“I don’t know where I fit.”
A Brit’s eye view on the day after the night before, Manhattan, NYC
I paused opposite the permanent showcase of nationalism at the Stock Exchange, reflecting after the most momentous of days, an African American man stood by me as if to do the same. He stopped for 2 or 3 seconds, looked up at the flag, shook his head and walked away. On Wall Street where eleven Africans built a defensive wall for the Dutch against the English, giving the famous financial centre its name, it seemed as if he no longer felt the flag was his.
In true comic book style, I rode the subway the morning after the election in to what felt like the epicentre of the end of the world, the city where all events had centered the night before, Manhattan. No smiles or conversation, deafening quiet, only the odd glance of common despair. A young man stood in front of me most of the journey playing with a Rubik’s cube, it looked more solvable than anything else would that day. The man opposite me had his sunglasses on, his eyes were red and sore as he tried to crack a smile of mutual experience with me, he couldn’t quite manage it.
I was headed to Civic Hall for a meeting with StreetlivesNYC, they emailed me first thing to confirm our meeting, given the events I was surprised, I’ve cancelled for less. When I arrived, the atmosphere was flat in the open plan office full of socially driven tech enterprises, I had the feeling it was the opposite of their true nature. I tripped over everyone I met saying how sorry I was, as if something had just died. We stared at Clinton’s concessionary speech together and cried together, the women in the room held hands as their eyes streamed when she spoke to us directly:
“Please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it… I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion.”
I say us because Clinton has been that for all of us, no matter your nationality, no matter your political background or what you think of her. This woman nearly did it for herself and for all of us in the process. Nearly.
After Obama’s address in an alternate reality, the staff asked me to join them for a community meeting. The cafeteria was like the buffet at a wake, someone aptly noted it as such — they were “mourning the loss of a country we thought we knew, never mind its future”.
The gathering was introduced with: “We want to make room for you to be able to cope, because we don’t know where we’re headed.” The group were encouraged to air anything in their minds, to serve their feelings up as raw as they sat within them.
After being drawn together by a Jewish New Yorker, a Floridian woman went first and could barely speak, the grand-daughter of the last chief of her Native American tribe went next, then a woman sat with her wife, then a white woman from Missouri, then a young African American woman from Wisconsin, an immigrant from Taiwan, a middle aged feminist, a French woman who’s just married an American, a middle aged white man who has two adopted Columbian boys, a British immigrant, the son of refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union. “I’m afraid”, “I don’t know where I fit”, “I don’t know how to tell my kids what this means for them”, “I don’t know my country anymore”, “I’m so afraid”, “I want to be allowed to be angry”, “I’m wearing my ‘F*ck You’ tights today”, “I left under Reagan and now I know I need to stay and fight”, “I’m terrified”. The longer conversations were meant to stay private, I sat and listened and watched and wept as I saw all this great country is built on tremble.
How are you supposed to start a conversation when you are afraid of your fellow countrymen? Not just a bit wary of the unknown, terrified. It is all well and good saying people should start to talk, but most of the people I speak to don’t know where to start and are scared to do so. Yes this is part of the problem, but it can’t just be the ‘liberal urban dwellers’ told to reach out, as ethnic minorities, all other kinds of minorities and people experiencing poverty too, they were also ignored by the political system, the media and other parts of their country and still are. If there is only a drive for mediation and no fight back this will stay the case.
This election result wasn’t just about disenfranchisement, this was about race and gender, people with anything other than white or male attached to them feel they have been told by 56 million people they are not wanted. This is the context communities now sit on, being blamed for the bubble of relative safety they sit in, this is the space they find themselves in searching for common ground.
People keep making parallels with 1930’s Germany, if you’re going to do that, the first place to start is by looking at the people who shifted the ground, not the people who scratched an X on a piece of paper. Unlike Hitler, people’s worry doesn’t primarily come from Trump having control over the nuclear codes and the military, it comes from the Republicans having control over the House and Senate.
Take the already proposed and highly popular, repeal of the Affordable Healthcare Act. If you want to know what a repeal in the Affordable Health care act means, take giving birth in the US. At present women — especially people with lower incomes are recommended to undergo a caesarean birth, because they’re more efficient and cost less. Under the Affordable Health Care Act, more people have more of a choice to choose a natural birth, without it women will literally not be able to afford to give birth. Freelancers currently benefit greatly from the affordable health care act, meaning more people can leave their jobs and start out on their own because they would still have access to decent health insurance. This would no longer be the case. So if you’re a female freelancer who wants to have a family, you can start to think again or start saving the $30,000 it will cost you, just for the giving birth part.
This is what people mean when they say I don’t know where I fit. The system has shifted so far in favour of others overnight there aren’t the same spaces as there were before. People will have to create these for themselves.
This is where the fight is, it’s not with each other. Fight for space to be created for your ideals and the issues you care about, don’t fight to take it from others, that is what has just happened. Trump and the Republicans’ American dream is for the population to turn on one another and ignore their deeds and words. None of us can let them get away with that.
