Aftershock

On Nov. 9, I woke up in a haze hoping that the evening before was a terrible, bizarre nightmare. I grabbed my phone, checked the news and realized that the presidential election was in fact real and that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be the next president. Our campus was eerily quiet, almost as if we were in collective mourning. The world felt tired, and the gloomy clouds and the rain seemed to embody our sadness.

It has now been almost a month since the shocking upset in the 2016 presidential election. I can still remember standing in Sanford the night of the election at the watch party and feeling the panic, shock and disbelief as state after state went red. After I had processed the initial news, I was ready to talk about it and support my friends and classmates. But the truth is that I am still grappling with the outcome of this election.

Many people have expressed skepticism and mocked the emotional fallout claiming that college students are fragile and too easily broken when things don’t go our way. To be honest, I was rattled. I was genuinely shocked that this candidate, who opposed everything that I thought was American, could be elected through a democratic process. I had surrounded myself in an echo-chamber that simply reflected back different variations of my own ideas and had completely underestimated a huge part of America that I didn’t really even know existed.

As I try to understand how Donald Trump was elected, I’ve realized that I also need to understand how and what drove my fellow Americans to cast their ballots. The path towards healing is paved by understanding. In the aftermath of the election many of my friends and classmates expressed how ashamed they were to be American. Perhaps because I’m a child of immigrants, who was raised to believe in the greatness and the opportunity of this country, I refuse to accept that. Yes, I am ashamed of the way that my fellow Americans voted in this election, but I am not and I never will be ashamed to be American. I still believe that this nation is not defined solely by the single person who is president. We are defined by how we act, think, engage. By the way we carry ourselves and how we treat one another.

I was heartened to see the responses on social media and through active conversations by my classmates and peers. My friend Charlotte Gosnell shared her thoughts about the election the next morning. She said, “This will not be the end of your story and of your person,” and shared these poignant lines of Maya Angelou’s poem, “And Still I Rise.”

"You may shoot me with your words/You may cut me with your eyes/You may kill me with your hatefulness/But still, like air, I’ll rise."

This election was as much about the dark forces of hatred, xenophobia and fear that one candidate awoke in America as it was about the indifference of all of us who failed to take a definitive enough stand against them. With Maya Angelou’s words in mind, I promise to engage (respectfully) in difficult conversations. I promise to vote in local, state and presidential elections because our government doesn’t just exist at a macro level.

These next four years will test the strength and character of our nation. If you’ve felt hopeless or broken by results of this election, remember that those who sit in our political offices don’t rule us, they serve us. As a government of, by and for the people it is our vote and our voice that has timeless power over the future of our nation.