election emotions

I went to bed when the results still read 0 to 0 and woke up to my sister saying, “he won.” It was too early and too shocking for words and as we got ready in the dark, her for yoga and me for work, the first tears found their footing and sank into a steady rhythm. I had forgotten to take my earbuds out of yesterday’s pant pockets and so I stepped into an uber with the radio turned on, news playing, the voices coming through the car speakers losing their shape and structure as they moved through the trapped air, which seemed to grow thicker and thicker with each sentence spat out. I rolled down the window to my left and I pictured the shapeless words merging with the air outside. I was only grasping onto sporadic phrases anyways. In the early hours of the morning. Kamala, due to speak at her alma mater, Howard.

My mind zoomed out to the image of new york from above; how many cars there must have been in that moment, listening. Questioning. Grieving. Cheering? How many enclosed spaces, moving up and down and across the streets of the city, listening to the station of their choosing. Or maybe just the first one that came on, the need to scroll to the preferred outlet of their party suddenly overridden by the need to simply engage with this new reality. Every station was sharing the same fact anyhow. I called mais to catch my breath before going inside, and then the day started. A horrible, horrible, dystopian day, countered with long hugs and moments of fresh air.

I’m hearing and reading about calls to lean on the women around me, but there are a few women around me that I can’t lean on at all. They aren’t leaning themselves. In fact they’re standing up straight, perfect posture, proud. These women are incredibly strong and deeply compassionate and they voted for trump. Not but, and— because I know all of these things to be true. And the question remains, how?

I watched a video the other day, a day or two before the election maybe, posted by the page, “a view from a bridge.” A man picked up the red phone and talked about his personal understanding of why his dad voted for trump. He said it’s because “he votes for people with strong personalities that are seemingly direct and straightforward. Notice how I didn’t mention anything about real issues, right? It’s less to do with kitchen table issues and more about emotional resonance around very personal identity things, like my culture, and do I believe in God, do I not believe in God?” He said his dad prioritizes this “emotional resonance,” even unconsciously. This was a race of abstract belonging, and in the fight for strong and domineering personalities, we have our clear winner. He won. I think the scariest part for me has been how quickly it happened. Many of us were expecting a multi-day count, maybe a recount, a neck-in-neck case in the key swing states. Instead, we woke up to his clear cut victory. And for the first time since he first ran in 2016, he won the popular vote. By a mile. By around a 4 million person margin. The foundation of my defeat and disheartenment lies in that margin, in the fact that there was no need to cheat, that the people spoke and the people wanted him.

What will it take? What will it take for the glass to shatter in the 73 million— 73 million— americans that put their trust in him, that willingly, freely, unironically, selected him on their ballot? It won’t be the comments, the damages already done, the lives already lost, the felonies committed, the long string of assaults. It won’t be any of this, clearly, because his voters either don’t believe any of it to be true anyways, support him in spite of it, or, most disturbingly, support him because of it. It will have to be some dramatic and critical error in one of the realms that his supporters voted him in for, a recession or some otherwise earth-shattering economic state, but then of course if this happens (and when all of the colossal consequences of his mere existence start thundering down), the scapegoats will be all teed up. I don’t know what it will take. At this point in time there is nothing more than an abstract picture in my mind of how he might eventually be taken off his poisoned and self-built turned publicly idolized pedestal. What I know to be true is that everything is cyclical and at some point, at some point, something will have to give. In the meantime, all I can do is accept, lean into the local, and pray that when that point comes, our world will still feel recoverable. In the meantime, I will condense and focus my hope— I will pick my exhausted and depleted hope back up off the ground and I will recharge it in whatever ways I know how and I will condense and focus this hope— into all of the ways we will rise in response to him. I will remember and look out for and make damn well sure to nurture and add to the unwavering and powerful humanity rooted in the countermovement. Many of us spent the last few months clinging to the hope that the vote for empathy would outshine and overpower the vote for destruction. But our freshly elected leader having a gaping hole where his store of empathy should be does not at all strip or diminish the empathy of the collective. If money, persuasion, and manipulation are his strengths, empowerment, humanity, and community care are ours. I hope, I hope, I hope with all the hope in me that the empathy of those 73 million has not been wiped away completely— that it is buried somewhere deep within, and that one day this empathy will overpower the hatred and selfishness once again and we will look up to a leader who will inspire and instruct us to understand rather than defend ourselves against those we were once told to fear.