I’m terrified, and I’m furious.
It’s easy to put specifics to the fear. I have a Sikh coworker who shaved off his beard and stopped wearing a turban after 9/11 – how much worse will it be for him now? My female Muslim coworker, a Syrian expat who wears a hijab, and her children – what will they now face? What will happen to my chronically ill sister with a potential Obamacare repeal? What about my friends in same-sex marriages? What about all my other coworkers, immigrants or the children of immigrants, Latinx and Southeast Asian and others?
And then there’s my personal fears, when I too am a child of immigrants. I’m a woman, and I’m queer, and I’m Jewish, and while I don’t identify as white I pass, but what will that mean in the near future? I have my own health issues, including one treated by birth control pills – will that be a problem? I live in California, on the coast. It’s pretty damned liberal. But I’ve looked at the maps the Southern Poverty Law Center puts out, and I know where the hate groups are, and how close they are. How long before they gain strength, with Trump legitimising their stance?
I’m terrified, and I’m furious.
The margins were so narrow in some states. There are so many problems with voter disenfranchisement, but the third-party protest votes alone could have changed the entire picture of this election. The two-party system is broken, and the electoral college is too, but voting third-party in a presidential election is not the way to change that. And I wish I was more surprised by the number of people who went that way despite all of that – the number of people who don’t care – but I’m not. And that makes me even more angry, and exhausted, and depressed.
What do you say to something like this? What can you say? I’ve been screaming into the void all evening, ranting at friends and clinging together in the face of an increasingly bleak inevitability. And no, it’s not the end of the world, but the ramifications of this outcome are at best disheartening. At their worst? There are too many possibilities.
Tonight I’ll be pragmatic. I’ll make a cup of tea and try to calm down, to make my mind let go of all these what-ifs and worst case scenarios. It is what it is. I’ll think of those people who I’m frightened for, and how they matter. I’ll try to find hope for solidarity among us.
Because it is what it is, but we can still learn and grow, and in that change what may be.