Hate Won
source: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/79...
I've kept this blog relatively free of politics, but in the wake of last night's disastrous election results I feel the need to write. I have to at least try and expel some of the uneasiness and disquiet I'm feeling.
After making history and electing our first Black president in Barack Obama, America was poised to again make history. And we did. Just not the way I had hoped. As a nation, we decided to follow-up Obama's legacy by electing the Number One candidate of Neo-Nazi's and Ku Klux Klansmen everywhere. We decided that a calm, rational, level-headed, cool voice must be replaced with a moronic, obnoxious, easily offended and loudly offensive braggart, and that a man-child who cannot even be trusted with a Twitter account should now possess nuclear launch codes.
Hate won.
Americans just let the world know what this country is really like and what we're really about as a nation.
We're cowards. We're racists, xenophobes, misogynists, sexists, narcissists, bigots, and fear-mongers.
I live and work in a multi-cultural cross-section of America. I work in a city that is home to the largest population of Arab-Americans in the US. I live next door to Black neighbors, in a neighborhood that has whites, Indians, Asians, Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs. I know and work alongside immigrants who have, for the past year, been vilified by an orange, thin-skinned, small-handed fascist purely because of their countries of origin.
For the next four years (oh, please, sweet Jibbers Crabst, let it only be four years), I will likely be safe and secure in the privilege of being a white cis male. My neighbors, my co-workers, my friends - I worry about them. I worry for them. For their safety, their security, and their future in this country.
Now comes the hard part, for all of us. Because hate won.
