Ugh.
And I thought the lead up to the american election was anxiety producing. This is much, much worse. I slept fitfully and woke up at 4am today (I’m writing on November 9th) to double check the election results. My wife wisely called for both sanity and bed last evening, after hours of half watching Netflix on the laptop and constantly refreshing the election results. We went to bed at 1030pm, while there was still an outside-wildcard chance of a Democratic upset.
Instead I was greeted with this fine mess. There was no getting back to sleep.
I blame twitter for most of the amplification and prolonging of my anxiety. Today, it is awash of shock, anger, and fear. So much fear. Someone named November 09 National Amygdala Day. And I won’t say for a second that fear is unfounded. It is a completely rational response to what many see as a completely irrational election, start to brutal finish.
It is also one collective voice. There are nuances. Some voices are hopeful, optimistic, calling themselves and others to the everyday duty of loving kindness here and now. Some are looking years ahead to the next political pendulum swing. Some are wailing, raging, refusing to be comforted. Some are identifying the places and people on whom the blame most lies.
I am all of these things today, because Twitter is just a big microcosm of me. Twitter is a reflection of what I want reflected. My own echo chamber.
Today my wife was worried about me. The kids were cautious around me (not cautious enough, I still managed to absolutely unload on one of them when they refused to wear the jacket I pulled out for them). This election has upset the way I look at everything. The world seems notably darker today.
Why was I so upset about the election? On the surface, this is very, very easy to answer. I could easily answer that I believe Trump is a buffoon, a misogynist, a likely sexual predator, a xenophobe, a business man with a history of failed businesses and shady practices, a liar, a climate change denier, and above all, an inciter of rage.
But here I am. White male adult in his mid-thirties in Canada. The promised land of so many desperate and fearful americans last evening (enough fearful Americans to crash Canada’s immigration website). I have a full time job. My wife has a full time job. We have three beautiful children who are not harassed for their beliefs or skin colour. My family’s day to day life is unlikely to be affected significantly by Mr. Trump’s election.
There are plenty of reason to be weary of Trump in the future though. I don’t believe for a second that the damage that he and the GOP can do will be limited to the United States alone. But this was not the source of my anger and distress this morning.
I was distressed because I had thought better of the humanity of my american neighbours. I had been hoping that the light is winning. And this morning I was a whole lot less sure.
Not because I felt that Hillary Clinton was the standard bearer for the light. But the rejection of such a morally repugnant opponent was. I watched this election with sick fascination. Each of the Donald’s ridiculous tweets or sound bites seeming to um… (excuse me here, I HAVE to…) Trump the one before it. And the rallying cry in opposition to his fear-mongering and blaming was infectious. I’ve liked and retweeted so many posts in response to his repugnance. I’ve followed so many activists and authors and spokespersons for Feminism, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities. I’ve thrown my whole lot in with them.
And to wake up November 9th and find that those people – my tribe- only make up half of the american population. That was a real punch in the gut.
“59 million people voted for Donald Trump yesterday. 59 million people listened to this man speak venom with agreement or indifference” That is what I Tweeted to my like minded colleagues on Twitter. Then (feeling both angry and quite pleased with my phrase) I posted the same on Facebook.
While Twitter represents so clearly whom I want to associate with and what I want to be about, Facebook has a certain scattershot quality to it. Your close friends are of course likely to have many of the same values as you, but things get a little further off the mark when you include your relatives, your work colleagues, or old friends from high school.
And so it happened that the first notification on my Facebook feed was from someone pleased with the results of the election. In stark contrast to my post, he stated that the 59 million votes didn’t represent Trump’s venom, just the hopes of new and real change to people who feel the system has increasingly not represented them.
I won’t get into the merit of his argument. There is so much intelligent (if depressing) editorializing about the factors leading to our current situation, and I won’t do it any justice to try and give you my dumb-it-down-a-touch version.
But here is what it really brought home for me. I don’t like those 59 million voters. I don’t understand them, and I don’t want to. And I didn’t much like my old high school friend at that moment.
And when you see 59 million people as “others” – that’s a real problem.
Before all of this, I half finished a similar post to this one, albeit with a completely different election result. In that post, and in this one, I keep coming back to the uncomfortable reality that I fundamentally disliked and “othered” a large percentage (now it turns out to be exactly half) of the American population. That’s not a dig on Americans either – Canada is closely related to both Britain and America, and it’s a very similar situation in both countries. It’s foolish denial to imagine that us Canadians are vastly different from either political landscape, (despite our recent Prime Minister…).
In a recent political panel discussion hosted by Krista Tippett, Dr. Eboo Patel, an Inter-faith program leader, admitted that looking out at the political landscape at all the potential Trump voters, he also had failed to empathize with the family whose job had been outsourced, or even simply the Republican voter that longed to see their elected official in the white house for these last 8 years. And he identified that as his failing. That despite being a visible minority, and a Muslim, he had a responsibility to “cultivate some sort of empathy for people who were once at the centre of the culture and aren’t anymore”
Dr. Patel went on to relate a favourite saying of his from William Raspberry, which was “The smartest people I know secretly believe both sides of the issue.” That someone could (and should) have a held ‘side’ or position on a given issue, but always be seeking the best in the other’s argument. The human in the other. That working together in a democracy certainly included trying to see your champion elected, and working together afterwards regardless of the outcome.
All of that was much easier to hear two weeks ago, while all the polls heavily favoured Hillary Clinton, but it’s likely just as true today. And in an election campaign with so much alt-right ugliness, and so much empowered and endorsed hate visible online, the last thing that I personally want to do is try to empathize with and care for the average Trump voter. It’s much easier to give into anger if they’re all deplorables.
But I’m struck by a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Junior that also came up in that panel discussion. That we must “learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools”. This is the highest calling of our humanity. This is what the light winning looks like.
And I also don’t think it is the white washed, lip service version of parties coming together under the orderly rule of the new president elect (I can’t bring myself to say his name and president at the same time). Words about healing differences without the necessary blood sweat and tears required are empty platitudes. It is about the hard grunt work of really seeking to understand the other in our families, in our workplaces, in our Facebook groups.
Maybe it’s the extraordinary shadow that this day seems to cast, but I can’t believe that things won’t become worse before they become better. Change will continue, regardless of this election and subsequent protectionist strategies. Automation will make whole sectors of the workforce redundant. There will be job losses. There will be unrest and anger, and those feeling like their country is not their own anymore.
We get to decide now, and again, and again. Will we live together as brothers, or perish together as fools? There will be many people looking for the “other” in their midst to blame, to dehumanize. On the left and the right.
We can be shocked. We can be fearful. We can be angry and rage. And we can feel all of that and still look for the humanity in those we ardently disagree with. That is the light winning. Even on such a dark day.
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