California After The Election
On November 8th, election day, my days goes on regularly but with a hope that by tonight we will call our very first female president. Excitement started my day but worried ended it.
That day I didn’t stay up till the end to see who wins because by the time Mr. Trump was leading, I was exhausted and didn’t want to deal with reality so I escaped to my dreamland. For some reason, I woke up at 4 the next day. Opening my eye I grabbed my phone, searching for the word “Mrs. President Clinton” on Facebook, only to see “Trump got elected president of the United States”. I couldn’t believe my eyes, I keep on scrolling to different news page, going onto different news website. I didn’t want to accept the fact. Before I know it, tears is rolling down on my face. I continues to cries for 30 minutes non-stop. I just couldn’t believe that it happened. Till this day, I still believe that there’s something to be done so that Mr. Trump would not be president. That night I did as many people do, posting on social about my reaction. I’m not the only who doesn’t accept the fact.
That night California shows the rest of the countries how their decision are not acceptable. Protests broke out, and it continues for days, blocking freeways, streets, marching to government office. But California isn’t alone, most young people across the country took to the street for days to protest Mr.Trump being the President-elect. If we look closely, California reacted very differently from other states, especially with it’s diverse population.
Some were pushing for what they call “CalExit”, which is the effort to make California into it’s own nation and separate it from being a state in the United States. As farfetched as it sound there are some reason why people would want to have a CalExit. First of all, CalExit would have the chance to protect the most illegal immigrant that resides in california and they would not be touch by Mr. Trump new presidency. Mr. Trump has promised through his campaign that he would get rid of immigrant from Mexico by “building a huge wall and Mexico will pay for it”. Which a promise that no one believed it would come true.
He also wanted to stop muslim from entering the country till they can find out what is going on. A very vague sentence but it holds the power of scaring millions muslim who is residing in the United States. My roommate, who is Pakistani, has expressed her fear by saying “She’s afraid of what is going to happen to her and her family from now on.” As someone who has lived in the United States her whole life, she has faced many struggles since 9/11 and now her future is in danger because of our President-elect.
In a democracy, people choose those who speaks for them, which is a very similar concept to Gayatri Spivak’s concept in “Can the Subaltern Speak”. Our founding father thinks that there should be one person who hold the power and speak for the people. Similar to the Subaltern in Spivak’s essay, our representative is looking at us from an outsider view and they try to speak for us. We would like to believe that they listen to us, study us, and make decision that we would make, even if they are not us. They might not be an immigrant, they might not have parent who’s not white, they might not be in the working class, they might not know our struggle of being different.
The different, who born in this country, our skin color might not be white, practice different culture, eat different food, and go to different school, we like to believe that we belong in this country even as a diaspora. Especially as a part of a diaspora and immigrant we belong here, because this country is an immigrant country and we would like to have a representative who represent us, not someone who call us criminal, rapist, and other names that negatively impact our community.
