November 9, 2016
It’s 8:30 PM and I’m in bed. I feel like if I go to sleep
now, when I wake up, it will again be November 9, but everything that has
happened over the last 20-some hours will just have been a bad dream. It feels
surreal, that Donald Trump has just become my President for the next four
years. I’ve never been a particularly patriotic American citizen, but I have always loved what
America stood for, that American dream which lured so many people (including my
parents) to her shores. But now, everything just feels broken.
Last night I was in a bar watching the election results come
in, and Trump was ahead. I turned to my boyfriend and asked, “What if Trump really
does win?” He assured me that it wasn’t possible. He would have to win every
swing state and then some. So later, I allowed myself to drift off to sleep while the counts were
still coming in, assured that when I woke up Hillary would have won like
everybody expected and that would be that. I woke up around 2 am and turned on
my phone to check the results. And thought I was dreaming. I had to wake my boyfriend up, saying, “Hey... I think Trump won.” He woke up and checked the news on his
phone. Then looked up the count results on Google, just to confirm. Then
refreshed the page a few times. We tried to go back to sleep, but it was a long
time in coming.
Getting to work felt surreal. I wondered if I were to not
show up to the office, whether the election results could be used as a
legitimate excuse for missing work. (I work for a foreign firm, so no.) I have one co-worker who is a foreign national with a green card. He is also gay. We just gave
each other crazy faces and discussed for a few minutes about how we could not
believe what had just happened. Another co-worker came in, an older, white Texan male, who expressed extreme relief at the election finally being over
and done with, and that he was not unhappy with the results. A third co-worker
came in - a white woman - and she was elated. She struck a victory stance and yelled, “wahoo!” as she expressed her
joy that Trump had triumphed over Clinton. “He’s gonna get things done,” she
said beamingly to my manager. My manager is a young man from another country who came to the
States for his master’s degree and hasn’t left since. When the overjoyed
co-worker left our room, we turned to each other. “I can’t believe that she
actually supports and is happy for this kind of man to be your new president,”
he said. “Doesn’t she realize the consequences of having someone like him…”
“and
for somebody like you…”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,
wherever I end up...”
He would never admit it to me, but I can’t imagine how
he, amongst countless other people, must have felt waking up today to the news
that the new President elect in this country that they have called home for so
many years, will make it so much more difficult for them to continue calling it
their home.
At lunch with co-workers, I couldn’t focus on anything else,
couldn’t talk about anything else. At the restaurant, my eyes kept on being
drawing to the TV screens, with news anchors discussing the results, with the
counts being replayed from the night before. My parents called. My mom asked if
I had voted, to which I replied, “of course, did you?” to which she responded
that they had. Then she remarked, “Well, looks like Trump is our new president.”
“Looks like it.”
“Well, God must have chosen him.”
“No, we chose him. You chose him – we Americans chose him.”
“Yeah, but it must have been God’s
will and it was part of His plan.”
“Uh…”
“And God will guide him.”
“I don’t
think he believes in God, mom.”
“Well, we have to pray that he will be led by
God.”
“But I don’t think he believes in God.”
“Well, we have to pray that he
will be moved by God. God chose him – just like He chose us, you know?”
“Um….”
I
didn’t have the courage to ask who she had voted for. I was afraid of hearing
her response.
All day long, my Facebook feed has been flooded by statuses
by my friends – both American and international – expressing their fear,
disbelief, anger, disgust that the man who is expected to be the leader of a
nation that was founded on democracy, liberty, and equality should be a racist,
misogynist, bigot, xenophobe, and fear-monger who was able to capitalize on people's frustrations and uneducated fears. I’m discouraged by how many
people were angry enough that they would consider Donald Trump a
more qualified option over Hillary Clinton, and I’m frustrated by those who thought that
by voting for third-party candidates like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein they felt
they were actually going to make a difference. I’m baffled by how Hillary
Clinton could win the popular vote, but the Donald Trump would end up with the
electoral votes - and with that, the presidency. I’m scared – not necessarily for myself – but for my friends,
for my classmates, for my colleagues, who genuinely feel unsafe – because of those
simmering feelings of resentment and hate that now have free reign to burst to
the surface in the form of open discrimination, hurtful remarks and actual
physical aggression against people whose only transgression happen to be the
color of their skin, where their mother gave birth to them, or the person
they fell in love with. I wonder how the description of what it means to be “American”
will be defined over the next four years – or even over the next few months. I
marvel how words like “nasty” and “disastrous” have become so engrained into even professional journalism’s common vocabulary. I feel ashamed to call myself an American and to be
associated with what the Untied States of America has decided will be her image to the rest of the world. I’m trying to stay optimistic –
or at the very least, pragmatic – but I’m finding it really, really difficult. Even
now, I can’t help but hang on to the thought that tomorrow, or the day after, or
next week, there will be a recount, or something will happen, that will make all this go away. I don’t believe that protesting will
do anything, and I believe that we must continue to move forward, but I still
can’t fully comprehend that this is the reality we live in.
