Y’know, it sucks to have that flickering candle of hope burning in your heart and then be punched in the stomach, kneed in the face, and thrown into an open sewer. Trump winning feels like that.
I don’t have anything too clever or witty to say here. I was really pulling for Harris. She wasn’t perfect, but that’s okay. She brought a joyous competence energy to politics I liked. She was an enormous breath of fresh air after the death march slog of the Biden campaign. I harbored hope that on things like Gaza she’d make a dramatic shift after she’d won and no longer had to worry about looking bad by vocally differing from Biden. I realize that last hope was probably naive, but I had it. That was the thing, really. For the first time in a while, when it came to politics, I had hope.
I started my Tuesday with what has become an election day tradition for me. I went for a run, with my ballot stuffed in my backpack, and dropped it at the nearest drop box. Every time I say I’ll get it done early and mail it in. And every time I end up getting it in last-minute, but if I get to work it into going for a run that day it’s fun.
I carefully avoided the news for the rest of the day. I figured things would be close enough to go into at least a few days of stressful waiting as they finished tallying up the votes. So why get involved in the breathless exit polls and reading of tea leaves the news channels would need to do to fill up all of Tuesday night? So I went to work, came home, watched my favorite Twitch Streamer, and went to bed, all while resisting checking the news.
Wednesday was, of course, punching kicking sewer water day. I woke up to NPR, as usual, but missed the crucial information by 10 seconds or so. The first line I heard was something about how Harris hadn’t addressed her supporters yet, and then it went on to talk about Republicans winning the Senate. Punch. The house was too close to call, but things weren’t looking great. Kick. I took a moment to wait, but the news moved on and it was clear that if there was a definitive call for president I’d missed it. With a sense of mounting dread, I went to get washed up and start my day.
I didn’t want to wait for the news to loop back around. I couldn’t. I gave in, checked my phone. There it was. The rambling, incoherent, casually cruel pile of radioactive velveeta cheese cursed by a witch to take human form had won. Not only won, but won by bigger margins than ever, making gains across a bunch of demographics. I checked Pennsylvania, specifically, and saw the count wasn’t even close. He even won the popular vote.
Sewer water.
I think it’s the last that feels the worst. If you’re anywhere on the left, being robbed of a victory by the electoral college is achingly familiar. If you still win the popular vote, at least you know that the majority of (voting) Americans agree with you. You’re just getting screwed by the system.
Trump winning the popular vote, though? It lets you know that the majority of (voting) folks agree with him. It takes the sewer water you were going to have to drink and makes sure it’s nice and warm and has sat in the sun for three days, first.
This shit sucks.
* * * * *
I really should have made this caveat up top, but I’m not a hardcore Democratic party member. I think of myself as being pretty far left, liberal, what have you. I feel like no matter what term I use someone’s going to find a way to tell me I’m using it wrong and that I’m actually admitting to being a neoliberal shill. I may have spent too much time on Twitter and Mastodon.
It’d have been nice to have a candidate who was more progressive, who pushed the envelope, who was willing to make a more decisive stand on several issues instead of trying to appeal to everyone. I also get that the current wisdom is that doing so is Not How The Game is Played. The game plan the Democratic Party has been following also clearly doesn’t work, so I’m hopeful (probably naively) that getting their asses kicked will make them reconsider how they do things.
I want more Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and (early era?) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types leading the party. Even better would be burning capitalism down entirely along with having a functioning multi-party system so you didn’t have to settle for centerists or yeet your vote into the void. But within the bounds of the way politics works in the USA right now following the lead of those three would be pretty good.
* * * * *
There’s the question about what happens next. What do we do in the face of another four years of Trump? I can’t answer that for everyone. I’m not sure I can answer that for myself, honestly. I’ll try.
One of the big discussions that happened almost immediately within my circles was about getting more involved with your community. Look out for you and yours, support each other, build resilient ties and systems that don’t rely on the government and instead allow people to work together directly to make sure everyone’s needs are met. I agree with all of that. I’ve been craving more community anyway, this is just another reason to push for it.
I know there’s also the cliche of packing up and leaving for Canada (or somewhere else). That’s not my particular jam, even if New Zealand does sound pretty good right now. I mean, all my stuff is here. More seriously, while I’m in the most optimal position to pack my bags and move away that I’ve been in a long time (single, no pets, temp job with a set end date), I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’d miss my people here too much. Almost no one I know has been seriously considering this route, either. Hopefully we won’t all regret our choice to stick it out here.
There’s also the advice to focus on what you can control right now. I think that’s the best for me. I can’t, personally, stay constantly engaged with the dread of the awfulness of what’s probably coming down the pipe. It’d wear me down. I’d be forcing the catastrophizing, too, which feels weird to say as someone who has anxiety. It’s important to keep the big picture in mind, but it’s all moves and counter moves, individual actions that add up to the big things that are going to happen. Nothing’s set in stone. So you have to be ready to take the shots you can, when you can, and to help others do the same.
In that vein, I’m using this fucking bullshit turn of the timeline to push project “Dude, Get Your Shit Together” into a higher gear. One, because I’ll probably be happier and more content, and thus have some emotional buffer to deal with the badness as it comes and not feel hopeless. Two, because it will let me free up emotional and mental bandwidth so I can take those shots when there’s an opening and fight the good fight.
There’s a lot of axes to getting my shit together, which I won’t go into now because this is running long and I’m not sure how relevant the details are anyway. I’ll be working on the things about myself and my life that I can control. Some of them might not solve a given area, depending on how things go, but at least I can tell myself I’m actively trying. Like building community. Maybe I’ll manage it, maybe I won’t. Other people are involved and despite my best efforts I still don’t have a Compelling Voice spell I can cast at my current level. I can control trying, though. Talking to people, arranging groups and events, getting out there and meeting people and helping them with their own projects. Will it work? We’ll see. But I have to try.
That’s the thing about the flickering candle of optimism and the shreds of hope I was talking about before. Shit like Trump getting elected again? It causes some damage to my optimism and hope. A lot of damage. So have a lot of other things in my life. I just can’t seem to let go of those little flickers or those tiny shreds, though. I don’t want to, even if I could. Without the hope that things will get better, both in my personal realms and for everyone else at large, what’s the point of pushing on? I know that answer is different for everyone. For me, at least, I can’t not believe in the possibility of a better future. It may be remote, it may be hard to achieve, it may require a statistically unlikely run of ridiculously good luck, but it’s always there. Even if sometimes, like this week, it seems like just a tiny spark on the horizon.
We just have to keep on keeping on, push forward, and find our way there.
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