This page has been written especially for you, folks who are thinking:
Hey! It’s not the end of the world! We all need to embrace and shake hands; that’s what democracy is all about, right? Why protest a fair and open election, a lawfully conducted part of the democratic experience? Why are y’all being such huge babies?
So we sat down and wrote this page to link to y’all so we don’t need to write out an entire multi-paragraph social media rant/tweetstorm/etc every time we see you.
But before we proceed:
We love y’all. We wouldn’t send you this link if we thought you were a blowhard, stupid motherfucker who wakes up in the morning, cackling about how much you love to racism, how you enjoy collecting the tears of LGBT folks in a vial and sprinkling those tears on your face to prevent wrinkles. We don’t want waste time arguing with that kind of evil, and besides, who does that?
(Side note: a vial of cosmetic tears of any kind would be metal as hell so never mind; proceed with whichever tear vials you need in these bleak and uncertain times).
You don’t need to know you’re hurting someone to hurt them. God knows, so many of our collective relationships would have gone better if we all had that idea stamped into our brains as teenagers. And what you’re doing is wearing away our ability to have this civilized sit-down convo you want from us. So we need you guys to see where we’re coming from if the next four years are going to be even remotely less not-okay.
These are our worries right now — the worries we feel whenever one of you tells us we just need to chill, that everything will be fine, that the real problem is partisanship or political correctness or whatever our current Liberal Demon of the Week is:
We are worried about those first 100 days under Donald Trump.
We are worried about our ability to safely move through this world.
We are worried because when we speak up, our experiences facing down very literal violence and hatred have been written off as some kind of scam, or a conspiracy.
We are worried that our next president literally just appointed a misogynist, bigoted white nationalist as his chief strategist.
We are worried about access to healthcare.
We are worried about ourselves or our friends and family literally getting murdered by emboldened racists and homophobes.
We are worried about police brutality.
We are worried about the legislative securities that protect our ability to live and work in this country.
We are worried about our friends and family who may be undocumented, who may be in the process of securing citizenship throughout the notoriously lengthy, expensive, confusing, and maddening current legal process.
We are worried that when the party controlling all three branches of our government align with the interests of bigots and racists, the rule of law won’t be enough to keep us safe. When the law conflicts with what they want to do, they’ll change the law. I live in Texas and I’ve seen it happen.
We are worried about the environment, about the unchecked destruction that will certainly follow if EPA regulations are rolled back. We are worried about access to clean water, clean air. We are worried about the world we will pass on to our children.
We are worried about dying from preventable illnesses. We are worried about dying from preventable pregnancy complications.
We are worried that a businessman with a checkered history of success will undoubtedly fail to deliver on all those economic promises he made.
We are worried that a man who has expressed terrifying views about torture and foreign policy is going to abuse that power. Four Americans died in the 2012 Benghazi attack. How many would die if Trump successfully deployed nuclear weapons on a foreign power?
We are worried that voter suppression — which is already a big deal in this country — will grow worse in the next four years, that we’ll slowly lose our shot to change things in the next election.
We are worried about an overly litigious public figure having the backing of a conservative Supreme Court.
Hell, given how 2015-2016 went down, we’re mostly worried about a conservative supreme court. How safe would Roe vs. Wade or marriage equality be under that kind of leadership?
Speaking about Roe vs. Wade: we are worried about our access to safe, legal abortion. Conservative states (again: we’re in Texas, we know what we’re talking about here!!!!!!!) have been stripping away abortion access for years and we are fucking scared. What use is legal abortion if no one can access it? (Which, incidentally, is the point of all that legislation).
And look: we’re just as worried as a lot of you are about the economy. You think we don’t want jobs? You think we don’t care about feeding our families, about making ends meet?
The folks who are the most worried right now aren’t the kale-and-yoga Liberal Elitists so many of you think we are — god knows that upper middle class white women flocked to Trump at unexpected numbers. Those of us worrying right now know what it means to struggle, too; a lot of us know what it means to barely scrape by. We grew up on army bases (hi), in urban blight, in downtrodden, rural communities. We’re from everywhere, worrying together about how we’re going to afford our bills and our medicine. Some of us are worried about whether or not we’ll see the fruits of the educations we sacrificed for in order to get out of those communities. And some of us still live there.
But we are also worried about our very base-level safety in this country and our basic civil rights. We are worried about our loved ones. We are worried about how blasé a lot of you are about whether or not our fears are grounded. A lot of the issues we’re worried about have been bad, real bad, for a long time. We all have access to the news — none of us can block it out anymore, even if we try.
And you middle-of-the-road types — don’t kid yourselves, here. I’ve read a lot of your social media posts about how we need to cool it about how this fair election all went down, how both sides are full of motherfuckers and everybody loses sometimes.
But Conservatives played all kinds of dirty tricks to reduce the impact of liberal-leaning voters. The Voting Rights Act was just gutted, so recently.
We’re not upset because we didn’t get our way, or that we don’t believe that you have the right to disagree with us — we’re not pissed at y’all for liking peanut butter more than Nutella or not getting into Star Wars. We’re scared as hell because we’re worried for our personal safety, and the safety of our loved ones.
And on a personal note and a selfish note, I’m worried about my loved ones. Some of you think these threats of violence are too insane to be real. A few of the people I love the most were intimidated by bigots in public spaces multiple times in the past week. People I talk to almost every day, shoulders I’ve cried on, hands I’ve held. And I know you don’t have a reason to believe me, a rando from the internet you’ll probably never meet, but I can tell you that I am 100% a real, flesh-and-blood human weirdo who is not being paid to say I’m scared out of my mind right now and this is not normal or fine. If you know how to stay calm and not worry when assholes are spray painting swastikas into buildings here in extra-liberal Austin, Texas, please let me know because I don’t know how to handle four whole years of this.
So instead of telling folks how to feel about all of this, I am begging all of you who think we all need to calm down, to chill out, to stop whining — I want you to think about kids that will go to sleep tonight worried about whether or not their parents will be deported.
I want you to think about a religious mother begging her daughter not to wear her hijab in the days after the election.
I want you to think about a little kid taunted by his peers in the cafeteria, as they chant “build a wall” at him at lunchtime.
I want you to think about yourselves, too — I swear on my own life that you will be impacted by this election in ways you won’t like and in ways you won’t see coming. We’re scared and being scared is the fucking worst, I know that. I am asking for your empathy, and I’m asking for, if nothing else, the benefit of the doubt. Please think about why we’re scared, even if our fears seem a little far-fetched. If nothing else, don’t mock us for them.
Because right now, we need you. We love you. We’re your friends. We’re not asking you to do anything right now — just think, and believe in us.
Featured image source: Pexels.