This morning, I woke up with the same mix of emotions I’ve been feeling for the past week: anxiety, anger, disappointment, and fear. No matter who you voted for, it’s undeniable that this election will bring many, many new changes, and I have this horrible feeling in my stomach that not a lot of it is going to be good.
It’s hard to go on Twitter or Facebook and see all of the chaos and hate that has already begun to consume our country in the past couple days and not feel hopeless. It’s hard not to wonder what do we do now? What do we honest to God do now? And it’s so incredibly hard not to think about how close we were to having our first woman president.
The morning after the election, one of my professors said, “Clap if you woke up happy this morning.” I was in a big lecture hall. A small handful of people clapped, mostly boys. Then, he said, “Clap if you woke up scared this morning.” The hall was filled with loud applause. On one hand, I was sad to see that so many people, like me, were fearing for the future of our country. But on the other hand, I felt solidarity. I wasn’t alone in this.
“Yeah,” my professor said. “That’s what I thought. All I can say right now is that we just have to keep going. It might be inappropriate of me to not talk about the election and to just keep lecturing and going through the slides, but that is my job. We just have to keep waking up every morning and do our jobs and we have to stick together. We cannot let the fear win.”
This is all easier said than done, of course. No one knows what is going to happen in the next four years. We can either keep making strides as a nation, or we can forget the progress we have already achieved and land ourselves right back at square one.
And believe me, I know it’s hard not to be scared when you think of it like that, when you think of all of the odds stacked against us right now. And for the past couple days, it has seemed so easy to just give into the despair.
But then I witnessed my university stage a peaceful protest against the election. Hundreds of people came out and marched together. And this was just at my college. All around the country, people were protesting together as one voice.
A former teacher of mine who I’m still very close with texted me the day after the election. “Hey! I’m thinking of you today. I know that our country is going to be okay because people like you are the future.”
Seeing that message on my phone brought tears to my eyes, but this time it was tears of hope and happiness. And I realized that my generation of millennials is one of the strongest, most diverse ones yet. And although the next four years might be something straight out of our worst nightmares, pretty soon it’ll be our turn to take over, and it’ll be our turn to make this country right. Who knows? Maybe we’ll not only get the first woman president, but the first gay president, or the first transgender president. It seems like a bit of a stretch now, but 10 years ago, so did having a black president.
So although I am feeling the fear, seeing the hate and am wondering what we are supposed to do, I also know that together, we are stronger, and together we can get through this.
