Love Doesn’t Trump Hate, Action Does

I have watched as families have been torn apart by the immigration laws in this country and the new wave of racism that Trump is instilling on the American people. I have watched as half of the country yells out from the rooftops about how I don’t belong here because of where my roots are no matter the fact I was born on this soil. I have watched as fascism became a new trend and watched as Nazis were put on primetime television for ratings. We have all watched it, condemned it, and talked about it, yet it happened. “Make America Great Again” has been plastered all over the country followed by swastikas, yet Trump has nothing to say about that but everything to say about undocumented immigrants who pay more taxes than he does.

It has became a phenomenon on Spanish social media for instruction images telling undocumented immigrants their rights and how to proceed if ICE comes to their front door, because it is very likely that they won’t be treated fairly. Families have had to explain to their young children what to do if one day they come home from school and find that no one is home, and their parents have been taken under custody for simply existing. While the argument that all the immigrants should leave this country is terrific, white supremacists forget they are living on land they stole. Indigenous tribes were here long before Christopher Columbus, and Mexicans held their own side of the territory long before the Mexican-American war begun. If there is such a need to cleanse this country of immigrants and the children of immigrants, then I will be waiting on the boats for Donald Trump and the entire Republican party to join me so we can all go back to where we came from.

The day that Trump was allowed into office, I did not have the courage to even go to school or leave the house for that matter. The reassuring messages I had to send out to my immigrant friends were hard to write, and harder to realize that they didn’t mean anything. We have spent time online comforting each other, and we have spread information and awareness the best we could. We went out and voted, and still something as outdated as the Electoral College made my vote count less than a random in Wyoming, and many other states who unfairly were given too much weight in the grand scheme of this election. While the protests are wonderful, changing policies are better, and it has taken me months to even want to talk about that. I did everything I could for the people I loved — and voted for everyone who I knew couldn’t — and still it wasn’t enough. Now, I am tired of seeing “Love Trumps Hate” and “When They Go Low, We Go High” signs and anything that disregards how serious this has become. It isn’t a trendy scandal that we all need to be ashamed at, but rather the lives of millions of people.

We have spent the entire election cycle trying to talk to the other side and trying to teach them what is wrong with their ideologies, but if that doesn’t work and they literally want us killed, what is there left to do? How much time can we spend talking before someone actually does something to save us from the deep mess we’ve been forced into? The numbers are out there and the Trump voters are overwhelmingly white and old. 58% of white voters and 53% of ages 65+ were for Trump. This is outrageous, considering that the long lasting consequences of this mess will be thrown on the younger generations who only had a record-low 37% of Republican support. My only comfort for the future is knowing that the younger generation has become open-minded and connected enough to have not voted for this monstrous administration.

I have watched for too long, you have watched for too long, we have all watched for way too long. There has never been a revolution that was accomplished by making the wrong side feel bad about their actions, and I have no expectation that this one will end with a friendly Twitter debate. Trump lost the popular vote, by a lot, so we need to remind him of that every time he tries to pass a policy. He has not won the ignorant allegiance of more than half of Americans, and will likely never earn the privilege to be called a legitimate president.

While there is a long fight to be had, I do hope that positivity can prevail. However, we must stop assuming that only loving rhetoric will get the message through their heads. We cannot allow for the country to revert back into the days when white supremacy was allowed into the public sphere, when it was never great and never will be if we don’t properly fight back.