The day after Election Day

I should have known it was going to be bad when a doe leaped out of the dark woods and slammed into the hood of our relatively new car a few days before Election Day.  She escaped with a bruise, we were unhurt and our car drivable, but we were formidably shaken. 

I don’t usually believe in omens but, looking back now over the past week, I should have sensed something ominous was underfoot, a grimness I saw in the face of a customer who came into the bookstore in Manhattan where I work part-time with such an expression of grief that I asked him what was wrong. 

He somberly replied, “We’re in a little bubble here. I just came back from covering a Trump rally in Chicago, and the crowd was rabid and they have guns.”  I dismissed his oracle with a smile and insisted that it would come right on Election Day.  Boy, was I wrong.

I should have known it was going to be bad when the TRUMP PENCE signs kept getting larger and more numerous on the lawns of my rural New Jersey neighborhood, often accompanied by such ‘lyrical’ acronyms as ‘lock her up!’ ‘Kill the B**ch’ and ‘Hillary for Prison’ while the demure posters for CLINTON KAINE were politely poised on manicured doorsteps besides elegantly carved Jack O’Lanterns and ears of Autumn corn.

I was heartened by my membership in the Pantsuit Nation, a collection of "nasty" women who agreed to wear brightly coloured pantsuits, mimicking Hillary Clinton’s campaign attire, on Election Day.  I posted on Facebook a link to the incredible story of a 102-year-old woman, born before women were given the right to vote and a delegate to this year’s Democratic National Convention, casting her vote for Hillary in Arizona wearing a white pantsuit in honour of the suffragettes. 

Dump trucks filled with sand outside Trump Tower: a quick-and-dirty security measure against car bombers (Cheryl Pearl Sucher)

I cheered and cried while I watched President Obama embrace a disabled child in a wheelchair who went with his mother to a TRUMP PENCE rally to protest the Republican candidate’s mocking of individuals with disabilities only to be kicked and pushed and thrown out by the heaving mob but then discovered by a Clinton operative who arranged for the boy and his mother to attend a Clinton rally and meet his hero, the president. 

I was heartened by my friends who volunteered to canvas for Hillary all over the country, I cheered and sang along with the final Philadelphia rally where 33,000 people assembled on Independence Mall to listen to the final rallying cries of Michelle Obama, her husband the president, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen. 

I woke up on Election Day enthusiastic and happy.  The sun was shining, a perfect day to attend the polls.  We voted early at the local firehouse.  People were bringing their children with them to witness this historic moment. The numbers of voters seemed to be larger than they were for Obama, which in the past, was always a good sign for the Democrats.  The pollsters unanimously predicted her easy path to victory.  We were all jubilant, practicing the phrase "Madam President," believing that a woman was finally going to attain the highest office in the land, buoyed by the expectation that the balance of the Senate might even move to the left towards a Democratic majority.

Then the votes were counted
So at seven o’clock, my husband and I sat down to watch the election results coming in.  We were confident of Hillary’s victory; all the polls until that moment were showing that she was leading by a slim but consistent margin despite the jarring hiccup of FBI director James Comey’s revelation 10 days before that more of her emails had been discovered on a computer device used to text an underage minor by the disgraced New York congressman, Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Hillary’s trusted confidante, Huma Abedin.  She had been cleared only 24 hours before!  Surely that meant something? 

The day before Election Day, the stock market rose mightily in anticipation of her annunciation after nine straight days of decline in anticipation of Trump’s election.

But then more votes started coming in.  Early Hillary leads started to crumble then fall precipitously. Trump was winning in former Democratic battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and (gasp) Florida.  The early sombre mood at Trump headquarters was slowly turning to jubilation as the early jubilation at Clinton headquarters was turning eerily sombre.  It felt just like the time when my father was dying in the hospital, only to rally back to health, then be sent home from the hospital, returning to the emergency room 24 hours later to pass from this world.

By 10 o’clock, I was starting to receive messages from my New Zealand friends and family.  ‘Come home!’  “How is this happening?’ “What is this world coming to?’ My husband couldn’t stay awake and went to sleep soon after.  I kept my eyes open, praying that the numbers in Florida would turn, that Hillary would win Pennsylvania, and then she won Colorado and Virginia, which gave me a brief moment of confidence but then the predictive needle on the New York Times website was moving more and more to the red. 

I decided to go to sleep when my nephew texted me that he was terrified and my niece wrote that she was having a panic attack.  At 95% chance of Trump winning the election, I turned off the television and went to bed, tired of the pundits who said that it was a Brexit deja vu, that they had underestimated the anger and frustrations of white working class men, whose numbers were later seen to be boosted by educated white men. 

I went to sleep but I didn’t sleep.  My cousin Julie texted that it was an auspicious day, the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass when Jewish businesses and homes were routed and destroyed by Nazi hooligans.  My husband noted that Hillary still was ahead in the popular vote, though Trump was winning the Electoral College, a system of election designed by the American founding fathers to protect leadership from the rabble.  Aristotelian in orientation, they believed that the educated classes had the best interests of the population in mind, so they gave proportional electors to each state. 

Perhaps that is still true, that the educated classes should choose those with the temperament, experience and fortitude to lead.  But it was invented in the days when only men could vote and then only white men who were landowners.  For most of my life, candidates have run on the promise that they would abolish the Electoral College but that has yet to happen.  It probably never will.  Even though in the most contentious recent presidential elections, both Hillary Clinton and Al Gore wore the popular vote, they lost to their Republican opponents in the Electoral College.

What did we miss?
I went to sleep, but I didn’t sleep, for my country had just elected a misogynistic, racist, narcissistic, lying provocateur to the highest office in the land, whose path to victory had been buoyed by white supremacist and anti-Semitic elements who had come out from under the rocks and out of the shadows.  What was going to happen to my beloved country and our beloved democracy? 

Demagogues have no use for democratic institutions, which stand in their way.  With a Republican Congress and a right-wing Supreme Court, how can  we save our democracy?  Why and how did this happen?  What did we miss?  The power of national outrage?  The hatred of the Clintons and their privilege?  Fury at the bankers and hedge fund managers who were earning extravagant, unbelievable profits when Joe Coal Miner couldn’t feed his family and Jane Doe was foreclosed upon for being unable to keep up with her mortgage payments?  Were Americans really not ready for a woman president? 

What actually happened will be left to the historians. 

Was the elevation of Donald J Trump the result of racism?  Yes.  Misogyny? Yes.  Disliked candidates? Maybe.  My husband and I lay awake in bed, wondering if Bernie could have crossed the divide.  What would have happened if Joe Biden, who I had wanted to run, had entered the race for the Democratic nomination. But retrospective probability was futile. It cannot change the result.  Holding each other, we decided that we had to find a way forward, and not lose our passion to fight for justice, civil rights and the health of our planet. 

This morning, we were all inconsolable.  We cried.  None of us had slept.  We were physically ill.  We asked each other how could we explain this to our children and grandchildren.  We wept for the great experiment of democracy, which once again seemed on the precipice of failure, a nation divided beyond healing, unable to stand. 

One of my friends, a great Hillary supporter, said that even if she had been elected, the attempts to discredit her once in office and even impeach her would have continued unabated. The divide would fissure. The country would have remained in an impassable stalemate. I took heart tin the small fact that the US economy hadn’t collapsed as predicted. 

The usual band of commuters were sleeping on the way to work, perhaps wistfully. Travelling to Manhattan, the train was eerily silent. I walked up the crowded subway steps, surrounded by individuals of all colours, men and women of all ages, some wearing hijabs, some carrying briefcases, some whispering in prayer.  It all seemed so normal yet so abnormal. Then I told myself that we live in a bubble. And I started to hear the cry to mourn followed by the cheer to rally and fight and not give up on our beloved country. But I am afraid. Terribly afraid. Not only for the country of my birth but for the world.