Reconciliation

Intially, this started as something that was going to be a Facebook post on the day after Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election: It's pretty clearly evolved past that, which is certainly one of the reasons I chose to post it here, but the original post was going to be paired with this song/video, and I think it's important to have it as part of this: It works better in context (I wasn't going to watch Trolls in the theater, but I needed some kind of distraction and the colourful ridiculousness of it all didn’t disappoint, and the hyperbolic optimism that was developed more fully in the movie still works in just this snippet, for me at any rate.) And it definitely helped me get through processing, and the finding the context for all the very real stuff below...

Reconciliation

I cried today.

I spent a long time trying to figure out how I wanted to start this train of thought, and I want to put that in context so you know why I chose that as the foundation here: I don’t cry. Sort of as a rule… It’s something I’ve been interested in for a while, as someone who had to figure out what masculinity and manhood meant growing up in a house with three sisters and a Latino father in the country of the Wild West/cowboys and American football. I absolutely believe in the academic idea and value of men being allowed to express their emotions more, but I’m also pretty sure my subconscious takes a definite macho pride in being someone who doesn’t, honestly even physically can’t, cry. Regardless of whether I owe that to nature or nurture, the fact remains that when I do cry, it’s a pretty significant indicator. Sure I’ll get a bit misty eyed at the more obvious Pixar feels, but I‘ve only, in fact, properly cried once previously in the rolling window of my life my memory can definitively vouch for. June 2011—I said I was going to remember the exact day, it was such a profound occurrence, but alas, that’s my memory that I cannot.  I suspect November 9, 2016 will be historic enough a date I won’t have the same problem…

When my parents cat was run over several years ago, pretty much the best cat I’ve ever met (not uncoincidentally because he was basically a dog) I was devastated, but I did not cry. In Kindergarten, on the Caribbean island of Saint Croix, when one of my bullies tricked me into breaking the rules in recess so he could humiliate and rat me out once class started again, prompting the teacher to discipline me with the stiff, taped, quarter inch thick special ruler reserved for digressions serious enough the normal one would not suffice, I did not cry, though he was bawling when I admitted his involvement and he faced the same prospect. In the handful of “boys will be boys” fights I got into in 1^st through 5^th grades upon returning to the continental US, before my new bullies there realized I would respond to their aggressions with the hard Cruzan steel I’d learned and thankfully left me alone, they were almost unilaterally left in tears, while I met my blows dry-eyed. I’ve been privileged to not have seen many explicit tests to my more traditional “manliness” since those elementary conflicts, but rest assured the stoic resolve I learned with them has never left me. I say this not to proffer any validity to such childish understandings of resolution, but to hopefully preempt the type of discourse I fear Trump’s victory will justify suggesting that when I say that Trump winning the election last night made me, a grown, adult, self-assured man cry, it cannot be written off as a mark of weakness or a “sore loser.”

I say this, so that if any of the 47% of Americans who voted for Trump yesterday ever happen to read this, they will realize that this was not, is not, a normal election.  I say this so when I say the things I feel I must confront below, they will not write them off as melodramatic, or hyperbolic—as hyperbolic and melodramatic as they may sound through an understanding of this election as in any way normal—but will realize the profundity of the truth with which I believe them, and the extent to which they have shaken me to my core. I say this so they will not think that when they hear these kinds of sentiments expressed, and see a nation flooded with protestors, they can be written off as merely begrudging political transitions, and dismiss them as simply blown out of proportion because the other candidate lost, waiting for them to die down to be paved over.

 Because the tears I shed were not for a disagreement of politics—I deeply believe Trump’s views on economics, the environment, the supreme court, will be devastating, not just to me personally in the next decade, but to a degree that will have lasting repercussions we cannot afford for generations to come: You almost certainly think the same of Hillary—These are the issues that shape what normal politics look like, and here I willingly agree to disagree, and respect the voice of the vote and the democratic process that made that decision. It is not for the thought of what may have been on these fronts that Trump’s victory made me cry. They are petty and fleeting in comparison.

Today I cried because I am in mourning. The protestors you see flooding the nation are not a voice expressing dissatisfaction, or incredulity of the political ground they lost, they are a vigil to the normalcy and morality we have sacrificed with this choice.

Today I mourn for society, and the view I had of my country as, perhaps sometimes misguided, but still fundamentally great. I mourn for decency and our collective values, and my previously unshakable belief that people are essentially good. I mourn for truth, and the fact that we can apparently now seize on any old blatant, bald-faced confirmation of whatever unfounded belief we need confirmed, and that is good enough. I mourn for my confidence in our system, and being able to take for granted the conviction that it would always be able to protect itself from the worst we have to offer. I mourn because of the fact that before yesterday, I could never understand, and even laughed at, the personality type that hoarded guns for fear of its own government, but tonight I go to bed a little bit more afraid, and expect I will every night for the next four years.

I mourn for my innocence. Which is not to say I was innocent or young before: I consider myself a realistic and resilient person. But I have certainly aged these past 24 hours: A not insignificant portion of my optimism and faith was stolen last night, and it has taken a toll I don’t know how long it will take me to recover from. I feel like I’m something a little bit harder now.

I am saddened, appalled, and beaten. The closest frame of reference I have to how I have felt today, was visiting Auschwitz while living in Berlin. I will preface this by saying I certainly believe some people are very receptive and sensitive to the world around them, but I very much am not one of them: Indeed, in those questions of masculinity I alluded to earlier, I’ve sometimes gone as far as to be slightly troubled by my emotional bluntness. I am also a fairly scientific person, so would tend to account those sensitivities more to things like subconscious social cues than something as vague as “energies” and the like. But in Auschwitz there was a tangible, radiating energy that even I, in my emotion amour and clumsy impassivity, could not ignore, and can only do paltry justice to describing. I could feel the force of the overwhelming death and pain clinging to the place, in a needling, sick-to-the-stomach disquiet. This was not a reaction of my own emotions, inspired to move me from within; this was a palpable external aura, acting upon me. It caught me off guard, and I cannot explain it, but I know what I felt better than to be quick to dismiss it. It made me believe in the unexplainable. It made me believe in ghosts.

And today I felt the same disquiet. I felt the pain caused by Trump’s language and the hateful sentiments it has given a voice and validity to, released into the world in spiteful spores with the positive confirmation they received, casting a tangible shadow acting upon me and sapping my spirit. Today the world truly is a little bit darker than it was before.

Because there can be no mistake that the world lost last night. Again, this is not hyperbole: I do not consider it to be merely my opinion. I truly believe this is objectively demonstrable. Women lost last night. Latinos lost last night. Muslims lost last night. Foreigners and immigrants (very much distinct from Latinos and Muslims) lost. Africa Americans lost. Multiculturalism and progress lost. Hell, white men lost last night—I apologize on behalf of my demographic that we aligned ourselves with such a degree of antiquation: I’m privileged enough in my own sphere of personal influences that I’d let myself believe we’d progressed further beyond it, and I intend to do better educating against and standing up to that kind of entitlement. Again I say this not for political reasons, not because I cannot disassociate my own political beliefs predicting that the policy we’ll see come out of this administration will set each of these groups back decades. That is subjective and remains to be seen. I say this because the fact that Trump was able show the disrespect he has for these, and countless other groups, unchecked, and more over won on a platform propped up on it, means that we have all already lost. That is objective, and as of last night has been cemented in our social conscience and our history.

I say this in the hopes that any of that 47%, or those who are quick to try to normalize and marginalize how destructive this decision not just will probably turn out to be, but already has been, will legitimately acknowledge the anguish and concern those defeated express in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Those voices that we will hear are not merely the normal, wanton cries of a defeated political contingent, but are expressing much deeper concerns about the path we’ve chosen for our future that simply do not have a precedent in this country for how real they may soon become. I know that I, for one, now recognize that there’s a significant portion of this country that feels like it hasn’t been heard the last eight years, and that I, like many others in my party, did not appreciate that such a large number of people were not being heard. I am deeply sorry that I did not extend you the respect of hearing you, that I dismissed you, and I did not try to better bridge these sentiments to those you heard in this election, before last night; I genuinely hope that this voice feels like this coming administration listens to them, if only because I honestly don’t think I could bear it if nothing comes of this. In turn, I hope they can recognize that their brand of “winning” was not the majority.

Because I need to believe, in my heart of hearts, that such a large number of people did not explicitly vote for misogyny, xenophobia, racism, bigotry and all other forms of hate and fear we saw embodied from Trump’s campaign. I am willing to concede that there was a deeper message I was not able to see in the “Make America Great Again” sentiment that won last night, but I think it is important that we all recognize that there was also an implicit vote that won for all those unquantifiable manners of vitriol Trump ran on. And I know if you were one of those 47%, you’re tired of people accusing you of standing for those sentiments when many of you faced a difficult position supporting your party and political interests, but I also want to make it very, explicitly clear that it is unacceptable to trivialize and normalize that discourse just because it has now ostensibly “won.” That discourse is objective and on record, and no matter what excuses we’ve made to qualify it for the hand we were dealt in the election, we all need to own, and categorically reject it moving forward. And we should absolutely, without qualification look very hard at what it says about ourselves that so many of us were able to ignore and trivialize it in their vote. Because no matter what we need to tell ourselves to sleep at night, and how many nuanced issues came into play to ultimately influence this decision, there was an objective aspect of this vote that supports misogyny, xenophobia, racism, bigotry, et pretty much every other bias it’s possible to have: I see it, the 48% who voted for Hillary see it, the Russian dictator sees it, the KKK sees it. It is not propaganda, or an out of context product of some “corrupt, rigged media” that can be trivialized or excused, swept under the rug and ignored now the battle is over and we’re all going to have to figure out how to reconcile ourselves with each other; it is demonstrable fact and it disturbs me more profoundly than I can begin to describe. And if you deny this discourse has as much power as it does, or try to say that it was just a means to free media coverage, and therefore somehow not reflective of the true sentiments it struck a chord with, then you’ve either drunk the Kool-Aid sold us by the con man that just won the presidency, or identify with that discourse more than you may be admitting to yourself. Regardless of the extent to which Trump actually believes that discourse, and regardless of the extent to which each and every individual who lives in this country believes that discourse, I will tell you that it is real, and it is powerful. I felt it today, perched on my shoulders. No matter what qualifications we try put on it, society voted yesterday for that discourse, in all its explicit glory. And it is mourning for belief in a society that was stronger than that that made me cry today.

And I’m sorry this has gotten to be a bit more of a rant than I was intending, and certainly more confrontational, that’s honestly not what I intended (again, processing real time here… Maybe not the best idea in hindsight…I promise I’ll come around to the hopeful stuff I was initially thinking I’d be driving at…) but if the winners here really want to make good on their promise to begin an effort to reunite the nation, accountability is my first and only demand: not for all the illegal and immoral things Trump has done that have come to light through the campaign—I’m no longer so disillusioned as to hope a rich white man in power will ever be held accountable for those types of digressions (and I can’t even being to admit to myself how heartbreaking that fact is in of-it-self). What I feel I need is accountability for the things he’s said and type of language that he’s made mainstream that everyone is trying to pretend is somehow fair game. I need someone who won to come out and admit that the fact that, for example, the KKK is openly endorsing the path our government is on, and the champion of that new government hasn’t come out saying how fucked up that is, is REALLY FUCKED UP! And that even if you realized the KKK was backing you because the sentiments that were somehow, impossibly, the path you needed to take you to victory, so just kind of kept quiet about it so you could win, is pretty fucked up too. (Which is not to say this about the KKK, I don’t actually know that much about it and I’m sure my treatment of it won’t hold up to the scrutiny of fact checking: This is much bigger, about the deliberate cultivation of a climate where that is even in the realm of possibility.) I need us to not just qualify and write off this discourse as “locker room talk,”—spin it when dragged and pushed on TV as “Of course it was wrong to say that, BUT…” statements—and actually initiate the conversation about how damaging this discourse has been and is continuing to be, and how it was wrong let it reign unchecked for the sake of votes. I need us to not pretend like it never happened, but to figure out how we can ensure it never happens again. Because I, while not perhaps not silent, have clearly not been vocal enough admonishing this discourse, and you can be sure I am going to do a better job of calling you on it, and holding you accountable to it in the future.

Again, I know you won’t believe me after that, but I’m not trying to be this confrontational, or alarmist, but I firmly believe that understanding is the first step to reconciliation, and I needed to say all that to understand it for myself, and I need you to understand how deeply I need you to understand it too. I do genuinely mean it when I say intend to show much more resolve moving forward, and you do me, our country, the world, and yourself a disservice to write off or try to normalize the intensity of the feelings I’ve done my best to express above.

For the record the answer I have arrived at for myself in those questions I unintentionally raised at the beginning about “masculinity” and “manliness” is essentially the sentiment, that, at its most basic kernel, what it means to be a man is standing up for, protecting, and empowering those you have it in your power to dominate. This sentiment is over simplifying and distilling many complex nuances for the sake of catchiness, that I’m going to resist the urge to elaborate 3,000 words in on an originally-unrelated and already unwieldy stream of thought. Suffice it to say though, that sentiment forms part of the model on which I live my life, and it’s what I’ll tell my children when they’re coming of age in a world that allows for the kind of dominance and subjugation that this election embodies.  It is a sentiment that aims to capture my reconciliation with the manner in which society has intrinsically linked the ideas of “manhood” and “strength,” and my coming to terms with the conscious decision that just because that link is very much a societal construct, doesn’t mean it cannot be beneficially employed in my own understanding of my identity and place in the world. And it is a sentiment that embodies the fact that the reason it has been a dangerous, and destructive social construct is because people like Donald Trump think that strength is synonymous with, and measured by “winning,” which for them is to say dominating and subjugating others. And that is not the mark of a man. That is the mark of a child, who has lived such a sheltered and entitled life he literally does not comprehend the distinction. The mark of a man is someone who takes the entitlement and strength society has undeservingly bequeathed him, and uses it not for his own gain, but for the gain of those who have not been equally enabled, at his own expense if needs be. And I aspire to be a man. So to quote the Prime Minister in Love Actually, you “should be prepared for me to be much stronger in the future.” And much like him, I am saying it now explicitly and publically so you can hold me accountable to follow through on it.

This brings me (perhaps somewhat ironically) to the hopeful stuff. Writing this, capturing it and getting it down on paper, has certainly (and probably very transparently) helped me get through some of the stages of grief (feel like I’m somewhere around bargaining, anger was probably words ~2,000-a couple paragraphs ago) but let there be no mistake that I am still reeling. And I know many close to me, and scores of others I and they have had contact with are feeling the same way. This exercise may have helped me formalize my emotions, and questions, but I still don’t have any answers. What I can do, though, is share places I have found some solace in the last days.

I still believe in the notion of Stronger Together—maybe in an even deeper way now it isn’t embroiled in a campaign and politics. One of the most helpful things for me has been Jeff Goldblum’s comments on Steven Colbert’s live coverage election night, and the paraphrased sentiment that “if we can’t look to our leadership for the change we want to see in world, we will just have to take renewed agency for bringing it about ourselves.” We are a strong body of people when you put us together, and no matter what it may feel like, this election hasn’t changed that: It’s just brought the obstacles we still have to overcome more clearly into the light.

I included the tangent on manhood not to preclude anyone who disagrees with, or doesn’t fit in with that understanding, or to suggest that is the only, or even right way to confront the problem, but because a bully writ-large like Donald Trump offends me deeply, viscerally as a man. And that is how I have been finding myself processing, and finding the strength to stand up to it. And if you can find your path to strength, we can share our strength with each other, and support one another, and help others do so in turn, so when one of us falters, and we are faced with the trials and challenges I fear are ahead of us, there will always be someone beside us to keep us from falling, and help us get back up again. That is what Stronger Together means to me. And the world, and our adversaries alike, will see how strong we are in this kind of strength. A silver lining that also rings a little bit truer today, is the much over-toted slogan prompting us to “be the change we want to see in the world,”—I somehow find it a little less eye rolling and exasperating and a deal more comforting suddenly realizing that, even if it ends up being our only option, it will always be an option. And that it is an option that can only be taken away from us if we willing let it be taken. And I am telling you that I will not let it be taken from me: I’m going to make good on it. I’m going to find a meaningful environmental movement I think I can make a difference with; I’m going to figure out the way I personally can best support Planned Parenthood—Not abstractly, in principle, in the future, but this week. Tomorrow. And I’m asking you to hold me to that. I am going to be stronger. This is me standing up. This is only the beginning.

And if we all let that be our reaction to this, it will be impossible to stop us, whatever happens.

And I believe that as truly, deeply, profoundly as the hurt and betrayal confronting a Donald Trump victory has inflicted. We may be despairing, but it is not hopeless, it is never hopeless. Writing this has helped me remember that. Hopefully if you’ve made it this far, reading it has helped you remember that too. We may just have to work a bit harder to find and nourish that hope. That’s where I will insert the first of my recommendations: If you haven’t had a chance yet to see Showtime’s election night special with Steven Colbert, I can’t praise it highly enough—I have an enormous new founded respect for Steven, and everyone involved in making it, and I’m blown away that they were able to process everything, and provide such insight in real-time. It kept me grounded as so many of core beliefs were exploding, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it in the hours since.

Similarly, I would like to plug Neil Degrasse Tyson’s call that we “Make America Smart,” again. Because we are all in this together, and pointing fingers or assigning blame, and denying ownership of and ignoring a Trump presidency, and the underlying conditions that lead to it just because we’re one of the 48% that didn’t vote him is precisely how he managed to get this far, and dealing with this in terms defined by otherness will only serve to further entrench our divisions. And because it’s hopefully not a controversially sentiment that we always aspire to educate and better ourselves as a society.

A bit lighter, I would also like to reintroduce the world to Last Week Tonight’s “Make Donald Drumpf Again!” Chrome extension. It’s silly and dumb, but levity has also been important for me in this time, and it’s the kind of silly, dumb thing that has kept me going through the darker points of the campaign, and I’m sure there will be times it will help keep me going in the next four years. And because, while I may get blow back for lending credence to a conspiratorial shyness about the sanctity of the first amendment, and I’m sure Donald Trump will not be so blatant as to try to actually challenge our freedom of speech with all the checks and balances, and scrutiny that will be on him, I was also sure America would vote to renounce his vitriol and insanity before last night, so if I may return it to “I feel” statements, I feel like can no longer trust with certainty that our first amendment rights will be protected over the next four years. And if a strong enough body of people participate in even this small, silly, dumb of a protest, it will help reassure me of the ridiculousness of this fear that the President’s fragility and insecurities may trump our civil rights.

And finally, my parting reassurance: The second day is a little bit easier. (Spoiler alert: despite the timelines of this essay pointing to its being written entirely on November 9^th, it’s pretty much taken me two full days to process all of this: Even nocturnal as I am, I’m sure we can all admit the advisability of pausing such stream-of-conscience musings once 4:00 am or so rolls around…) Today was definitely a bit less bleak than yesterday. It’s still raw, and it’s still not something that’s ever going away: I’m not dropping the promises I made here when enough distance goes by, and things get a bit rough—That’s maybe what this essay has morphed into more than anything else: a record to keep myself accountable to the power of these convictions. But today’s revelation to myself is that not forgetting doesn’t mean I shouldn’t begin trying to heal. The path forward may still not be clear, but I feel like the next step is ever so slightly more defined. And maybe it is just because I’ve probably listened to that song at least 35 times at this point, but if that’s what it takes, then I’ll take it, because “I’m marching along, I’ve got confidence, I’m cooler than a pack of peppermints” (really have to work to say it, but) “I haven’t been this excited since I can’t remember when!.. ’Cause I know that I’m really, really, really gonna be okay! I’m not giving up today! There’s nothing getting in my way! And if you knock, knock me over, I will get back up again! If something goes a little wrong, you can go ahead and bring it on, ‘Cause if you knock, knock me over, I. Will. Get. Back. Up. Again!..I’m okay!”