Waking Up in a Trump America

My body did not want to accept that it needed sleep. Even as I sat on the couch, flipping back and forth between the media powers and Seinfeld (a needed break to keep from chewing my finger nails off), I had yet to come to grips with the conclusion that Donald Trump would be President. Yes, that Donald Trump. The same Apprentice hosting, Casino owning, model marrying Donald Trump. The same man who had managed to alienate every minority group in the country, who had made fact checking a national sport, and who had blabbered through three national debates without an ounce of preparation or any statement that could be defined as “carrying substance or meaning” was about to win Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and the damn Presidency.  I was completely caught off guard.

My mind kept running through all of the scenarios I had digested the past few months. The map came into focus and fewer and fewer paths remained open to stop this misogynist, racist heap of failing wig. There was only one outcome and my mind, my presumed all-knowing of America mind, did not want to give the idea any credence. No, no the understanding could be left for latter. Now was the time to question everything, to even think about the rigging of an election, to think about what groups didn’t make it out, to think about the suppression of the Latino vote in my home state, and to swear up and down that there were more like minded people out there. It was time to be that crazy flag waving loser that I was convinced the other side would have morphed into if the roles would have been reversed. If they can get away with it, why can’t I? Why would anyone expect a rational reaction from anyone in this election? After all we had been through didn’t it make sense to retreat back to our respected corners, lick our wounds, and hope for a speedy four years until we could line up again on each respective side to laugh in our presumed enemies defeat? That would be the easy thing to do.

That’s what my mind told me as I threw a pillow from my couch after Florida was announced in Trump’s favor. After emphatically proclaiming the death of intellectualism in America and shaking my head in concurrence with a few resounding comments on my Facebook feed, I thought of what my America was. I knew it was not what Trump had proclaimed-this dreary, third world of a country, with no jobs and no one to stick up for the common man. America was not that and it had taken many years, many deaths, and many fights far grander than this election to get away from the resounding racism that had infected our country for so long. Trump’s America was not meant to be a melting pot but was meant to be shut in, isolated, and contained. This bully of a man was not the figurehead of my America. I didn’t understand.

For the first time in my voting life I was with the minority, on the losing side. It was emotional and taxing to not what to scream at the top of my lungs. How could all of what he said have gone unnoticed by all of those people? How can you excuse suggesting immigration policy based off of religion? An undeniable right of this great country. How can you excuse the degradation of women? How can you tell your daughter, sister, or wife that this is a man that should represent ALL Americans, men and women? How can you tell your kids that the most intelligent, best tempered, and uniting people become President? How can we sit here and say George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and….Donald Trump?

I tossed and turned all night with these questions-expecting each turn or drop of sweat to magically awaken me from a pre-election nightmare. It never came and it was only the Google electoral tracker that brought it all home to me the next morning. It quelled my angry and alerted me to the change in the aura of the country. My door unlocked all the same, my car started, my office coffee still sucked but it was all different as it was in a Trump America. The country had shown me what it was actually thinking in a most rude and unapologetic way. The country even had the foresight to give me four long years to digest and learn from it all. It gave me a silver lining. I realized-finally with the only clarity that a national election can give-that we were all hurting.

Most of these people hadn’t voted for him out of agreeability but more out of an anti-establishment sentiment. The two party system had wrecked America. We had become so blinded on our own respective sides, so out of touch, that we could not even make out the other side and their own opinions, wants, and needs.  We were all forever polarized, stunk on our respective ends without the slightest inkling to think about each other or what had gotten us there in the first place. We were bound to wander aimlessly with other likeminded individuals who only could compartmentalize cause and effects for their problems instead of examining a worldwide view of interconnectedness that points to not one solution but many. We were left in our corner feeling like we were owed a democracy without participation, representation without offering our voice, and socialistic values without giving our own sacrifice and work. We all had forgotten that there are no winners or losers in an election but only an assured four years of being.

It’s not going to matter in a week who you voted for. Hell, it doesn’t even matter now. The only thing that matters is where we go from here. And….guess what….the other 65 million people or so who voted for Clinton, Johnson, Stein, or others will be along for the ride. We’re all in this together. There is no victory lap because nothing has been won, there are no spoils because nothing has been conquered, and there should be no reaction because there has been plenty of inaction. Let’s all realize that this is merely a look in the mirror. This isn’t us getting dressed and seizing the day. Leave the petty name calling, the grouping, and the dangerous generalizations for an America that’s not a melting pot, that’s not a cultural mecca, that’s not the land where anyone, anywhere, can do anything.

Go back to your own delusional idea of America if you don’t want to make progress. Go back to your corners and be the same person in four years that you are now. That’s the easy thing to do! Repeat the cycle and you’ll continue to think of yourself as a winner or a loser instead of as an American! Do all that and this election would have been for nothing. This great look at us, this self-realization of the need to be moderate would have flown by us as quickly as the many lies that were spewed in this election. If we don’t settle with each other, if we don’t try to learn, and if we don’t try to fight for the inclusion that is the foundation of this country then we will all crumble.

Realize that this isn’t the victor’s country but it is the country of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses who yearn to breathe free. Realize that this is larger than any of our little versions of America. This is about compromise, this is about respect and about homage to many generations before us. Realize that one man cannot be America without the people. Realize that we are a light of the world, that our country is never as bad as the media makes it seem and that millions come here every day because of opportunity, because of inclusion, and because of the promise of chance. We just received a chance to show the world that we’re above one person and one thought. What will we do with that chance?

The Irony of Hating Trump

I felt as if I were stuck in quick sand-sitting at a bar in downtown Phoenix talking about economics and politics that my supposed millennial, no student loan privileged ass had no place talking about. With every thought or sentence I would sink more and more into the quick sand that was my own white privilege where I was well off enough to actually care about these things, to have the energy to talk about them over a beer, a meal, and ambience. I would sink in until I would eventually collapse into myself, realizing that I was not talking to others but more to my own mind, trying to sort through the labyrinth of conflicting principles that my moderate head kept throwing out. See…I was living on the cusp of a world that, for the next seven months, was not going to allow me to camp out in the middle with my comforting and easy moderate views. Primary season was ending and the general election was coming.

             The last general election was like a mirage or a fossilized Rosetta stone that I had yet to decipher.  If you asked me who Obama beat it would take me a minute to realize it wasn’t John Kerry. For all of the coverage, pageantry, and outlandish behavior that come from any election season it is rare that those who were in it recall the time fondly or in great detail at all. It’s like surviving a storm and it is okay if not accepted that any question of presence is met with an answer “Yes...I was there.”  No other response is needed and at the conclusion the country goes back to clicking headlines, posting videos, and questioning why nothing ever seems to get done. It’s a cycle that has become so monotonous that it often breeds immediate misremembrance, like the work week or whether or not the dishes are clean or dirty. Then something like Donald Trump happens.

                All of the media, liberal and conservative, were scrambling around as if a flash grenade had just gone off, disorientated, fumbling, and maybe even blaming themselves in a moment that should not have been self-righteous. (Than again, when you are a talking head, when is any moment not self-righteous?) They couldn’t even remember when it had all started or when it had even gained steam. Up until Indiana they were all still convinced that it couldn’t work, that the man that Donald Trump was and the sacred office that was President of the United States could not be one election away from meeting. The campaign was fleeting, people were too pissed off, he had alienated too many, he was too brash, he was stumbling, he was on the god damn Celebrity Apprentice, there were protesters, they were fighting, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, CONTESTED CONVENTION! All of the glory that the chaos had brought to these media pundits had evaporated away with the conjuring of the most unlikely of scenarios. The very people whose eyes they wanted had done them one better and done something that they all never wanted: nominated Donald Trump. 

                In a time where the financial mat was most recently pulled out from under the feet of hard working Americans and in a time where financial institutions seemed to be as cared for and coddled as a new born baby, control and accountability was no longer democratized but capitalized. The people who had suffered the most had been shut out and punished seemingly more than the crooks who had put them there. Most of the time these people didn’t even know it and kept chugging along, searching for that idea of an American dream that they whole heartrendingly wanted to believe still existed. They would continue like this, the silent, seemingly stubborn majority of America that has too many scattered voices and spectrums to unite as one. News stations would indirectly talk about their fates through cryptic headlines of housing markets and job reports; making sure to never refer to them directly by name. Maybe this was all proper controlling by the media, for they knew if they called them out, if the presumptive hornets’ nest was tapped, that the silent majority of the country would begin to develop a voice.  That’s a stretch in and of itself when talking about a purely reactive industry where the daily clicks matter more than the long, drawn out journalistic pieces that are believed to not warrant anyone’s attention. More than likely they were beat to the punch by Donald Trump who, whether accidently or intentionally, stumbled upon this hornets’ nest.

                 I like to think it was accidently because that’s the only way I can justify this long shot becoming a reality. A reality so random that it could have only been brought about by accident and that the rhetoric, the outrageousness that he said at the beginning of it all-the call to ban all Muslims, the call for Mexico to pay for a wall on the border, the take your pick buffet of sexist comments-was all to only gain some air time with the media and maybe just get his name out there again. Free press for a crazy and wacky campaign. To me there couldn’t have been any rhythm or reason to it because that would go against what I thought of a nominee, who they should be, how moderate they should be. My privileged mind could not fathom how the Republicans could imagine winning with this candidate. Only then did I realize that the media, papers, internet, and I were not thinking of the same Republicans. We were thinking only of the generalized Republican.

                 It had been drummed into our brains for years, ever since defense spending was rampant and everybody’s angry Grandpa was labeled as a Republican. The Dems were for the little guys, the disenfranchised, those whose voices were plugged out by the Koch brothers and corporations that wanted women to keep their babies and criminals to die horrible deaths. That’s what we had been taught; that trust fund kids were voting for Bush and they would keep doing it to get the tax breaks. It all seemed to make sense because Obama offered that hope and McCain and Romney were so white, so establishment, that they fit that stereotype of working against the silent majority, not understanding, not relating. Who would have thought that a white billionaire would be the man to show the disarray in all this? To show the gross prejudice that had been eroding right under the eyes of America. The Republican party was being taken over.

                The money and pundits didn’t matter. The gasps for Meghan Kelly, the protesters at the rallies, and comment after comment that most were convinced would be the last knife in the back; it all didn’t matter. All of the perceived Republicans, the sweater vest wearing, boat sailing, and entitled hoard, were not showing up at the polls. It was a different kind of crowd. An angry, revolutionary type crowd. They were disenfranchised, ignored, the crowd that the perceived Republicans had been brushing over all of these years, not trying to corral but not necessarily alienating.  Maybe these people agreed with some of the craziness that Trump possessed but I don’t necessarily think so. I just think they wanted to see if they still had the power and if the big money could be beat because that’s the irony of all of this: Trumps meteoric rise to party nominee is the most American thing to happen in any primary.

                His politics aren’t in the mold of the fore fathers and his alienation of a number of demographics goes against all that this country stands for but it cannot be argued that the power of democracy has not been better shown than in this Republican primary of 2016. There was no good ol’ boy candidate. There was no candidate backed by money or name recognition. There was only an outsider, a person who had tapped a nerve among a population that was searching for a figurehead more than a voice. They didn’t want the politics or the rhetoric-they wanted a change. The voters wanted someone different, someone not of the mold, someone who wasn’t the electable plug and chug, a person who would bring change, even if it would be outrageous. They wanted to be reminded again that they had a voice, that they could make a difference.

                Now, maybe this general election turns back to normalcy and the true moderate colors of American show themselves in November and I breath a sign of relief. Even if this is the case, we all would have still seen a seismic shift in the Grand Ol’ Party. The importance of this primary would still not be overshadowed by what might end up being a not very close general election. It would be remembered as a time where voters found a different, if not troubled voice again, over a decade after the popular vote didn’t decide an election. There are inklings of even the Democrat side finding a new voice-where a young, presumably entitled and debt ridden populace is making a seventy something socialist relevant long after the math has not been in his favor.

                It all points to something profound and revolutionary and…inherently American.