Today I have avoided the news and stared into the tunnel of the future -- what could be and what most certainly is facing us.
I see a white male consolidation of power unprecedented in my lifetime. I see the years of anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-everyone but white men becoming codified ever further into law. I see my right to control my body stolen, whereas before it was merely held hostage. I see our education system gutted. Our cities and infrastructure abandoned. I see the already catastrophic environmental devastation happening around the world hastened by unfettered capitalism, and the related human suffering increased dramatically. I see a positive feedback loop of economic oppression and reactionary politics.
I see movements to protect the right to the clean water and air and environmental sustainability suppressed, and the cultures and people who depend upon natural resources obliterated. I see lives being ruined and families torn apart, a possible forced exodus of millions. I see religious bigotry empowered. I see banning of ideas. I see wars abroad, already fought with impunity, exacerbated, enlarged and turned into world conflagration.
I see worst case scenarios, and then, as an afterthought, in hope, I see ways to mitigate it. Little steps. Maybe if we did this it won’t be so bad. Maybe the administration and Congress and probably Supreme Court won’t be able -- or decide not -- to do all the insane things we’ve been promised. Maybe it will all come apart at the seams before the damage can be done, and things will stabilize.
Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. We have time. This all won’t happen suddenly.
But, then I am reminded of the first decade of this century, of the Bush administration, of wars started, rights rolled back, education rewritten, environment wrecked. And I go back earlier, to the moments in history we are most ashamed of. Or should be. Sometimes things don’t turn out as badly as they could. But sometimes they are worse than you could possibly expect.
So now I am sitting here, reading on social media the heartfelt calls for human togetherness, for hugs, deep breaths. There is also rage, confusion, catatonic shock.
But, exchanging terrified and devastated emails and texts with the women in my life, I am realizing this feeling of dread and hopelessness within me goes deeper. I am in mourning; we are in mourning.
All of the efforts to overcome deep-seated historical injustices were just killed. We’ve repudiated our march toward progress, slow though it has been.
We just told our daughters and granddaughters that they will have to wait another few years, possibly a generation, maybe longer, to see a woman in power. We just told people of color that having a black president was an anomaly that their civil rights will now pay a heavy price for.
We just told the world that the immediate and dire need to tackle global problems like climate change are less important than the needs of racist white Americans to retain some semblance of their perceived cultural superiority.
We just embraced anew the entwined forces of white supremacy and patriarchy that have so long dominated our cultural life and history.
Until yesterday, I heard over and over again that this was an unthinkable result. The largely white, male media and my white male friends couldn’t see that Trump’s election was possible.
I hoped for the best. But still panicked at the thought of this happening.
This was not inevitable, but it was foreseeable.
Donald Trump didn’t get elected alone. He launched himself into the media spotlight by wrangling the voices of the most vitriolic, extreme and radicalized part of the Republican base. He used targeted rhetoric to build that minority into a loud, normalized movement. And then he folded himself into a brand with money and the political will to propel anyone who gets their candidates and agenda into office.
We scoffingly watched it unfold, unwilling to process the damage that could be done.
And now those who have the most to lose from this election -- women, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ community -- are offered condolences, like some friend or family member of theirs has died. Tragic but inevitable.
But, unlike death, politics are not an immutable force. And I refuse to treat this like a merely personal loss, or as one inevitable swing of the pendulum forever caught between progress and regression.
I can only imagine this being fixed -- to use a vague term, because I don’t even know what that would be -- through both radical and pragmatic means.
I want a woman president. I want women in Congress, in our city councils, in our local legislatures. We have to take institutions of power and force ourselves, once again, into them.
We need to build a machine. We need to actively support progressive and diverse candidates -- women, people of color, members of the gay community. Raise money for them. Fight and fight and not let the organized mechanisms of power outgun us.
But, I think we have to throw wrenches in the political system wherever we can, beyond marching and yelling and crying. We have to grind things to a halt. Borrow the strategy of 8 years of Republican obstructionism and implement it however we can. I want women sitting in and staying there -- holding back the tide of publically acceptable misogyny and white supremacy.
I want us to refuse to participate in the existential threats to nature and humanity posed by the exploitation of natural resources -- not just demand equal access to our piece of the spoils.
I want the people who voted for Donald Trump to understand that this is unacceptable and that what they have done has threatened the lives and wellbeing of millions. I want to make sure that their efforts to “take back” America fail. And we cannot let them off the hook -- try to understand where they’re coming from as a means of excusing it. Ignorance is not an excuse for embracing the worst part of yourself.
I don’t want to overthrow this authoritarian wave. I want to crush it, from outside and from within, to crumple it into a ball until it is flattened, airless, below the feet of the millions of women, who will have to, whack-a-mole like, stand there knocking down one at a time the misogynist and racist incursion into our earned space.
This is what we have always had to do. And we will do it again.
