Here is Ground: A Sober Look at the Election Results

In the past few weeks I’ve suffered an irrepressible headache, compiled a week’s worth of black clothing, and raged against what seems more like a bad episode of The Twilight Zone than 2 day’s time in the country, until recently, of which I have been a proud citizen.

It is now November 29.

Back on that fateful Monday night my mom and I joked about the impending election results; she smiled when I said, “Happy doomsday, or November 8th.” Later that evening, my mother, along with the other members of my family and some good friends, was far from jovial.

Ensconced in the deep sink-down leather of our living room couch with a fur Restoration Hardware blanket and a half-hearted attempt of studying for a Precalculus test spread across my lap, I found myself horrified to watch the map of the United States light up solidly red, like the pre-mac-and-cheese scribblings of a particularly monochromatic toddler, or the solidifying red of a Jello mold set in the fridge.

“If she gets Wisconsin,” our family friend would utter, as another territory was claimed Maraschino red, “she’ll get Pennsylvania.”

“Virginia.”

“Michigan.”

And yet the map continued, to the discomfort of the CNN news team, to color itself a quilt of pale pink and faded brick and primary red until, at last, ensconced as much in the warmth of my sink-down couch as in my dismay, I wondered whether the map on the screen resembled, to anyone outside the leather Blokus piece of my family’s attention, the map of a territory stained with blood.

A Mashable article fragment found a hospitable response in the Reinecke family living room: “Why consider Ireland? The Irish are consistently ranked some of the friendliest people in the world—and Americans that are considering relocating will be in desperate need of friendship. Plus, a stroll on the moors is the ideal setting for brooding and cursing America.”

After hours of screen time, a dinner of couscous drenched with butter and palpable fear, and half-serious suggestions of a family move to Dublin, I retired at 9:oopm to my bedroom, where I absorbed the same electoral progress with as much terror and considerably more focus on quadratic equations.

10:00pm found me despondently pouring over CNN and MSNBC updates in my bed. Though many factors could be blamed for my evening exhaustion, I think it is reasonable to peg the 10:00pm-ish New York Times blog post which projected the probability of Trump’s winning the presidency at 81% (the same number the NYT had projected for a Clinton victory only two hours prior) for catalyzing the hysteria which consumed the rest of the night.

By 10:30 I had abandoned all hopes of both mathematic productiveness and sanity and so, with my door open to the sound of the TV broadcasting from downstairs and my windows open to what I thought (incorrectly) would be the calming draft of November air, I vigorously cried myself to sleep alongside visions of the White House pillars being painted, after Trump’s instruction, to resemble the contents of a box of Cuban cigars.

When I woke, as I dried the little wells of water which had gathered in my ears, my fears were confirmed. It was November 9. The votes had been counted and the people of my country, with whom I was supposed to feel an affinity, a basic and human camaraderie, had enshrined a dictator.

As I got ready for school the following morning I was ashamed to be American. I cried so freely that I didn’t so much as wipe my face when tears glazed my chin, my collarbones, when tears fell like dropped pins at my feet.

I will long remember with what unspoken understanding my mother wrapped me in a hug.

I cried again in class, watching the cold grace of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech. I cried again at home, lying up in bed remembering the human pain I had registered in my role model’s eyes, the very humanity many have long denied her. I know pain today. There is a visceral disappointment I harbor; there is a physical weight on all my limbs.

Last night at dinner my mother paralleled the election results to a death in the family.

I wonder if this is what it felt to my aunt when she walked twenty blocks, along the West Side Parkway to take a MetroNorth out of the city on September 11, 2001. I wonder if this is the same dazed disbelief my grandmother wore the day Kennedy was shot and her parochial school class watched the proceedings on the dull plastic of a library projector screen.

I wonder if this is what real defeat feels like, real failure, for it goes beyond me, and yet it is my own.

I want to be graceful like our leaders. I even want to be like my classmates, who don’t care, who can appease themselves with Facebook collages of Vice President Joe Biden eating vanilla ice cream, because then maybe I wouldn’t feel the weight of all the past feminist’s fights, all the banners of all the old marches, heavy on my shoulders. Maybe I wouldn’t feel indignant, or radicalized, or understand even more strongly my need, inherent to my lack of being male, to prove myself, both to myself and to others. I want to say that I am not angry, that I have been quelled by Obama’s promise that in the Trump-era, the sun will still rise, but whenever I hear this, I ask myself whether it will rise clear.

Rioters at UC Berkeley are shouting “He’s not ours” along with others across the country, as though he’s an old tennis racket left behind at practice that no one wants to claim, no one wants to take the responsibility for, and yet he is ours. We can hate Trump, but we cannot disavow him. Maybe that’s the saddest part of this all. The American public, whoever they are, whoever they have become since the last time I knew them, has brought him upon us. It is by no one’s doing but our own. During September 11, we had an outside enemy to target. Even during Kennedy’s assassination there was a single form to point at.

Today we are left with these unfavorable results not by chance. Today we are looking at each other, groping, fumbling for car keys, talking in the blurred drunkenness of morning, and yet there is a bar there, and here a stool; so there is a bed to return to, and a desk, and actions to be held accountable for. So here is ground; we have reached it.

And where has this left us? With riots in the streets. With women feeling unsafe in legging pants. With Confederate flags flying with new fervor. With my 9-year-old cousin found bawling, at 6:00am, over the keyboard of the home computer.

And where has this left me? For the first time in my life, the word “America” has attached itself outside its usual moral, star-spangled bounds; America is more real, less brave. America is no longer a quilt of remembered joys, the shining cannon muskets that cold day my grandparents took me, age 6, to walk along the waterfront at West Point, the 3 plates of buttered corn I ate on Independence Day, despite having been at camp and having eaten little more than Diet Coke and Snickers bars for 2 weeks, a deeply-instilled conviction in our country as a force of good.

I read an article last week in which a journalist, after having painted a melancholy backdrop of a confused elementary school daughter, a voting booth selfie, a husband’s hand in apology on one’s back, the 60’s-type glob shapes of black flowers made in morning cereal-milk courtesy heave-loosened mascara, said simply: “I’m tired. We’re all tired.” This comment makes overwhelming sense to women across the nation. That is the word for our tears, for our indignant though broken dinner table arguments over the election. That is the word: exhaustion. Resignation does not describe it.

The election has had a strange effect on all the women I know which I can only describe as an inverse-intoxication; it is an induced awareness, a heightened comprehension of our patriarchal society, of the solidarity and camaraderie we have, beneath all the BS, with one another, merely for our having been cast as the believed-lesser sex. It is in this state that this past week I have, in that tacit compassion as human beings, in cases of extreme or exceptional duress, sometimes exhibit, hugged dozens of female members of my community: my librarian, my club advisors, friends, classmates, near-strangers, my mother.

On the phone my grandmother and I experienced a momentary confusion, a pause in speech following a fumbling over each other’s words, for we had simultaneously intended to tell each other we were sorry. Well, I am. And not only for women. I am sorry for all people, all Americans who, like me, have found themselves disillusioned as to the character of their country.

I am sorry. I am tired. It seems the better journalistic choice to conclude this with an excerpt from Clinton’s concession speech, such as that as Americans we should “never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it,” but I feel more strongly (maybe in duress it’s an old pull to what I know, to the common Irish restlessness) drawn to Fitzgerald’s close of a certain essay, “What I Think and Feel at 25”: “If I had been asked to do this article 5 years ago it might have been worth reading.”

If I had been asked to do this article a week ago I might have had something wittier to say. I might have closed or started with a metaphor I have often been reminded of during this election season, which is that which my father imparted upon me before I partook in a favorite Boothbay, Maine tradition: “That’s how they kill the lobster, by putting them in water and turning up the heat so slowly they don’t know they’re dying. And then they die.”

But today I am indignant. Today I am angry. Today I say, in journalistically well-advised or otherwise conclusion, that I am ashamed.

November 8 remains, as the feeling of unreality clears from the scene, as the day becomes a date and the date a history, something which has touched me. November 8 is as much with me as is the little indent in my nose where a friend once hit me with a kick board, or the callous on the 4th finger of my right hand (2014-now) indicative of steady writing. November 8, however we may close our eyes to it, or reject it, or rage, in posters and chants raised against it, is part of our generation, part of our own comprehension of ourselves as Americans.

America is gathering up its things –leather clutch purse, a stick of lipgloss whose gold cap has been gnawed by the dog, the number of an old friend or classmate scribbled mid-Grey Goose on a napkin back –and going home. The election is over. So here is ground.