I know you feel terrible. I know you spent all night trying not to look at the New York Times’ historically unreliable needle, which turned out to be excruciatingly accurate this time. I know you held cigarette after cigarette, I know you drank melted ice cream as a sleeping potion, I know you cried so much you could drown in a sea of your own making. I know you hugged your daughters and wondered, What kind of world can she inherit when this country hates her so much for having only one body? I know you feel like you woke up in a familiar hell, because we all did. Of course it feels so bad: We were hopeful, again.
As the election results steadily hammered us, it became abundantly clear that a Kamala Harris win would not be inevitable. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Donald Trump was was announced as the winnerfair (in an unfair system) and square. I know it feels like the sun is being blocked out for good.
I don’t have it in me to do the whole impartial journalist thing – not that I ever have – but it’s just too bleak to even pretend this is anything other than the worst case scenario. I’m too scared to perform. I was scared in 2016 too – but eight years ago we didn’t know what to expect. Now it’s the fear of what we already know, and the fear of what we can’t even imagine.
The options in this election were ultimately between two bad ones: one, an administration ready to support an ongoing genocide, and another happy in its denial of abortion rights, its restriction of trans freedom, its terror of immigrants and, of course, its support. of that particular genocide. There would never be any real victory in the outcome of this election; it was just always a choice between the irrevocably broken and the devastating, skull-crushing, irrevocably broken.
But the skull-crushing, irretrievably broken alternative still feels worse. There’s no subtlety in what the Electoral College results tell us: This is a country where half the population indulges its hatred of women, of queer people, of brown and black people, of anyone who comes to America from a poorer country. A Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004, and while the final tally is still pending, it’s a damn shame that Donald Trump carried a majority of the country in his third bid for office. Can I find a more elegant language for this betrayal by the people who are supposed to be my neighbors? Can I be more cautious about the majority percent of Americans who are content to conform to the core tenants of brutality? No. It’s a waste of my time, and time is what I’ve never had. Hillary Clinton called them a “basket of deplorables” in 2016, and Joe Biden called them “garbage” just days ago. Maybe that rhetoric is losing elections, but it’s still language too soft for this current moment. More than 50 percent of the country wants to shape the republic, more and more, into something inhuman, inhospitable, destined for fascism and decay. In 2016 and 2020, journalists and academics and voters alike sought to “understand” the Trump voter, to better understand their political choices. I don’t care anymore. There is nothing more to understand.
Despite this, Harris still has himself to blame for the result. She lost voters in places like Muslim-majority Dearborn, Michigan, a region Biden won handily in 2020. Her rhetoric on Palestine was also inhumane, her continued vehement support for Israel’s siege of Palestinians an impossible obstacle for many voters from the middle to even. consider. Nothing was more short-sighted than the Democrats sending Bill Clinton to give a speech days before the election, said Israel was “forced” to kill more than 41,000 people during the past year. The cruelty is often the point, and that is true even from a party that cannot account for its own cruelty.
In the days before the election, Octavia E. Butler’s 2000 essay, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” began to go semi-viral among left-leaning voters, facing an overrepresented fear of whatever would happen on November 5. “There is no single answer that will solve all of our future problems,” Butler said. “There is no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
This election was never going to save us, so I have to believe it will never doom us either. Perhaps this is a measure of my own delusion – I can’t bring myself to get up every morning thinking it’s all a wash. But governments and institutions and districts with loopholes are not heroes. Harris was not a savior, she was always a placeholder for something – someone – better. During the first Trump administration, we were tasked with taking care of each other, in any way we could. We would have been given the same task under Harris, but perhaps in fewer ways. Maybe my chest wouldn’t feel so heavy. Maybe I wouldn’t feel as angry as I do. But there was only ever us: sending money to UNRWA, driving a friend across state lines to get an abortion, keeping an eye on the trans teenager who lives in your building to make sure they get home when they’re walking around late at night. night.
I still wanted Harris to win. I wanted it for my mom, who held on to the hope of a brown and black president, even though she doesn’t even live here. I wanted a sign that it could get better. But I can’t give up hope completely, even though this year’s results might tell me I should. I refuse to feel stupid in my longing for more humanity. I cannot allow myself to sink too deep into my despair; it is simply too much for many of us to save.
Hope doesn’t have to come wholesale. You can pick and choose and take what you can get—in fact, you should right now, because it’s the only thing that keeps our hearts from atrophying. Even in the rubble, light breaks through. Sarah McBride won her race for Congress, making her the first openly trans member of Congress. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been pursuing charges against Trump for trying to sway the 2020 election, won her re-election bid. Mark “I’m a Black Nazi” Robinson lost his race for North Carolina governor. As of this writing, all but two states voted with abortion amendments on the ballot to protect abortion rights. Florida’s Monique Worrell, pushed out of her job as attorney general by Ron DeSantis, won her seat back. For the first time ever (yes, ever, gloomy), there will be two black women serving in the Senate.
I have to dig for hope, like a pig looking for truffles, like a dog trying to find a bone he can’t remember where he buried. I will dig for it until I die.
For now, as we await the opening day, there is nothing to do but rest for a while. Not for long – there’s so much more work on the other side of tomorrow, and the next day, and the next week, and the year after that, forever, for the rest of time, until you die, and probably even after that. You can still be an answer to a future problem. But now is the time for mourning: mourning for who we are sure to lose in the next four years, and mourning for the last lines of democratic innocence we had left. You will never find a lack of policies or laws or social mores that demand desperate and immediate improvement, for yourself or others. Soon, despair will envelop you again, as we all begin to realize what another brutalizing four years of Trump politics will be. Today it is for suffering.
But tomorrow – tomorrow is for fellowship. I will be there, chest heaving, limbs heavy, eyes blurry, waiting you.
