What’s a President for?
In January 2009, as I watched Barack Obama’s inauguration, I was an unemployed person unsure how I was going to make my rent or pay for food for the month, shivering under gigantic blankets because my roommates and I could only barely afford to heat the ramshackle Victorian house where we lived. My memory of that time is blurry with the despair and terror through which I watched the day’s ceremonies, feeling a small, frightened glimmer of hope.
Within a few months, I had a $10/hr temp job working in the Massachusetts Department of Revenue processing unemployment taxes, which were ballooning at that time. I moved into a collective house full of union organizers, artists and teachers dedicated to healthy living and advocating for social justice. Then a few months after that, I found out that I was accepted into graduate school. At first I assumed I wouldn’t be able to go because it was too expensive, but then I learned about the executive orders Obama had recently passed allowing for income based repayment of student loans, and eventual loan forgiveness for borrowers in public service. So I went, and when I graduated I got two half time jobs paying $25 and $30 an hour respectively, doing work I felt good about. I was able to afford health insurance through the Freelancers Union and just missed benefiting from the insurance exchanges. A few years later, one of my part time jobs turned into a salaried position paying $60,000 with full benefits, educational opportunities, and a mission I felt good about. In the meantime, I had fallen in love with a woman who would eventually become my wife, enabling her to access healthcare through my employer plan. I marvel frequently in wonder and gratitude at what is by all measures a good life, beyond what I ever imagined for myself, a life that I feel is hated and begrudged by people I never encounter.
I thought voting for Obama would make me feel good about myself because he would do things like close Guantanamo Bay. I thought he would make me feel better about an America that would elect a black president. I thought he would build robust social programs I would feel proud to support. In retrospect, his presidency didn’t do that, but it essentially saved my life. I never would have expected the concrete material benefits I personally received from his presidency. I had been skeptical of a great man theory of history and believed no one individual had particular weight in the face of a large complicated social organism. The significance of the presidency in the whole complicated workings of our government seemed overrated to me, but I can’t imagine how different my life would be without this one individual in power in it. Strangely, I think his ultimate legacy is as the savior of capitalism, bringing a collapsing system back from the brink, and calming massive unrest through his extraordinary personal competence, conscientiousness and charisma, his unique combination of organizer bonafides and sincere belief in capitalism.
Similarly, when I felt traumatized by the contested election of George W. Bush in 2000, I comforted myself with the idea that there is a limit to the damage one person can do. But even today, the unfathomable scope and depth of the damage originating directly from the Bush administration continues to become more and more apparent. At the time of that election, when I was 17, the cause I was most passionate about was fighting torture. Running my school’s Amnesty International chapter, I regularly wrote letters to leaders of other countries letting them know that in my opinion, as an American high school student, torture was not ok. It never would have occurred to me in my wildest dreams that the election of George W. Bush would open the door to torture being openly sanctioned by the United States government. And that’s just one issue. The degradation of the public education system in the United States and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have results that we continue to see echoing and amplifying in ways that will surely continue long into the future. It becomes so clear how quickly destruction can begin and then snowball wildly, while repair is incredibly slow, difficult and incremental.
For the months leading up the election, I felt sick to my stomach watching the tracker on the New York Times give Hillary a 75% or 85% or 95% chance and glancing at the articles listing the reasons Trump would never win, and speculating on what Hillary would do in office. If felt like such terrible hubris. What most shaped my feelings about Trump’s ascendency in the primaries was reading about the rising white mortality rates, due largely to suicide, opioid addiction, and treatable illnesses. I was thinking a lot about the extreme passion for gun ownership, how guns outnumber people in the US, and how it must feel to want guns to badly, to feel so passionately. It all added up to a palpable spiritual malaise. Hearing Trump’s quote about how he treats women like shit, and they love it, something clicked into place. I started reckoning with the possibility that he may win, not despite treating people like shit, but because of it.
Whether people love Trump because they want to be bullied by him, or because they want him to bully others on his behalf, whether they tell themselves they are voting for him despite his bullying shenanigans because they hope he will remove the environmental regulations keeping them from their factory job, I cannot imagine a reason that isn’t some way tied to self-hate. A funny thing started happening to me when I started looking at the violent, racist, misogynistic rhetoric and seeing despair, my own righteous, self-righteous, superior outraged and disbelieving anger left me too. I could no longer enjoy Daily Show mockery, or head shaking over those who seem to vote against their own economic interests.) James Baldwin once imagined one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. Although I will never excuse a single Trump voter, my hate for them is gone and in its place is sadness, and a resolve to do what I can to mitigate the damage they will cause. There’s plenty of evidence the man himself must be motivated by a deep personal loathing driving the desire to fill an endless void with more gigantic gold mansions and other peoples’ pain. The too rich are even worse off spiritually than the too poor.
On election morning, I went with my partner to vote. Thinking of her joyful confidence then feels like a punch to the gut. Unlike her, I was tense and grim, the way I’ve been throughout the interminable time since this all began, whenever that was. Throughout this election season, I’ve been working to find a balance between taking in the necessary information but not wasting strength and energy endlessly consuming the trivial horrifics. Trying to find that balance is going to be even more important in the years to come, I imagine. In that spirit, I took a bath as the first results were coming in, and went to bed when Florida was announced, asking my partner to listen on headphones. Throughout the night I kept half waking up, thinking at one point that Trump had won 70% of the popular vote, and at another that it had all been a dream.
Although I thought I had been preparing myself for the possibility of a Trump victory, once it happened I found myself spinning through implications I hadn’t yet considered. First I thought about my own survival: whether my job at a university might be cut in the likelihood that higher education is hit hard; if my partner, who just finished nursing school, might have a harder time finding a job now, or maintaining a good salary if unions are suppressed and the protections of the Affordable Care Act are lost. I started cycling through my closest friends and who work in fields likely to take a hit: libraries, schools, archives, Planned Parenthood, and I started to think about what we could do to support each other and manage the damage. It was only then that I thought about the groups that have been overtly targeted for racial violence, and the people already unemployed or making minimum wage, barely getting by. Then I thought about the surely coming blows to the disaster relief infrastructure already insufficient to deal with Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy. The Ebola outbreak, and the response by Governor Chris Christie and other Republicans who sought to criminalize and illegally confine returning relief workers, while refusing aid for research or containment of the disease. What happens when there is another outbreak of disease, another natural disaster, and we can expect this government to not only provide no aid but to add to violence and fear? Who will be our leaders? In vain I searched for Angela Davis on Twitter (she doesn’t have an account), gave money to #Our100, felt grateful to the leadership shown by Black Lives Matter, inspired by the example of efforts like the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children and Occupy Sandy. I resolved not to cry and give the satisfaction to Trump and his supporters of another crying lesbian in Brooklyn, but to learn from this and grow smarter, more disciplined, determined.
If there is one positive outcome from this disaster, it’s that the racist and misogynistic violence that has infected this country from the start has shown its face more openly than it has in my lifetime. We are sharing a landmass with white people hell bent on destruction. Some might say this has been true since the founding of the United States, is in fact our origin story, but it is showing a new face. The chickens have come home to roost. The insidiousness of dog whistles and bad faith have given way to an opponent who personifies white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism, and who brings together in solidarity the vast numbers of groups he targets as he shows us our shared vulnerabilities. Instead of the uneasiness of anxiously hoping for the best from Hillary Clinton, an obstructionist Republican House and probably obstructionist Republican Senate, I have the searing clarity of purpose that we must plan to protect ourselves and each other, and strategize for the future. We’re free now to envision new systems, new ways of being, and to make plans to bring them about. It has never been clearer to me that we are sharing a landmass with millions of self-hating people determined to destroy us, themselves, and this whole world. Now we have a fresh urgency guiding the work of survival and repair, the need to bring the despairing and violent hearts and spirits of our fellow citizens to the causes of mutual support and liberation.
