Tuesday’s election was a victory for democracy. It was an off-set victory though, and we are still recovering from it; mentally, physically and emotionally. The wounded are still recovering.
“They’re rapists,” Donald Trump said about Mexican immigrants. “And I assume some of them are good people”
I’m writing this the night of the election. Our future is still suspended. Could Hillary still win? I’m not sure. It doesn’t look good. We need a miracle to counteract this miracle.
I watched as the New York Times projection swung from giving Trump a twenty percent chance of winning to giving him an over 95 percent chance of winning.
The margin of error was out the window; It looked like Donald was going to win. Fortune favors the bold. And boy, was Donald bold. I remember writing about Donald Trump with merriment in past articles. Donald Trump who? I joked.
Brexit. My stomach was brexiting from my throat.
I was a little drunk and could hardly believing my eyes.
“It’s the Anne Coulter dream of white turnout,” I thought.
Was this the last gasp of the old America, or was this a renewal, a new ascent of the white supremacist past that we thought we left by the side of the road. Where’d that white supremacy go? I saw it hitchhiking to Cleveland. Apparently that’s exactly where it went, and then it moved to the suburbs. And then it voted for Trump. Early and often. In Florida too. I saw it going that way.
Suspense. Keeping an eye on the Latino vote in Arizona and looking at votes coming in from Lebanon county in Pennsylvania. Apparently white college grad males had voted for Trump in great numbers. Thanks man, my roommate told me. You did this. I’m Jewish I said, which wasn’t not true. And Latino. Collingsworth is actually a Swahili name.
The media had failed us. Nate Silver stopped by. He took a couple hits off the bong then went into our closet and stood there in the dark with the door closed and hyperventilated for about an hour. Mumbling something about Michigan. I was about to go to bed and I knocked on the door and told him it was done, and he got an uber but then canceled it. He walked out the door. Where’d Nate go? My roommate asked. I saw him hitchhiking to Cleveland.
I was going to be hungover in class tomorrow. I sure hoped my professor would be there. Maybe he’d say “screw it” and decide to focus on carpentry.
I expect tomorrow that lava will not be running in the streets. The days will still be short. It will be colder a month from now. You can’t blame the cold on Donald Trump. Things will not have changed much tomorrow.
Except the way you feel. I don’t know which way it will go. One of Clinton’s guys, Podesta, came out and said people should go home. Tomorrow they will have more to say. Maybe Clinton was too drunk, one of my roommates suggested.
Apparently Podesta had appeared as the more mature person in the Clinton emails.
I’m going to stay up until this is done. Apparently the Pennsylvania vote wasn’t going to get fully counted for maybe four days, my roommates told me. It was going to be a long week. Please just spare me the phone call. Have mercy.
Who knew, my roommate Aditya said, that a hundred days from now we’re huddling on Mt. Mansfield watching civilization collapse, thinking about how carefree we were back in November.
Dark days are ahead. But the sun will still shine. We are the same country we were before, the same people. Nothing has changed.
