I stayed up until 3:15 AM watching election coverage and simply could not pull myself away from the screen. In that moment, I could not figure out why I felt it was so important to watch until the bitter end since the race had been decided long before. It wasn’t denial. In retrospect, it was the very opposite. I was sitting there because I had accepted the result but did not know how to move forward, so I just didn’t move. I was afraid to get up and go to bed because the next morning would be qualitatively different and I wasn’t sure what that would mean for me. It meant campus would feel gloomy. It meant I’d be there for my friends. It meant I’d watch Clinton’s concession speech. It meant I’d feel sick to my stomach. It meant I’d feel powerless. It meant that there were people all across the world feeling even worse than me. It meant that there were people all across the world celebrating.
For some of us, it hurts right now. And we need to let it hurt. We need to allow others to hurt. We need to hurt because others hurt. To feel our pain and the pain of others is a humanizing experience, and that’s something we must hold near and dear to our hearts following an election in which so many people were dehumanized by campaign rhetoric. By feeling this pain we also inevitably reach a place in which we cannot do nothing. This is how we move forward. We must move forward. And there are a few things we must do in order to move forward.
First, we must be able to say, “Donald Trump is my president." For some people, this may not be a profound statement. For others, I realize that #notmypresident has a lot of appeal, but President Trump is less abhorrent than railing against our democracy. We are not members of a democracy with the condition that elections go the way we want. In the words of Hillary Clinton, “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power, and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it.” In the third presidential debate when Trump suggested that he would consider the results of the election at the time, the world collectively gasped and the hypocrisy of following in Trump’s rhetorical footsteps, now that Clinton did not emerge victorious, is, as Hillary Clinton said in her response at the third presidential debate, “horrifying.”
Second, we must listen. Our two party system creates exclusive coalitions that privilege their members’ voices over those of non-members, and as divisive as this is, this is how Trump got elected. To be frank, this is how Clinton would have been elected had she won. Nevertheless, Trump’s job now is “to bind the wounds of division,” and he began by “pledg[ing] to every citizen of our land that [he] will be president for all Americans.”
For those like me who refused to be a part of Trump’s coalition, we are exactly who Trump was reaching out to. Our natural reaction was one of skepticism because his new words are so antithetical to his words and actions during his campaign, but we have no choice but to hope that he was sincere when he spoke early in the morning on November 9th.
In conceding the presidency to Trump, we shall not concede our values, but we must listen anew to the values of those who voted to place Trump in office, at the very least to understand the state of our nation. For those who fit into Trump’s coalition, his speech should serve as a carefully guarded plea that they also take up the burden of listening to those who opposed them, instead of taking their candidate’s victory as proof that they were right as opposed to a politically constructed “wrong.”
Third, we must make our voices heard. For those who feel defeated, to opt into silence would doom Trump to failure in uniting the nation and would doom our nation to four years with a government based upon ignorance. Trump must listen to the voices he previously mocked, scorned, or ignored, but he can only do that if those voices make themselves heard. For those whose voices were heard and affirmed by the results of this election, they must also continue to speak because while heralded as a “silent majority” up until election night, their force was sufficient to change the course of the election and if we want to move forward we must address their concerns instead of letting them fade away.
As both sides both speak and listen, our nation will finally be engaging in conversation of a nature which can help our nation to move forward.
Fourth, we must act. Listening, speaking, and conversing is action in and of itself, but this must happen on a larger scale than it naturally occurs. Many people do not have access to these conversational and active spaces, yet everyone at this point has something to say. I’m fortunate to be on a college campus where these conversations are constant and where when I wandered into a lounge seeking free barbeque I was able to engage in a meeting about how to turn our campus into a space where people can process the result of the election and where we as a campus can model the type of unity our nation needs to achieve.
During the campaign season, we were taught that there isn’t room in this nation for the visions of both parties and that we should react with fear to those who have a different vision from our own, and this is what we must protest on a larger sphere. There is room in this nation to show love to all people: white, black, Hispanic, Muslim, rich, poor, LGBTQIA, disabled, men, women, veterans, people who voted for Trump, people who voted for Clinton, people who didn’t vote, and so many more. No matter what our identities are and how they’ve been manipulated over the course of the election, in this moment we should not protest Trump. We should protest rhetoric and policy that devalues entire segments of our population.
To conclude, as I’m writing this and I look around campus, I see that people are glum. I see that people are angry. I see that people care. I also see these attitudes starting to fade as quickly as they set in. Yet, what I’ve proposed in this article, albeit in the vaguest sense, is going to be a prolonged endeavor. I implore people to continue to care even as emotion dulls and apathy woos us away from taking action.
