It was weird Tuesday, watching the election returns come in. I’ve never quite felt anything like it.
I was asleep on September 11 when the towers got hit, but I can’t help feeling that if I had been watching The Today Show that morning, I would have experienced the same kinds of feelings I was experiencing on Tuesday. The anxiety creeped in minute by minute. Was this really happening? Were we really going to do this?
I honestly didn’t think we had it in us.
Cathy and Aaron weren’t home yet. Things started happening around 5pm PST. Florida started to tip red. It should have been called already. Then North Carolina, then Virginia? The next hour, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were all too close to call. They should have been called, blue, and done with at that point. What the fuck was happening.
I felt panicky, like for real panicky. I made Nate leave the room. I’m not even sure what he did that hour. Could have helped himself to all the Halloween candy in the house and I wouldn’t have noticed.
Cathy and Aaron came home. She asked if I was all right cause I’ve had a cold lately. I said NO. She said, “Awww…” and I said, “No, it’s not that.” And she said, “What, the election? It’ll get bett…” “NO, it won’t. It’s all going bad. All of it.”
She took the kids to the grocery store, presumably just to get them away from me. I couldn’t leave the couch. I was going to make dinner before they got home but the best I could do was put a frozen pizza in the oven. I don’t even think I ate any that night.
Who the fuck even are we?
My friend Krysta is currently driving around the country in an R.V. with her boyfriend. She’s from the Boston area, and has never really seen most of America. Until the last two weeks. She said she was shocked at the … depressed nature of pretty much every small town she drove through. She said she’d never seen anything like it.
I told her, “I have. I grew up in it.”
I look at Obama’s America and see progress and hope and economic growth and acceptance and positivity. But small town America just doesn’t see it that way.
Small town America got Trump elected on Tuesday. They want their country back, they say. It’s been taken away from them by the elite, the gays, the immigrants, the blacks. And most of all, Hillary.
I can’t even tell you how sad I feel for her right now. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it feels like to be her? People hate her SO MUCH. They hate her so much they were willing to elect Donald Trump president, just so she couldn’t have it.
Exit polls show that 63% of people feel that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. That means that there’s a substantial portion of the population that feels he’s unfit to be president, but voted for him anyway. I simply have not the words for such people.
But they won. They won, didn’t they. By God, they got their country back. They validated all the hate, the lechery, the toxicity, the venom that he spewed. They validated him. Al Qaeda released a statement congratulating America for electing Trump, saying it effectively ends our claim to the high moral ground on which we claim to reside. They have a point.
I’m mad at the 46% of Americans who didn’t vote. I’m mad at the 25% of Americans who voted for him. I’m mad at the 3% of Americans who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. I’m mad at people who “sat it out” because “they’re both awful.” I’m mad at the media for allowing her email scandal to seem even remotely equivalent in severity to the myriad of dangerous ideas and deplorable actions of Donald Trump.
But mostly, I’m just sad.
I couldn’t even be alone on Wednesday. I drove downtown to have lunch with Cathy just to get away from the house, the TV, the computer. I haven’t been on Facebook or Twitter since Tuesday night. I’m tired of processing my feelings through other people’s reactions so I decided to break up with it for the time being. I’m sure it won’t last.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with our country. I don’t think he’s going to be as awful as he seems. I don’t think he’s going to be able to do all of the terrible things his supporters want him to. But he’s going to try. He’s going to have a congress behind him, and soon enough, he’ll have the Supreme Court behind him.
So, congratulations white people. Congratulations, white women, who voted for him 50% – 40%. You get to make America great again. And a few years from now, when we’re deeper in debt, broken, backwards, and angry, I wonder who you’ll blame.