By ALEX PECHA
Contributing Writer
I’m a liberal. I probably qualify as a Democratic Socialist if you want to be technical about it; and while I certainly diverge from your average liberal in some areas, such as gun rights, I am still at heart mostly a liberal.
And by god, as a liberal my worst nightmare has come to pass.
Trump and Pence won the election, in case you live under a rock, and the reaction so far has been intense. I’m writing this the morning after the election and I am feeling a feeling I can only describe as the same sort of emotional shock you get from a break-up. You know the one, where it doesn’t feel quite real but at the same time you know that something is wrong.
Many Trump supporters might call me a cry-baby, or say my tears are nice and salty and that I need to get over it. They may be right. But I’m writing this not just to express how shocked and hurt I am—Facebook is doing that quite nicely—but to lay a few things out for the people of this college and this nation that I feel need to be said now that all bets are off.
Ignorance and hate won, it’s sort of the liberals’ fault, and we’re worse off as a planet because of it. Now allow me to explain all of those controversial statements.
Let’s start with the obvious: our new president-elect, Trump. This man is just vile, he brags about sexual assault, he mocks handicapped people, he was willing to cause a succession crisis if he lost and he has a laundry list of failures and other things that would have disqualified anyone else from being president.
But he’s not what scares me, not really. He’s a boisterous child with an ego the size of Saturn, but essentially he’s politically harmless. No, it’s the people who voted for Trump and Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence, who should scare the crap out of you.
I’ll do the easy one first, Mike Pence. Pence is a man who believes that gay camps work because homosexuals are diseased. Pence is a man who is anti-choice to an extreme level. Pence is a man who will fight to kill any increases in the minimum wage. Pence is a man who believes that businesses should be allowed to bar “certain people” from using their services based on their “beliefs,” and this is just a small taste.
Pence is a damned monster and he’s the one who’s going to be getting stuff done, Dick Cheney style. This is the man who’s going to help push legislation and get Supreme Court Justices who push us back by 50 years. Trump is just the mouthpiece; Pence is the true maniac.
Now what about those supporters I mentioned? Well, I want to qualify right off the bat that Trump supporters are not all chest-thumping morons with no concept of human rights. There are Trump supporters on this very campus who I honestly believe are some of the best people I’ve met with a lot of integrity and just happen to right leaning.
However, to say that some Trump supporters aren’t terrible, horrible, racist and sexist people is just living in a land of make-believe. There are supporters who will now see their world-view validated; they will see their hateful rhetoric as acceptable now because their man got elected.
This is the true horror of a Trump presidency: legitimacy for backwards idiots. People we should universally despise are now going to have more clout in society; people who genuinely believe we should throw Hispanic people back over the wall and think grabbing women “by the p***y” is okay. These people are now in a much better position to preach their crap, and they will.
Even worse, some of these people won’t just preach, they’ll take action. They’ll do whatever it takes to “Make America Great Again,” even if that means maybe making sure that “illegal” down the street knows he’s not welcome with a tire-iron to the side of the head.
Again, not all Trump supporters are like this. Not even most of them are like this, but the minority of them that are have enough numbers and now enough legitimacy that it should scare the crap out of you.
That’s the thing: had Clinton won, people would’ve been really annoyed, angry, disgusted; but very few would be scared. People are scared, and I’m not sure I blame them.
The worst part though, about all this, is that this is kind of our fault, fellow liberals.
To quote “The Newsroom,” “If liberals are so f*****g smart, how come they lose so goddamned always?”
The answer is because we have spent eight years in a great position with a great president and we never felt the need to reach out and educate the other side. Especially the last few years where extremists in the left have gone crazy and basically called anything and anyone under the sun and moon racist, sexist, ageist and any form of “ist” they could get their hands on.
Rather than disassociate with these people, we embraced them, and it frightened everyone who wasn’t them. It created a ground-swell and backlash so strong it got the Trump-Pence ticket to the White House.
Even now I see posts saying how racist every single Trump supporter is for voting for him, when in reality half of them were just sick of everyone in power calling them sexist, disgusting and blaming them for the world’s problems. No matter how true or un-true it is that whites and males cause all the issues we have, you can’t win hearts and minds by telling half of the population that it’s their fault for everything. So rather than saying “die cis-scum,” maybe they should have found a better way to educate people on their beliefs rather than being a bunch of raving lunatics.
The spiritual and emotional toll of this election is still being counted, and will be counted for a long time. I can only hope I’m wrong and Donald Trump proves to be a good president for us all, but after the past two years of bullying and bigotry I just don’t see it. Hopefully he can prove me wrong, though. I’d love to be wrong.
I think the best way to end is with a text I received from one of my close friends the morning right after the results were in. It’s a beautiful snapshot of why this wasn’t your traditional loss of an election, and while I have edited it slightly as to not reveal any personal information of her or her friends, 99 percent of her original words are here.
“I’ve never been more scared to walk down the street before. Albany was bad enough, I’ve been catcalled probably 50-plus times since I started coming to Saint Rose, but I would gladly go back to slightly fearing that. Now though… I’m a Mexican female, and I’m so incredibly scared that Trump’s supporters are going to take things into their own hands and “Make America Great Again” by getting rid of people like me or my roommate or my brother or my best friend and half of her family.
I’d like to believe that we live in an area where nothing will actually happen, but I’m still terrified. What the actual f**k America.”
This is the first glance I’ve had at Trump’s America, and it’s not one of hope and prosperity. It’s one of fear and anger.
Prove me wrong, Trump. Please, for the love of God, prove me wrong.
