Looking Toward the Horizon of 2017: A Temporary Sunset for Hope and Change
While the high of the Cubs' first World Series win since 1908 in November was enough to make 2016 a decent year, I found that euphoria swiftly extinguished on election night the same month. I attended an election viewing party at a friend of a friend's house, intending to numb myself with whatever substances were available to make the results more tolerable regardless of the outcome.
It didn't work.
To my horror and everyone else's—save for one Mexican-American in the room who ironically voted for Trump—the votes, which FiveThirtyEight had predicted would result in a Hillary-favoring landslide, turned from uneasy to nightmarish in direction. The scale of moral and ethical injustice tipped to give Trump the upper hand, showcasing the vast presence of anger and regression in the red states.
It was a rough night for us, particularly for the homeowner's aunt who expressed despair from the final tally, fearful that as a lesbian woman her rights were now at stake. The fact that any reference to LGBT efforts has been removed from the White House website as of the inauguration is enough to justify those concerns.
That night, we faced the prospect of a "new" America where division and isolation would regain the power they once had over a century ago—a return to an archaic and skeletal nation with old-school morality at play. And now, as of January, the cards are on the burning table, and in the hands of a man who spends his early mornings Tweeting about SNL impressions and crowd numbers in lieu of sleeping and thinking beyond himself. We're facing a grim four years during which our POTUS will only be concerned with keeping his ego afloat while putting the nation and its people second. "America comes first," he spouts at his inauguration, but we know inside of that isolationist rhetoric he's thinking, "And America is me." Sure, he told us all he was going to give the nation back to its people in the spirit of Batman's Bane, but he couldn't go on without sounding overly chauvinistic, an unintentional cynical parody of every past inauguration with all of the eloquence of an elephant stomping gleefully in its own shit.
There have been enough insults thrown toward Trump for me to virtually ignore the man at this point and focus instead on the people who will be largely responsible for a majority of his impulsive decisions.
There's the more recent cabinet pick Rick Perry, the genius who thought that he would be supporting oil and gas when his position actually puts him in charge of ensuring the safety and security of the deadliest weapon on Earth; yes, the guy who cluelessly wore a Brokeback Mountain coat in an anti-gay ad is responsible for curating our nukes.
Let's also not forget Steve Bannon, who gives us great comfort as the former owner of Breitbart, a website totally not dedicated to white separatism, despite the first comment I saw on one of their articles belonging to a user with two confederate flags in her avatar (she's since changed it to two Bonnie Blue flags, which are essentially the same thing). Side note: Because I, like everyone who isn't a conspiratorial nutjob, refuse to link to their website, I will just tell you the title of the article is "National Public Radio Falsely Links Breitbart to White Separatism." The irony is scalding.
And then there's Vice President Mike Pence, the shrewdest man in office who, in addition to maintaining those old white men's traditional Christian values we all love, has once stated that "smoking doesn't kill," but sure it's "not good for you," just to go easy on tobacco companies. I want that guy advising the child in the President's chair.
How about White House spokesman Sean Spicer, who's already been caught in lies, or "alternative facts," twice since the inauguration: the first time regarding the number of people who attended the inauguration as called out by photographers who were there, followed by today's fib about the supposed recent expansion of the federal workforce.
Let's not forget the audience he caters to: people who refer to any type of popular media as "fake news" while reposting, parroting and parading anything that comes out of Alex Jones' or Milo Yiannopoulos' mouth; people who use terms like "SJW," "cuck," "libtard," and "fuckboy" more than testosterone-governed high schoolers probably would; people who claim that all of the Trump protesters are violent and angry morons when only a handful have been, while spending time spouting on and on about "idiot liberals" in aggression-littered rants on Facebook and forgetting that Obama was the most threatened president in American history. Let us also not forget the kind of vile shit that broke out during Obama's first election, but you've no doubt seen a Trump voter post a photo of the supposedly clean streets during Obama's inauguration on his (or, less likely, her) Facebook wall.
Sure, the left side has displayed its fair share of hypocrisy, and I don't condone the senseless acts that some have committed, from breaking the windows of Starbucks establishments to even punching white supremacists like Richard Spencer with their Nazi-esque undercut haircuts, regardless of whether or not they deserve it. At the same time, this violence is understandable, coming in many cases from people who have felt and been oppressed for most of their lives and are sick of it, with any hope for change in the near future now apparently out the window. As a white, hetero cis man, I can't say I truly empathize or understand what that's like, but I do sympathize.
We've made a certain level of progress as a nation, no question, but when someone like Trump is sitting in the president's chair, we have effectively transitioned from a country honoring its first black POTUS to electing a man who is the exact opposite in both appearance and persona. Gone is the eloquent, well-spoken man who displayed nothing but humility and graciousness during his exit, telling the collective American people "you made me a better president and a better man," and in comes the guy who just knows he's "gonna do a great job" and who's shown time and time again that he can't handle an atom of criticism while simultaneously deriding everyone he despises. Obama even briefly empathized for working-class white Trump voters during his farewell speech and encouraged the rest of us to do so, but do you think Trump would do the same for everyone who voted against him?
I look at many of the people out there who have suffered beyond myself and what this year means, looking forward. The future doesn't look great, but from the moment I woke up hungover from both the booze and the results the day following that unbelievable election night, I chose to view it as uncertain. It's uncertain because we have the power to change it—it's not set in stone. Minorities, women and everyone in the LGBTQ community and their supporters (myself included) can fight back against the oppressive rhetoric of the alt-right assholes of the nation. We can use peace and tolerance to counter the vitriol and toxicity that this administration represents.
Things like the Women's Marches are exactly what need to happen, lending a voice to people who haven't been properly heard for centuries. While the alt-right who voted for the biggest whiner in office can try to silence these efforts by hypocritically labeling us as "crybabies," we can say "no" every time. The government already listened once, and while Obama was a flawed president with his own problems and broken promises, we can elect someone down the road who can restore more hope for true change we need. Just as the sun has to come up every day, so too will progress as we experience a hopefully brief and survivable night.
It didn't work.
To my horror and everyone else's—save for one Mexican-American in the room who ironically voted for Trump—the votes, which FiveThirtyEight had predicted would result in a Hillary-favoring landslide, turned from uneasy to nightmarish in direction. The scale of moral and ethical injustice tipped to give Trump the upper hand, showcasing the vast presence of anger and regression in the red states.
It was a rough night for us, particularly for the homeowner's aunt who expressed despair from the final tally, fearful that as a lesbian woman her rights were now at stake. The fact that any reference to LGBT efforts has been removed from the White House website as of the inauguration is enough to justify those concerns.
That night, we faced the prospect of a "new" America where division and isolation would regain the power they once had over a century ago—a return to an archaic and skeletal nation with old-school morality at play. And now, as of January, the cards are on the burning table, and in the hands of a man who spends his early mornings Tweeting about SNL impressions and crowd numbers in lieu of sleeping and thinking beyond himself. We're facing a grim four years during which our POTUS will only be concerned with keeping his ego afloat while putting the nation and its people second. "America comes first," he spouts at his inauguration, but we know inside of that isolationist rhetoric he's thinking, "And America is me." Sure, he told us all he was going to give the nation back to its people in the spirit of Batman's Bane, but he couldn't go on without sounding overly chauvinistic, an unintentional cynical parody of every past inauguration with all of the eloquence of an elephant stomping gleefully in its own shit.
There have been enough insults thrown toward Trump for me to virtually ignore the man at this point and focus instead on the people who will be largely responsible for a majority of his impulsive decisions.
There's the more recent cabinet pick Rick Perry, the genius who thought that he would be supporting oil and gas when his position actually puts him in charge of ensuring the safety and security of the deadliest weapon on Earth; yes, the guy who cluelessly wore a Brokeback Mountain coat in an anti-gay ad is responsible for curating our nukes.
Let's also not forget Steve Bannon, who gives us great comfort as the former owner of Breitbart, a website totally not dedicated to white separatism, despite the first comment I saw on one of their articles belonging to a user with two confederate flags in her avatar (she's since changed it to two Bonnie Blue flags, which are essentially the same thing). Side note: Because I, like everyone who isn't a conspiratorial nutjob, refuse to link to their website, I will just tell you the title of the article is "National Public Radio Falsely Links Breitbart to White Separatism." The irony is scalding.
And then there's Vice President Mike Pence, the shrewdest man in office who, in addition to maintaining those old white men's traditional Christian values we all love, has once stated that "smoking doesn't kill," but sure it's "not good for you," just to go easy on tobacco companies. I want that guy advising the child in the President's chair.
How about White House spokesman Sean Spicer, who's already been caught in lies, or "alternative facts," twice since the inauguration: the first time regarding the number of people who attended the inauguration as called out by photographers who were there, followed by today's fib about the supposed recent expansion of the federal workforce.
Let's not forget the audience he caters to: people who refer to any type of popular media as "fake news" while reposting, parroting and parading anything that comes out of Alex Jones' or Milo Yiannopoulos' mouth; people who use terms like "SJW," "cuck," "libtard," and "fuckboy" more than testosterone-governed high schoolers probably would; people who claim that all of the Trump protesters are violent and angry morons when only a handful have been, while spending time spouting on and on about "idiot liberals" in aggression-littered rants on Facebook and forgetting that Obama was the most threatened president in American history. Let us also not forget the kind of vile shit that broke out during Obama's first election, but you've no doubt seen a Trump voter post a photo of the supposedly clean streets during Obama's inauguration on his (or, less likely, her) Facebook wall.
Sure, the left side has displayed its fair share of hypocrisy, and I don't condone the senseless acts that some have committed, from breaking the windows of Starbucks establishments to even punching white supremacists like Richard Spencer with their Nazi-esque undercut haircuts, regardless of whether or not they deserve it. At the same time, this violence is understandable, coming in many cases from people who have felt and been oppressed for most of their lives and are sick of it, with any hope for change in the near future now apparently out the window. As a white, hetero cis man, I can't say I truly empathize or understand what that's like, but I do sympathize.
We've made a certain level of progress as a nation, no question, but when someone like Trump is sitting in the president's chair, we have effectively transitioned from a country honoring its first black POTUS to electing a man who is the exact opposite in both appearance and persona. Gone is the eloquent, well-spoken man who displayed nothing but humility and graciousness during his exit, telling the collective American people "you made me a better president and a better man," and in comes the guy who just knows he's "gonna do a great job" and who's shown time and time again that he can't handle an atom of criticism while simultaneously deriding everyone he despises. Obama even briefly empathized for working-class white Trump voters during his farewell speech and encouraged the rest of us to do so, but do you think Trump would do the same for everyone who voted against him?
I look at many of the people out there who have suffered beyond myself and what this year means, looking forward. The future doesn't look great, but from the moment I woke up hungover from both the booze and the results the day following that unbelievable election night, I chose to view it as uncertain. It's uncertain because we have the power to change it—it's not set in stone. Minorities, women and everyone in the LGBTQ community and their supporters (myself included) can fight back against the oppressive rhetoric of the alt-right assholes of the nation. We can use peace and tolerance to counter the vitriol and toxicity that this administration represents.
Things like the Women's Marches are exactly what need to happen, lending a voice to people who haven't been properly heard for centuries. While the alt-right who voted for the biggest whiner in office can try to silence these efforts by hypocritically labeling us as "crybabies," we can say "no" every time. The government already listened once, and while Obama was a flawed president with his own problems and broken promises, we can elect someone down the road who can restore more hope for true change we need. Just as the sun has to come up every day, so too will progress as we experience a hopefully brief and survivable night.
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