Watching hopes for a strong repudiation of Trumpism fade on election night forced me to take a long, hard look at this adopted country of mine.
“Iam just grief stricken by how many Americans are OK with racist dog whistling and white supremacy and cutesy nods to white nationalism. Even if 45 is gone, that all stays. This is who we are.”
A friend, the White mother of a Black child, posted this on Facebook on election night. That last line floored me: This is who we are.
I wanted to write back and disagree with her, to argue that this is not who we are, that I chose this country as my second home not just for the opportunities I saw were possible here, but because I believed just the opposite was true.
But, of course, she was right.
This election is a mirror on this country, a referendum on good versus evil, decency versus crudity. Last night was supposed to be that part of the movie where everyone voted for the good guy because we wanted to show we’re better than that.
But like so much in this year, this decade, and this country’s history, what was “supposed to be” never came to pass. There was no “blue wave.”
More than 67 million voters in this country witnessed, along with the rest of us, the intentional cruelty, the unrepentant racism, the proud misogyny, the bold-faced lies, and shameless disregard of human and planetary life that Donald Trump and his enablers displayed over 1,385 exhausting days.
We witnessed him launch his campaign by attacking immigrants, then exploit the power of his office to take this country’s animosity toward newcomers to new heights. We witnessed him repeatedly lie about his taxes, while refusing to reveal them; then when it came to light that this self-proclaimed “billionaire” president paid less in annual taxes than most hourly workers, the nation collectively shrugged. We witnessed him roll back and reverse critical environmental protections, insult our global allies, and call White supremacists “very fine people,” who should “stand by” if the election doesn’t go his way. We witnessed how callously he’s handled the pandemic, literally mocking COVID-19, with no obvious regard for the more than 233,000 lives it has taken in this country.
More than 67 million people witnessed all that, then trotted off to the polls to return the man to office: “Four more years, please.”
This leaves me with one nagging, existential question: alongside a raging global pandemic, what will four more years of Trump rule, if he wins, do to an already fragile Democracy that hardly survived the first four?
And what of our collective mental health?