain the kind of decency that allows beauty to continue to live?” Activist friends, take note: This is not a time to burn yourself out. We need much more from you than your marching, so do what you need to do to build justice and increase love, compassion, and generosity in the coming years.
In the face of my fear of what Friday will bring, and at risk of offending those whose health care is already at risk or in other ways are already hurting, I also feel very strongly the need to recognize this as an opportunity. A Hillary victory would have meant the continuation of business as usual - but Business as Usual was NOT working. Even a Bernie victory, I feared, would not challenge the system enough - progressive policies would come from the White House, but Bernie would likely have been as nearly constrained by the system as Obama was. Obama, who was going to be our savior. Obama, who, as a black man, was our symbol of how far we’ve come. Obama, who was attacked for any affiliation with angry and outspoken others, and even as President of the United States of America perhaps felt he lacked the privilege to speak from that place of crude and open critique in the way that both Sanders and Trump confidently do. Obama, who disappointed us in large part, I think, because we disappointed him.
Obama was able to be elected as the first black president of the United States because he bought into the American Dream, he used it to sell himself. And it worked. I was there, in 2004, when he preached his personal American Dream story at the DNC and was launched onto the national stage. I was sold; I wanted him to be my president. And four years later he was! But the Obama presidency has shown many of us that progress is not the clear arc we wanted to believe it was. Politics is a messy, messy game of egos, the results of which sometimes work in your favor but in a convoluted and expensive way. I have a lot of respect for people who stay in the game for the right reasons, but if we want to get better results, we need to either redesign the board or change the rules. Donald Trump’s victory demonstrates how possible it is to game the game - to manipulate the people, to get passed the checks in the system designed to protect us from demagogues, to treat the campaign like a joke and win. And on one level, he gets away with it because we all know the game is rigged anyway. In a feat of cosmic irony, he played the Trump card. The game is over; to keep playing is futile. We can restart playing the same game, though last I checked that involved a lot of bloodshed, genocide, slavery, environmental destruction and devastation, extinction of species, and just in general exploitation and abuse of everything. Or we can decide that maybe it is time to play a new game. What would America look like if instead of just applying what propertied, Protestant, heterosexual white men had to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone, we allowed everyone to shape what that means, to name and define the terms of our aspirations? What if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t the values of progress, aren’t the dreams we want to drive our nation? What if, instead, we found some others, such as justice, love, and peace?
And so, the dream dies and we must lay it to rest. Some of us will just hunker down and try to survive as best we can, hoping in four years to reset the clock, try again, not make the same mistakes, revive the dream. But in the face of climate catastrophe, in the face of Syrian refugees, in the face of the many for whom the American Dream was never a possibility, in the face of all those who have come to these shores or crossed this continent in search of something better, hoping beyond hope that somewhere out here was a second chance, was freedom, was a new beginning, was home, hibernation is not enough. We need a metamorphosis, to rethink everything - home, freedom, family, America - and decide what will rise from the ashes of this dream. Our ancestors, previous generations of organizers, has been fertilizing and cultivating and otherwise preparing the ground for us. We need to decide carefully what we want to plant - but perhaps this time with an awareness that we will never be able to completely impose our will on this land, it too has things to say, and a successful American future is only possible if we learn to work with it. We have so much left to learn, but the work has already begun. Let’s go.
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