“Hush. Be quiet. Get off social media. Process.”
This is what I told myself after sitting through the most unprofessional, nasty and incendiary presidential campaign I have witnessed. It was time to face the ugly truth of who would be our next president, a task all too surreal and all too daunting.
I had a friend — a former co-worker and fellow writer — check in with me this week. She confided that she had felt similar feelings to me after the election. She is a white woman who, although she had contemplated the possibility of Trump winning, felt somehow immobilized in the harsh reality of what that means once it happened. We both agreed that we would need time to process and nurture our mental and spiritual health.
It is too exhausting, post-election, to try to analyze who voted, who didn’t and why. I will leave that to the political pundits who get paid to hash it all out nightly on our various media outlets. I have my own theories, but the ugly reality is we are now here. I will need to continue processing, but if I had to reduce my present mindset to one word or feeling I can only think of one: resolve.
I am resolved.
I am resolved in knowing that despite glaring character flaws that would be most accurately labeled as racist, sexist, and misogynistic — not to mention admittedly being a sexual predator — many folks still said, “This will do,” and elected Trump as our next president.
I am resolved in dealing with the schizophrenic expectation that his supporters want to now normalize his behavior and expect folks who have been at the receiving end of his hateful rhetoric to get in formation and come together in some bizarre world of solidarity. That’s easy for you to say, if he’s not gunning for you.
I am resolved in knowing that folks are so scared, broken and disenfranchised that many would vote against their own self-interest in the remote hope that a billionaire businessman with no prior political experience or history of helping the disenfranchised would all of a sudden be their savior and champion.
I am resolved in the hypocrisy of a president elect that calls for solidarity and wants folks to set aside their differences because he wants to represent all of America, but when given the chance to choose a diverse cabinet he appoints folks who look like him in both race and gender. Trump’s cabinet choices include Jeff Sessions; meaning that a man whose nomination for a federal judge position was rejected due to his historically racist comments and actions is now frontrunner to be our next attorney general, the nation’s top law enforcement position.
I am resolved in the irony that this man will follow our current president, who has faced eight years of racially charged barbs while all the time keeping it classy and rising above the muck to handle the daily sobering business that his office demanded. Now President Obama — like so many other brothers have had to do in their employment tenure — must face the task of training his less-credentialed and less-qualified replacement; an act made all the more bitter by the fact that it is someone who has publicly maligned his name and character and even questioned his citizenship, something sickeningly reminiscent of a “Where are your papers, boy” slavery vernacular.
I am resolved that this election has opened a festering wound of racism and hate in this country and some folks are feeling emboldened and validated in those feelings; so emboldened that minorities have already been targeted in incidents across the country.
I am also resolved that some of these fools will have to be checked if they step to the wrong person in their Trump-induced hubris.
I am resolved that there are some folks beginning to see that they have been conned and will eventually fall victim to the ultimate okie doke when they see how Trump is not representing everyone and how ill-prepared he is for office. You would think facing the enormity of what being the commander in chief entails would usher in a laser focus rather than to see Trump wasting time on Twitter wars with the casts of Broadway musicals and Saturday Night Live.
However, I am most resolved in knowing that for as many folks that are behind Trump there are just as many who do not support his divisive ideology. I know this will be hard for a lot of folks, but for those that are accustomed to being marginalized this will be business as usual. So I am resolved that I will do what I have always done and press forward and do me.
This article appears in Nov 23-29, 2016.
The day Trump won the highest office in the land is the day the country officially went bats**t crazy. Forget his bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, narcissism. This is a 70-year-old man who stays up all night tweeting replies to everyone who gets under his thin orange skin. That should be enough to disqualify him from office.
But no. Not in 2016. Not in the Year of the Crazy.
Obama brought class, intelligence and reason to the White House. Trump brings tantrums and anti-intellectualism. Gonna be a long four years.
But I’m with you, CE. I’m resolved to battle this blowhard clown all the way down to the wire. He didn’t win the popular vote. He didn’t even win a majority of Republican primary votes. He’s a con man and carnival barker who slipped through the back door because the Establishment couldn’t open its eyes long enough to develop a winning strategy against the worse presidential candidate in history.
Trump is not my president. He’s just a temporary tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I’m resolved to demand that the opposition party and media keep a laser focus on all of Trump’s shady deals, shady connections, and shady friends and colleagues. I guarantee something will come up — something YUUUUGE — that will send him out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on his a88.
Stay strong. Stay focused.
This is politics such as it is. We had a choice between two candidates neither of whom represented what was best for America, and so, once again, we were forced to choose between the lesser of two evils because once again, we found ourselves caught up in the embrace of the partisan political process as if it were out only hope for change. And so it is as long as we are foolish enough to surrender our potential power to one man. I have said this before, and I will say it again. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us much about using our power collectively to bring about real social change, and yet we have forgotten the lessons. King placed little faith in the partisan political process. Instead he showed people how they could work together to make the changes they wanted. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight, but he showed that it was possible. Our hope does not lie with any single person. It does not lie in laws, elections, or ever Supreme Court decisions. It lies in our collective will to do what is necessary, and unless we are willing and take action ourselves, we will fall into the despair of the outcome of elections, and we will wait for another four years to pass so that we can expend all of our energy and squander our faith on the possible outcome of an election. Einstein said that insanity was doing the same thing repeatedly expecting a different outcome. And so here we are writing a tale told by idiots. The rest is silence.
I think we are most compelled now to look at our lives through the modest evolutions from which so many have and still evolve.
I impenitently stand on the sturdy shoulders of those whose devotion to change though not violent was still virulent and vituperative. I know the names of god mothers and fathers my own mother and father–whose flesh side of hand bore the scars of hours and hours of unrelenting work in bad conditions though in distinguished and dignified silence still voluminously tore down institutions like this newly proposed national one– that was meant to do them harm. I have stood in sun, rain, wind, and cold with black community leaders who rallied their folk and other looking folk from all over and dared them to be still while local, county, state and federal leaders unabashedly targeted populations and attempted to undermine basic dignities that lineage blood had shed to attain. I have had my fair share of voter education rallies, donation pickups for clothing pantries, donation dropout to senior citizen high rises and section 8 community dwellers, document reads and signature signs for the unable to do so and have caught myself on occasions stopping just short of begging to hear just one more sage line from one of the most encouraging older mentor men I knew whose AIDs related death so stunned me in my younger adulthood I could hardly go among the many people and agencies he changed over his life because the memories were too painful. I am RESOLVED AND RESIGNED to be and do one thing whatever I and those of a kindred spirit have always donewhatever we can reasonably to destroy what appears to be one of the most openly divisive hate mongering machines to touch down in the free modern election era since Jesse Helms and Robert Byrds forces converged but still even many of that day never thought to give glimpses for presidencies.
In any case, we certainly cannot be trepid souls before and among those whom time has placed us in such proximity. Those who did so much more with so much less. They ALL told us who NEVER to trust AND WHY. We have been empowered. We know what we must do. We have been successful and will be again.
We just have to get past our utter appall and misinterpretation of how soon history can duplicate itself.
@VC yes folks will definitely have to keep an eye out on what is going down. It’s about to get real bumpy on this ride. Thank you for reading and sharing your comments.
@Thomas Cooper I agree that if anything comes out of this folks should realize that we have to take responsibility for our own reality. Political leaders will come and go but our issues will remain the same and like you said we have to rely on each other to get through it the best way we can. Thank you for sharing such sage lessons and historical references.