Politics Suck

One of the problems with reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming is that I end up constantly considering politics, an activity I’ve been trying to avoid lately. The political climate in the States is enough to make me feel ill, but I somehow manage to feel ill when I avoid looking at it too. No matter how I frame the issues in my mind, I find myself feeling guilty, helpless, hopeless, and like I may vomit from it all.

You might think it would be easier to hear about the 2008 election, pretending for a few minutes that the biggest issue is Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama for the Democratic Nominee. Maybe I could get swept up in the hope and change that Obama promised, I and would feel hopeful again. Yet, because I am so vividly remembering his hope, it has only made my current hopelessness worse.

I was too young to vote for Obama in either the 2008 or 2012 elections, though I remember standing in line with my brother for early voting in 2012. We stood in line, he was in flip flops and it was cold on his toes, and then we met my friend Karin at the movies to go see Wreck-it-Ralph in the theater. I remember being frustrated that I couldn’t vote yet; I wanted to vote for Obama, I would be an adult during his entire 2nd term, and the idea of Mitt Romney beating him gave me such a feeling of political dread that I thought, at the time, no presidential candidate could ever top it.

I was wrong.

In Becoming, Michelle Obama talks about respecting Hillary Clinton, even though she was the opponent, due to her resilience in the face of misogyny. I didn’t fully understand this in 2008, because I was a barely-paying-attention child. This was not just pre “woke” me, I was a literal child, only vaguely aware that history was being made in front of my eyes.

I remember my mother wondering if her long-time Democratic voting father would vote Red for the first time to avoid voting for a black man. He didn’t. Grandpa, in his own words, “voted for the white guy running with the black guy.” We were all sure that he would’ve voted McCain had his option been Republican or a Woman.

It amazes me to think that Clinton faced the same criticism in 2008 that she faced in 2016. She went into that election cycle knowing full well that all people would see would be a woman. That she would be called shrill, her laugh would be a cackle. People would question her competency, her qualifications. She was, objectively, the most qualified candidate in history, and she would be up against the least qualified candidate. Yet, she was painted as a hysterical witch. Why? Because she was a woman. She went into that election, of course not knowing who her opponent would be, but knowing very clearly that she would be up against the full force of the patriarchy--she had done it before, many, many times.

I have to respect that in her. I don’t particularly like her; her likability was never the important part to me, though it was clearly very important to a lot of people. Similar to Michelle Obama, I am simply awed by Hillary Clinton’s willingness to face that adversity, again and again and again, to put herself out there, to be hated for her womanhood and have her policies ignored.

This was frustrating and annoying in 2008, but it still ended up being a win for minorities. Honestly, I think it was far more important, a much bigger win for minorities of all intersections, for a black man to win, rather than a white woman. I may desperately want a woman in charge of the country, I may want my demographics to be more broadly represented politically, but I am not so unaware as to think that I do not have a hell of a lot of privilege based solely on my skin color. I’m not going to get shot by a cop for driving, for walking, for sitting on my own front porch, for sitting on my own couch in my own house.

What was frustrating in 2008 became demoralizing in 2016. Once again, the United States was asked to pick between their racism and their sexism. But this time, instead of the question being, “Do you vote for a black man or white woman?”, the question was, “Do I vote for a racist or for a woman?”

Three years later, I still feel tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat when I think, I hear, I see people saying, “the lesser of two evils.” As if to say, “I would vote for the Devil himself, as long as it was himself and not a woman.”

I didn’t like Clinton, I still don’t like her. It wasn’t about likability. It didn’t even come down to who was qualified for the job and who wasn’t. The 2016 election proved that a man could be unqualified, unintelligent, blatantly racist/homophobic/ableist/xenophobic/transphobic/etc., and simply a downright asshole to everyone, especially those who dared to disagree with him, and still be seen as the better option, the lesser of two evils, when compared to a qualified, intelligent, responsible, well-spoken, diplomatic woman.

I was in Philadelphia going to school at Temple University, a college right in the middle of urban streets, a couple blocks away from what was dubbed “the ghetto” in 2016, which really means, of course, it was a black neighborhood that the gentrification hadn’t hit yet. In fact, I lived right on the line between the hipsters of Fishtown and the black communities of Kensington and the rest of North Philly. In my urban bubble as a liberal arts major in a traditionally black college in the middle of a big, East Coast city, I don’t think I realized how big of a threat Donald Trump was. Everywhere I looked, I saw people with Bernie and Hillary stickers. Everyone I interacted with was disgusted by Trump and voting for Clinton. Philly would go blue, and we all knew it.

The day after the election, the weather was grey and drizzly in Philadelphia. I could barely convince myself to get out of bed to go to class. I know a lot of people skipped that day. A lot of people stayed home to mourn, even more went to protest. I passed by rallies of angry students at the center of campus on my way to class. I thought about joining them, but I didn’t. Part of me regrets not being one of the people who protested that day, not being in the crowd of angry people, the crowd of women hurting as a man who had been accused of rape countless times became President Elect, because he was less evil than a woman.

The other part of me is glad I went to class that day.

I had three classes. My first class was taught by a gay man. Maybe I imagined it, maybe I projected it on to him, but I swear there was horror and fear in his eyes that day. Perhaps he, like me, knew a little too much about Mike Pence’s politics. Maybe he wasn’t just worried about Trump, maybe he saw Pence as a bigger threat. Maybe he knew Pence argued for conversion therapy for gay teenagers. Maybe he was thinking about a concentration camp, electric shock therapy, being beaten to the point of not being recognized. Or maybe, I was projecting my fears into his eyes, that always looked a little crazed, like he had one too many shots of espresso that morning. But that day, the day after the election, his eyes just looked dead to me.

What I do know is that he said the only way he knew how to go forward was to teach like nothing was wrong. The best way he knew how to protest was to educate others. He said that to waste an opportunity for education was to let him win, to let ignorance win. So we continued like normal, though certainly a little less boisterous and talkative than normal.

My second class that day was an American Lit class. In this class too, the election results were brought up. How could they not be? We were all talking about it, horrified by it, angry about it. The teacher for this class didn’t pretend it didn’t happen, didn’t think it would be best to move on like the first one did. Instead, he opened it up for discussion, allowing people to vent their frustration, but asking us all to seriously consider it, like academics rather than be swept away by our collective emotions.

He asked us how we thought this was allowed to happen, and the conversation and lecture that day brought us all the way back to the Puritans, whose principles founded the States and whose ideologies continue to be present to this day. Puritans were big on the idea of “plain speech” and “straight talk,” and though they preached good deeds, they were definitely a people who took care of themselves, their community, and fervently outcast the Other. You can find Puritan values in lots of aspects of our culture still, but it is most prevalent in Conservative circles.

My third class was taught by an old, Jewish man. He sat down at the front of class, looking like the most dejected and depressed person I had ever seen. He spent the class talking about his family, the ones who had escaped Germany and the ones who hadn’t. His mother’s uncles, who they still don’t know what actually happened to them. All the people who were left behind, left to die, because they were too poor to buy their way into another country.

He said this was how it started. The election of Donald Trump was the beginning of another holocaust.

We walked out of that class quiet and sober, whispering to each other, wondering if it could really be that bad. Was he overreacting? Surely that couldn’t happen here. Though, we didn’t think he would be elected at all. We didn’t think someone whose platform was nearly entirely a platform of hate could be elected in this, the great American mixing pot. How could a nation of immigrants back a man who wanted to build the Great Wall of ‘Murica to keep out all those “bad hombres”? How could we, as a nation, forget that airplanes exist and walls can’t stop them?

For the past 3 years, I have gone through a cycle of phases: phases where I’ve consumed as much media as possible, believing it is my duty to stay informed, to share information, that education and awareness can stop a holocaust, and phases where I hide from it all, finding it all too depressing to face, using my privilege as a shield for myself.

Yet, even though I am too overwhelmed by everything, I can’t stop myself from reading the news for long. Concentration camps filled with children, without beds, without soap, without water, without medication. The United Nation pulling out of Sudan, a massacre in the making currently going on, currently being ignored. Tariff wars with allies, breaking agreements, Russian interference, tax breaks for the wealthy while destroying health care for the poor, starting another war with Iran.

And this, all of this, is the lesser of two evils.

I don’t think Hillary Clinton would have been a perfect president, I don’t even know if she would’ve been a good one, but I know she would’ve been better than this. And I can’t help but think that all of this, this holocaust that my professor prophesied in 2016, is all because America, the Great and Beautiful, is so damn sexist.

I swear to god, if the next Democratic candidate is a woman, and y’all don’t vote for her because you’re convinced she’s a shrew, a witch, hysterical, or whatever, I will write a scathing blog post that names you personally and I’ll market it better than any other post so that when someone Googles your name the first thing they find will be my blog that calls you a dummy.