The end of the world as we know it
I am scared today. Scared, and inexpressably sad.
I stayed up most of the night watching the election results roll in. I had cast my ballot at the early-voting polls. And every forecast said that Hillary was supposed to win, so I went into the evening optimistic.
Yeah, that didn't last long.
As more and more states reported their results, I got queasy. And angry. I held out hope as long as I could, and watched the flabbergasted reporters try to parse this seemingly-drastic shift.
I finally went to bed around one, after the commentators spelled out the fact that she couldn't afford to lose even one more state, and she was trailing in three. I cried on the phone with my sweetheart for anther couple of hours after turning off the television.
I know that the scope of the president's power is limited - even a president whose leanings are as totalitarian as any I've seen in my time. So, while the thought of him within arm's reach of nuclear launch codes makes me nervous, that's not what scares me the most.
We were only a million or so votes away from electing our first woman president; and, while I wasn't excited for Hillary as a rank-and-file Democratic candidate, I was excited about that. Instead of shattering that glass ceiling, though, we took the elevator back down a few floors by electing a man who has bragged about sexually assaulting women. And the thing that scares me is that more than half of voters weren't bothered enough by his blatant bigotry to cast their vote elsewhere.
More than half of voters seem to be saying that it's okay with them for women to be assaulted by people in positions of power. More than half of voters seem to be agreeing that Latin@ immigrants are rapists. More than half of voters seem to be saying that they think followers of Islam should be barred from the freedom of religion on which our country was founded.
That's what terrifies the ever-living shit out of me. More than half of the people surrounding me will stand for his casual bigotry. So I have to believe that, on some level, they agree with it. I wanted to think that we were living in more enlightened times than that. But maybe my ability to believe that to be true, up until last night, is a result of my white privilege and the confirmation bias of living in a solidly-blue state.
The world is still turning, for the time being. I pray that we'll survive the next 4 years with a minimum of damage, and that this ignoramus is booted out after a single term. Or, hell, an impeachment would be fucking GREAT.
But, shit... I tried. Don't blame me, guys. I wanted Bernie.