Morning after

It's the morning when Americans are waking up to check the news shows, the internet, the newspaper. Some are hopeful, some horrified. This is the third time I have been living abroad during a presidential election. I confess that in 2000 I did not vote absentee. It was my junior year in college and I didn't have my act together. In 2012, I cast my ballot and everything seemed to go okay.

Today is another story. I have a feeling that this was a very different election, in a very uncomfortable way.

Today, the Brits and Germans I work with are asking for my opinion, my sound-bite. Whether I will never move back or whether I can really believe it. And as the American down the hall, I have to tell them something.

I don't know what to say. I am in disbelief, though maybe I should have known this was coming. I am uneasy. I'm worried that a culture of fear and isolationism will take over. I'm worried that bigotry will become socially acceptable. I'm worried that people will believe in a fictional story about the America-that-once-was and the America-that-we-all-want... Except we don't that America if we are people of color or college-educated people. We don't want it if we are urbanites or intellectuals or single moms or immigrants. But democracy is funny that way. The people who speak the loudest often win. In this case Trump not only spoke loudest, he found the people who felt like no one had been speaking to them.

I don't know a ton about politics, but I know that few presidents accomplish all that they promise in their campaigns. I hope that as all this dies down, people worry less about the White House and go work on crafting their own stories of America in their own neighborhoods. Make change where you can, and hope the rest goes okay. That's a lot to tell my coworkers, and I don't know whether they would even understand. I am hoping you will.

This is a very different election because it could, and I really hope it does, change the political game in the future. I hope that next time around, someone with integrity can stand up and ask for our votes. I hope the feeling of discontent that mobilized people to support Trump doesn't go away. I hope that, instead, it can bring in a leader that unites people. But there are four years to go before I vote for a president again, and a lot to do before then.

So call me an idealist, but I ran across this quote from writer Suzy Kassem which validates how I'm feeling today:

“Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.”


That kind of a leader would win my vote.