A Final Look Back on the 2016 Election
If you don't like that I've gone political on my blog I've got good and bad news. The bad news is it's just getting started. The good news is if it bothers you, you have two options. You either have one less blog to read, or you can read a 30 year old white male who changed his party allegiance from Republican to Democrat in large part because of our President elect. The decision is completely up to you but I want to make sure that's clear from the onset.
On the night of the election I wrote a post titled Election 2016: Completely and Utterly Devastated. It was written only minutes after the official word came down that Donald Trump would be the next President. In the last week I've felt an immense sense of loss that I can only compare to that of losing someone close to me. It appears there are many in this country who feel the same way. As I write this there are protests happening across the country in protest of the President elect.
I'll admit I find it a little late for people to show their outrage on Trump. We've had nearly two years of his bigoted, racist comments on the campaign trail to get riled up for and we failed. We as a nation on November 8th failed. We found that Hillary's e-mails (which most still don't even know what an e-mail server is) was worse then a man calling an entire race rapists, or an entire religion to be banned from entering our country. We failed not only ourselves but future generations. I can't imagine the horror of trying to explain to kids the enormity of the 2016 election. One of my favorite podcasts as of late is This American Life on NPR and there was a story of a young women who was afraid to wear her Hijab the day after the election because of the vitriol of Trump supporters. She shouldn't have to fear people attacking her because of her religion.
My initial reaction after Trump was elected was to hunker down. It was to avoid the news and pretend like nothing happened and go about our lives. I talked to Jenn on the night after the election and came to tears after reading aloud a letter that Aaron Sorkin wrote to his daughters. It helped to bring me out of my trance and made me realize the only way to fight a bigot is to be engaged.
So that's what Jenn and I are going to do. Along with donating to organizations like Planned Parenthood and The Trevor Project we want to be more informed. We plan to read more (outlets like the NY Times and Washington Post), listen more, and be far more involved in the political process. We won't sleep when it gets to midterms in two years and kicking Trump out of the white house in four.
A big part of that is to hopefully bring more of a political spin to my blog. To write about how the fear and dread I feel today translates as Trump takes office. To look at some of horrific policy plans that Trump has already talked (deportations, building a wall, banning religious groups, overturning Roe v Wade, etc.) about doing and the injustice to anyone that's not a white male. To stand with the LGBTQ community. To stand for women's rights. To stand proudly with the majority of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton and never allow Trumps hate to become acceptable or normal. That's what we want to fight against and that's what we will fight against until Trump becomes former President of the United States.
