Understanding My Post-Election Response: Part 1

The morning of November 9th, 2016,  I checked the news to confirm the headline was as predicted the night before. It was.

After staring blankly at my screen for a bit, I slowly gathered myself to go to campus. My classmates exuded the same listlessness and anxiety I was feeling.  Hallway “How’s it going?” greetings were answered with grave, pithy social commentary. People hugged each other wordlessly. Heading home, I found myself weighted by the perilous, still ongoing task of unpacking: why exactly was I so upset?

Throughout the presidential campaign, my idealism kept any candidate from filling me with enthusiasm. I knew this, and so I never trumpeted praises for Hillary. Cosseted in the liberal stratospheres of first a Californian university and now a social justice-oriented medical school, such trumpeting felt unnecessary: the public will of America couldn’t possibly select a president who declared Mexican immigrants were rapists, proposed a ban on immigrants based on a religious test, and bragged about grabbing women’s pussies on the side. I remember lamenting that Trump’s absurdity prevented me from even researching merits of a Republican vote, and I (wrongly) assumed others would feel the same.

Still, reflecting after the election, I knew my grief did not stem from realizing the majority of my fellow Americans were morally aligned with Trump’s most outrageous platforms. For one, the popular vote results and low voter turnout overall rendered that point moot ¹. Secondly, if I ascribed to the binary of “If you didn’t vote for Clinton, then you must agree with XYZ of Trump’s most incendiary remarks,” then I’d have to subject myself to the same binary. Among other things, I can’t align myself with Hillary’s track record of expanding American foreign military presence ².

No, many people globally stood to suffer under a Clinton presidency. The difference, I realized, is that this is the first election where I keenly felt a presidential candidate’s ability to directly target me.

President-elect Trump’s campaign galvanized anti-Muslim rhetoric in a way that I have never seen. This is a man whose website still calls for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” ³ He rallied his followers around a false story about a general shooting Muslim prisoners of war with pig-blood drenched bullets, lauding the tale as inspiration for how we can end terrorism ⁴. He has rambled incoherently about databases, registration, or surveillance of American Muslims ⁵. He told Anderson Cooper: “I think Islam hates us.” ⁶ 

Regardless of how President-elect Trump chooses to act on these sentiments, his words offer political backing for fears and prejudices. Taking the microscope of political focus that remains eternally primed for parochialism, he narrowed it to exclude a distinct Other–disabled people, refugees, LGBTQ individuals, Mexicans, African-Americans, countless others, and yes, me.

Continued…