We Get Up And We Move Forward
By Ani Bundel
This morning, as the dust settles over the 2016 results, we must all do what we need to keep going. We must get up and keep moving.
This is the hardest post I’ve even had to write.
Someone suggested I just post a bunch of angry gifs. After all, it would reflect the same sentiment, and gifs get clicks.
Gif Courtesy Game of Thrones
But I’ve never been that kind of writer. Which, in and of itself, should make one wonder how the hell I got my own site, huh? But words. I’ve always been a big believer in words. And words for how I feel this morning, as we survey the wreckage, are hard to form.
What do we know?
We know Nixon’s silent majority still stands today, fifty years on. We know that there’s a lot of blame going around. There’s a lot of anger. A lot of fear. A lot of fear manifesting itself as anger. We know that after eight years of Obama believing in this country, this is how we thanked him. We know the patriarchy stands high and tall. We know that many, many of us have internalized it on a base level that cannot be shaken, of both genders. That’s because playing within those boundaries worked for many (white) women and gave them a comfortable life.
But more importantly, we know that racism is alive and well in America. This is not the 21st century we thought we were in, that new world that 2008 promised us. That’s the hardest part I think, for many. Even those who looked at the Fergusons and the Black Lives Matter movements in the last two years and saw how far we had to go, we assumed “at least we’ve come far! we just have to keep going!” To discover we have not come that far, to see the terrible rebuke to all Obama stood for, is like a knife to the heart.
It will be another generation before a party risks putting a woman at the head, a fact that is chilling enough. But to watch the last eight years roll back will be harder still. To know that the other team gambled on white supremacy in this country and won tells you more about us than anyone on television this morning will be able to admit.
And there’s nowhere to go either. Everyone has been referencing Germany in the 1930s on and off this year. Each time they do, I always think of my maternal grandparents, and how they fled Poland ahead of the war. And I think to myself….where do we flee? There is no country that holds forth the same idyllic dream America did. (Sorry Canada. Maybe one day soon?) There is no new world to cross to, to make a new life. This was it. And oh dear.
I don’t know the way forward from here. I think that probably goes for a lot of folks this morning. I know when Hillary was knocked down in 2008, she got back up and went to work to make the world a better place. I want to follow her example. But, as Frodo once said “I do not know the way.”
More than anything this morning, I want her and Obama to step forward. To show us the way. To help us in this time of darkness find the path back again. I’m trying to think of things like Prop 8 passing in 2008…and Marriage Equality becoming the law of the land seven years later.
Or maybe that was 1972, and we’re in for another 20+ years of arguing over the map. Maybe one day, I too will look out with the right kind of eyes and almost see the high-water mark. “That place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Next: 21 Times The 2016 Presidential Election Was A Dumpster Fire
But until then, we get up this morning. We go through our day. We put on foot in front of the other. We live as best we can, keep on keepin’ on. That’s what we’ll be doing at Culturess today and every day. (Ok, today might be a little slow, a lot of us are hung over.) As a president once said in our lifetime: “Don’t let the terrorists win.” Even when they’re inside the house.