On the Election

I have friends who still believe that both candidates in the American election were bad choices. I have friends who believe that the reactions would’ve been the same no matter what. Worse still, I have friends who believe the right person won.

All of those friends are wrong. At best they are woefully ignorant of the situation, and at worst they are xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic imbeciles. Being as these people are friends, I truly wish that I could believe the best of them, unfortunately I can’t do that. They live in this world, they have the responsibility to open their eyes and see what is going on around them. The fact that they choose not to is a point against them.

Donald Trump is a bad man. It’s a simple statement. He’s a failure. He’s a thief who takes from charities. He’s a bully who mocks disabled people. He doesn’t care about the military and calls POWs losers. He’s an abuser in every sense who believes that women are things for him to take and enjoy. By now most people have heard the “grab em by the pussy” tape, and yet somehow this cretin got elected. He threatened to have his opponent assassinated, and said that if he lost he would not accept the results. He called Mexicans rapists and Muslims terrorists. He claimed that Black people lived in war-torn hellholes. On the day of the worst mass shooting in US history he tweeted out “I told you so”.

But he has been elected. Even though he’s going to trial for rape and fraud in the next couple weeks. He was officially endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Every living president was against him. But he has been elected.

I watched the polls coming in with my heart breaking. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. People were voting for a man who bragged about abusing women. People were voting for a man who is openly racist. I went to bed in disbelief, and that morning I wept as I read people’s reactions to the election.

I wept as I read about Muslim families deciding that they couldn’t wear their hijabs in public anymore, I wept as their Imams told them it was okay to not wear them and that Allah would understand. I wept as my family in the LGBT community were too frightened to leave their homes, and I wept as people told them their few rights would be taken away from them. I wept at the videos of white males running up to black people, calling them n*****s and that they’d be sent back to their own country soon enough, I wept as white men threatened to murder black people on the street. I stared incredulously at swastikas spray painted on businesses run by people of colour. After a while I ran out of tears and just became empty.

Teachers began to share what they had to tell their students, many of those students minorities. The stories were heartbreaking, but none more than the kindergarten teacher who was asked if they [black people] were going to become slaves again with Trump elected. A five year old was worried about slavery in 2016 in a country that prides itself on freedom.

Don’t get me wrong, America has a lot of freedom for the straight, white Christians. Everyone else should just be happy that they get to live in the same country.

I had a friend who claimed that people would’ve been upset either way. And, yeah, people would’ve been upset if Hillary had won. But people wouldn’t be scared. Five year olds wouldn’t be worried about slavery. LGBT people wouldn’t be worried about having their marriages annulled. Women wouldn’t be worried about going to prison over abortions.

I have spent the last two days worrying about my loved ones in the States, all the while hearing from straight white people about how things were going to be okay and that people were overreacting. The thing is, history is cyclical. We often repeat the mistakes of past generations. Germany was warning Americans this whole time about Trump because he was saying things that sounded a lot like someone from their history. A certain man who believed that other races were inferior. A certain man who ran on a racist platform that led to one of the worst wars in human history. A certain man who committed genocide. History repeats, but it doesn’t necessarily repeat in the same place. Trump is a man who openly admired Adolf Hitler, and kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside.

Maybe nothing bad will come of this—other than all the bad that’s happened in the past two days. Maybe Trump will be a good president. I’m sure the people of Germany, Russia, China, Cuba, Italy, North Korea, and many more thought something similar.