This isn’t about any of that, there’s plenty to read about those things on the internet whatever side of the divide you fall on. This isn’t about him or her. This certainly isn’t about you, whether or not you were with her or him. This is about me, and with hope it is about us.

Trump supporters got it right. Wrong about nearly everything else, but about how broken the system is and how necessary change is they got it right. Trump was so bad it was funny to me. Like a MacGruber or an Austin Powers villain. I made bets with friends in 2015 because I was sure he would get the GOP nomination — my eyes were open, I thought, to the real world. It was funny to me because from my condo — in the poshest part of Williamsburg, which is the poster child of gentrification in Brooklyn, which is the hipsterest borough in NYC which is an epicenter of privilege— he didn’t need to be taken seriously. I live in my own homemade Matrix. Around 9pm on Tuesday, like some orange Neo, Trump crashed through and I stopped seeing the lady in the red pant suit, I started seeing the code. As much as I’d like to eat the steak again, hopefully I won’t.

The system is broken. How else can you explain it? The brightest in our country tasked with making predictions and understanding what is going on failed to even understand that there were huge swaths of the country where they had no idea what was going on. Failed to see that there were people, not just poor, uneducated, white men as they liked to condescend, but educated, urban city dwellers — who felt so betrayed by their government that seeing someone who didn’t talk like a politician was enough for them to ignore all the other facts and believe that he’s the one who’s going to fix it. And to some degree, how can I fault them? If you believe that the system is broken and needs to change, if you KNOW that there is a 100% chance that choice A is not going to fix the problem then choice B has got to represent a better chance than that. Try something else, anything. Right?

Except in this case Choice B is 100% going to break everything but the system— it’s throwing the women, mexicans, lgbt, muslim and nearly everyone else out and it isn’t even going to get out the bath water. But when you’re desperate and you see a chance, you focus on that one thing and you make reality conform to what you want it to be. You make your own Matrix. Just like I made mine, willfully blind to the degree of pain and suffering huge portions of the country are in.

The system is broken. Or it’s not — it’s working exactly as designed. It is an efficient machine for the inexorable transfer of wealth, power and privilege upward into an increasingly concentrated few. When Peter Thiel talks about “single digit millionaires” as a class unable to protect themselves and one deserving of his protection while destroying the independence of our media — putting on full display how disconnected and privileged our empowered class is, I would laugh if I wasn’t crying. At the same time, the system divides the people and pits them against each other with fear and hatred all the while taking everything.

The system doesn’t reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour. The system consistently rewards bad behaviour. Lies are not punished, they’re glorified. It doesn’t try to lift people up — just watch the news. It tells you daily, hourly, up to the minute that you’re in a world of crap and the person giving you that crap sandwich isn’t some toupeed orange billionaire monster, it’s your neighbor. That anyone could believe that an insanely wealthy, fascist, neo-nazi could be the saviour of the un-privileged who he has no interest in understanding is exactly the enduring product of the system.

Trump supporters are wrong in the belief that Trump is some kind of sand in the gears, that he is the One to break things up. Trump isn’t some anomaly. Trump is the product of the GOP — the words he spoke were the subtext of the actions the GOP have been taking forever. He has simply given unvarnished voice to their natural endpoint. He’s not breaking the system, he’s accelerating it. The GOP platform of misogyny, racism, and hatred — there’s nothing new in Trump’s behaviour, except that he’s saying it out loud. So I guess they were right about that, he does say it like it is. Hate and fear thy neighbor.

Hillary, too, was also the ultimate product of this machine. A broken political party, foisting an establishment candidate into a climate that obviously (in retrospect, if you must) was looking for change. Completely blind to the pain and suffering of huge portions of the country, despite the fact that it was screamed to the rooftops for the entire election cycle with both Bernie’s and Trump’s increasingly successful campaigns. Pulled gently to the left with the surprise success of Bernie’s campaign, but with all gears of the machine pulling her forward an inevitable triumph over him. Even then, instead of realizing that there was a glitch in the polling, instead of trying to embrace this wider constituency crying for voice, they chose Tim Kaine as her running mate, a man who toes the party line and brings no wider breadth of representation or promise of support to the unsupported. The system no longer represents the needs of the people, only the needs of the powerful.

Trump’s supporters were right about this. The system is broken for all of us but the powerful. This is the US democracy and this is how it is broken. For me, writing this is both catharsis and another step in my process of moving forward. This is how my democracy works. If it was easy, the whole world would be awesome. I want to move forward and focus on the system, I want to break down the walls it’s built between us and not the people divided by those walls. I want there to be transparency and responsibility. I don’t know how to get there, but this is how I start.

It’s Friday the 11th now. I’ve cried each day since Wednesday and I hate it, I expect there will be more days of crying to come and when it stops I dread to learn why that will be. I’m filled with despair for our country and our people. I’m filled with hopelessness for what is and what is to come.

Throughout this election, I’ve thought deeply about what I should talk about with my 4 year old and I decided—deep in the bowels of my Matrix, deep in my surety that Hillary would win — that I wouldn’t tell her anything, that the greatest thing for her would be to grow up simply knowing that having a woman in the White House was perfectly natural and not exceptional in any way. I am filled with sadness that instead she will reach an age where her burgeoning understanding of concepts like country and government will arrive at a time when a man who’s all but thrown out concepts of civility, goodness and the rule of law is our President.

Nevertheless, just like I tell her so I tell myself, crying, throwing a tantrum, sulking — those feelings are natural and good, accept them but also calm down and figure out what you can try to start solving your problem. To me that means, fight the problem — fight the system. Fight the system that tells people it’s ok to hate. Fight the system that takes everything from everyone to feed itself. All else is the actual product of the system, the exact thing it wants you to see and do and try to fix. Focus on the problem. Stay on target. Words I say all the time in other contexts. I ask myself to allow me use these emotions to drive me to keep going when nothing seems to work, when even anything I could personally do feels like trying to drain the ocean with a thimble. Because that is how the system thrives, making you feel small and isolated and helpless and alone and afraid. I will use this to find ways to attack the system at work, in life, and with as many breaths as I can. I will use this to find ways to hope and help and love and understand. I don’t know exactly what that means or exactly where it will take me. For me, for now, that will have to be enough.

I wrote this and I put it on the internet and it’s about me and it’s about now. It was my way to confront this awful pain in my heart and name it so that hopefully I can put it behind me and move on. If you read this, I would love to hear from you and about your experience and about your path forward especially if your experience was not like mine.

So I’m a dad raising two girls, one is 7 months old and the other is 3 years. As the internet will tell you, this is an interesting thing for dads to be doing. Recently I read a piece on allowing girls to be princesses by Sarah Chipps who I’ve unfortunately never met, but everyone I know who knows her speaks volumes on how great she is.

I was super interested in what she had to say and found myself fundamentally agreeing with her writing. This was — at least superficially — at odds with the fact that I’m most definitely trying to shield my daughter from princessification. I intercept presents from well intentioned gift givers, I’m distinctly off Disney movies (well all movies, but especially Disney — not because they’re bad, indeed many are fantastic and rightfully loved — but simply because the princess virus is strong in them), and I generally try to change the subject when princess comes up.

In the intervening days I’ve spent time thinking about this seeming contradiction, but realized it’s not that at all. In fact it aligns exactly with my belief that you only get to guide your children and show them the things you think are cool, they get to decide what is actually great. There’s a fine line between showing and telling that parents need to walk (and it is a tough as hell line to walk).

I also do not subscribe to the idea that kids are the same and gender differences are societal — from early days I could see young boys (on average) being quite different from young girls (on average). So I get it, but here’s the thing, the princessification process begins before birth and is very much a subtle, but ubiquitous and pernicious societal construct that prevents girls from seeing beyond it.

Walk into any mainstream children’s clothing store and wander into the boys section. You’ll find that boys are prepped to be rock stars and astronauts and presidents and surfers and mvps and ride tractors and boats and dinosaurs. Stroll over to the girls sections and you’ll see they’re Princesses. If you look hard, maybe they can be daddy’s little girl, too.

Boys learn (because they are told repeatedly from early days) that you can be whatever you make yourself, even the sky is not the limit. Girls are told, you are already all you could hope to be — a princess. When’s the last time you called some boy “prince?” Let me tell you, “princess” is what everyone calls girls they stop to coo at.

So it’s not that I want to prevent my daughters from being a princess if that’s what they want. I bow to the fact that there is a certain inevitability to it. It is also most certainly not that I put girly and science at opposite ends of the spectrum, they are completely orthogonal. I rage at the fact that society has made it such that every last one of its girls will go through at least some time (and usually an extensive period of time) where they believe that their value comes from their birth and not from their actions. Why is it that there is no equivalent phase for little boys?

It’s because when your value comes from your actions, there’s no single avenue that every boy wants to walk down — your actions define you. That should be the message we all tell our girls as well. It’s what I’m telling mine and would greatly appreciate it if you all would too, otherwise, “Your Majesty” does have a nice ring to it.