The Day After November 5, 2024
I am sharing this now as I wanted to wait and perhaps… Hope… hope that I’d be wrong about my instincts with respect to the results of the elections.
Seeing many are shocked and surprised. I am not sure why.
It is interesting that I knew, I felt, this would be the result. I knew it back in 2016 and I knew it this time around.
In 2016, on the Sunday before the election, I had gone to see my musician friends, The Blasting Company perform with La Santa Cecilia in Pomona, California for a Day of the Dead celebration. As we traveled back to LA I started to voice my concern that he would win. I was fearing it very much and I wanted to unburden myself. People thought I was crazy, that it did not make sense. The following day, at work, I talked about it and people disregarded what I felt saying that Hilary had so much support and money, that he would not win at all.
Well, I just felt otherwise and wished I had been wrong, but it is hard to ignore these types of things when one has felt that category of racism that one can even smell. After that November I was in a much ptsd-type-of-space and so so so angry with the voters. I was so disappointed. I wrote infinite resentment inventories about it.
Yesterday, the electorate voted in a convicted felon. That must be the American Dream where there are no checks and balances, a dream in which everything is possible for a selected few. A dream that is a nightmare for the rest of the population. The voters chose a racist, a xenophobic, a sexist, a misogynist, a homophob, an exploiter and plainly said a very ignorant person. Perhaps this is by and large what that country is.
In 2020, during full blown pandemic time as I walked down La Brea Avenue wearing my mask and on my way to the market, a young man yelled at me fucken wetback! That sent me flying to the 90s. That decade was hard for me and many others. I was called so many names at school, on the streets, at the supermarket. Woooo! I was not surprised, but I wished people had evolved… How could I be surprised if they were caging the kids and genociding the Blacks? They are genociding the Palestinians as they have been for decades…
Wondered if I had been too naive. I had hoped for too much.
Voters could not vote for Kamala because she is a woman and a woman of color. Also because honestly, she did not have anything new to offer. Not sure if in any other country candidates are allowed to be endorsed by movie stars and other famous people so that elections gain some traction with the population. In sum, there have not been true alternatives at all.
Still, so very sad and disappointing, specifically because these elections impact world politics so no one is exempt. We all are caught up in the fire, even if we do not live in the country.
In the meantime, I am here, just finalized interpreting at a clinic somewhere in the US as a woman is seeking to get an abortion.
Next I will go out and keep growing arugula.
