It’s the morning after the night before, and there’s much that is still unclear in my mind. Nevertheless, I’ve started to form the haziest of conclusions about the election we just concluded.
Perhaps the most important one is this: the really painful thing is not the sure knowledge of what is to come in the weeks, months, and years ahead. We’re certainly in for the following:
- Repeal of Obamacare and the end of any meaningful health insurance reform
- Further emasculation of the Voting Rights Act
- Multiple Supreme Court nominations that will set the course of the high court for decades to come
- Overturning Roe v. Wade
- Rolling back guarantees of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage
- Further incursions into the Constitutional freedoms of all of us, especially our Muslim and Hispanic neighbors
Despite all that, those are just symptoms. The really painful thing is this:
We are not the country that I thought we were. The American people, my neighbors, family, and friends, are not the people I thought they were. The things that I was taught to value as someone who was born in the 1960s, raised in the 1970s, and came of age in the 1980s—things like equal rights, First Amendment protections, the value of truth in journalism, the idea that we are a nation of immigrants, the beauty of diversity, just to name a few—are not important to the majority. In fact, many despise those things. The white nationalists are having their day in the sun.
The most painful thing, in short, is the recognition that we are no better than anyone else, that it may not be safe to believe those things in this new America, and not knowing how, or if, we’re going to get out of the hole my fellow citizens have just dug for us all.