The Nightmare of Reality and Moving Forward with Purpose and Vision

Facing a world with Donald Trump as the USA President-elect...

So on that fateful Tuesday we all waited to see what would happen in the USA 2016 election. While people were vaguely concerned about Trump winning, it didn't seem likely. Then again, everything to do with this election hasn't seemed likely and yet it has all been happening. So when we then woke up on Wednesday, November 9th everything seemed like a bad dream. I myself had work at 7am that morning, so I had gone to bed around 10pm before anything was certain... Inevitable, yes, but not yet certain. So while I suspected what had happened I did not know for certain and was in denial for a good 5 hours. And then I realized that this was my new reality and I needed to get used to it. 

I probably spent the next 2 or 3 hours being quite depressed and upset, but still, things weren't too bad in my head at that point. Until I realized what a Republican President, House, and Senate would mean for the USA and the world as a whole. And then I couldn't switch my brain off. Everything was swirling like a maelstrom in my head; LGBTQIA+ rights, gay marriage, women's right to choose and abortion access and legal consequences, healthcare and access for low income families, the environment, Trump's climate change denier appointment as head of the EPA, Endangered Species Act future support, my future career choice of conservation biology... Everything that is important to me went from being supported and protected by the government to facing complete dissolution and active threats from the entirety of the government. The fact that republicans now control the executive (presidency), legislative (congress), and judiciary (supreme court) branches of the government terrified me.

When Obama was president republicans chafed under his "control", but his presidency has been plagued from the very start by a gridlocked congress. In the beginning, democrats controlled the senate and republicans the house, and Obama managed to make some progress with congress. However, then the republicans took control of the senate as well, and then Obama's hands were virtually tied behind his back for the majority of his presidency. So while republicans were not happy with Obama as president he couldn't do as much "damage" as they feared he would if congress hadn't blocked him at every turn. However, democrats are now faced with a very different situation. Republicans now control the house, senate, presidency, and will likely have the choice of the new supreme court justice filling Scalia's spot.

They prevented Obama from carrying out his constitutional privilege of appointing the supreme court justice on the basis of them wanting the next president to choose because then the "people would be choosing". Regardless of the fact that this is perhaps the stupidest argument I have ever heard, it worked for them. The president-elect of the US is Donald Trump, the republican candidate, and as such he will appoint someone and congress will gladly accept that person, and then we will have a majority-conservative supreme court that will likely then attempt to overturn gay marriage rights, abortion rights, women's rights, equal pay for equal work laws, environmental protection laws, and everything else the House majority leader that looks like a turtle has suggested so far. There are also 2 justices on the supreme court over the age of 80, so there is a possibility that they too may need replacing in the near future. Ruth Bader Ginsberg (83) and Anthony Kennedy (80) are the oldest members of the supreme court. While Ruth Ginsberg is famed (or notorious, depending on who you ask) for supporting liberal ideology and protecting social rights of people. Anthony Kennedy on the other hand is shaky at best when it comes to protecting individuals rights and the environment. While he has not voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade, he has been the swing vote that often allows more restrictions on abortions and state decisions to restrict access. He also is shaky on protections for the LGBTQIA+ community. He was the swing vote striking down measures that would actively stop gay couples from claiming domestic partnership, however he also refused to support anti-discrimination laws for gay people. If Ruth is not able to hold out for the next 4 years, we are faced with an overwhelmingly conservative supreme court, and if Kennedy kicks the bucket, he will likely be replaced by someone much less likely to support individuals freedoms.

So the stark truth of reality is now facing us. Trump's picks for "Secretary of ___" make the simple fact that he is president-elect even more terrifying. Add to that the republican agenda of squishing the light of progress out of the world, and the idea of a conservative majority supreme court and you've got my personal nightmare and the US version of the Nazi regime mixed in with dictatorship and communism in Russia. Yay.

I have spent the last two weeks in a mixture of being okay for a few hours, to the most incredible despair I have ever experienced. I spent a good two weeks getting maybe 3-4 hours of sleep each night, and what sleep I did get was interspersed with nightmares and waking up frequently. Not a good way to keep up with schoolwork. On top of that I burst into tears and had panic attacks randomly throughout the days if I thought too hard about things. I couldn't get schoolwork done. I couldn't concentrate in class. I fell behind on homework. My nerves were shot to hell. When I heard loud voices in the street outside my house I always listened to see if they were harassing anyone, prepared to fly out my front door with my pepper spray and give them hell.

I'm not even a minority ethnicity or religion. Yes, i'm female, so I am naturally worried about the normalization of sexual assault and the lack of respect for women, their wishes, their consent, etc... But other than that i've got a lot of things going for me. I will fully admit that I am privileged. I am a white middle-class female with good family support. I'm atheist, so that's not great in this country but it's not seen as an immediate threat worth being expelled from the country over. I'm i'm scared, I can't even begin to comprehend how people who are actually at risk of verbal and physical abuse are feeling. People who already experience rampant racism and hatred towards them for their skin colour, religion, sexuality, and clothing choices related to their religion, etc... People who have already lived their entire lives being targeted because of who they are, attacked by random strangers with verbal slurs, aggression, and even physical violence are even more at risk now. Trump has "normalized" the "Alt-Right" which is really just a glamorized way of representing the white supremacist/Nazi agenda.

The more cabinet members Trump picks, the less likely it looks like this government is going to work for making all americans lives better. This government will take care of the rich old white people with political ties, and pretty much everyone else is screwed. Even the people who most vehemently support Trump will in the end suffer from this election. They think he's going to wave a magic wand and suddenly they'll all be millionaires? There's going to be a very rude awakening for some people. But his supporters who overlooked or even embraced every single character flaw and lie... Will they even notice that they are suffering for their choices? Or will they continue to blame everything on the "dirty lying cheating liberals" that they see as a parasite on this country? Sadly, it's probably the latter.

I see a bleak future for this country for the next 4 years. An undoing of all the progress made in the last decade. A fall back to the "great" times of America where women, minority religions, and people of colour were subjugated by white conservative christian zealots and their backwards agenda. I see a world where we will fall back by at least 20 years into the past. We will fall behind pretty much every country in the world. America is already the laughing stock of the world. Now we are not only a global joke, but a terrifying out of control torpedo that could hit other countries and do devastating damage with very little warning or provocation.

I see very scary times approaching and i'm currently planning my escape. I'm planning how to get out of this black hole as fast as possible. I'm planning on joining the Peace Corps where I can hopefully do some good in the world, where I can make a difference in people's lives. Where I can spend 2.5 years without having to worry about my future, where I can focus on the here and now while doing meaningful work, traveling, learning new cultures and languages, and learning more about myself and what I am capable of. When I get back I'll be faced with a few months of political campaigning and then an election that will hopefully get this country back to a place of sense and caring. If not, I can then apply to graduate school in Norway, which was already part of my plan. I can get out of this terrifying place and get a foothold in Europe, hopefully find a niche there for my specific skill set and integrate with life there and not have to return.

Part of me wants to stay and fight, fight for people's rights and for those who need the help. Part of me wants to tough it out and come out the other side stronger than before, knowing that I made even a tiny little difference with my resistance to bigotry and hate. But the larger part of me is just too terrified to even consider what that kind of life would be like. My parents moved my family from South Africa to escape what was quickly becoming a tyrannical government. They wanted my sister and I to have a better life than what was offered to us there. They wanted us to be safe, to have careers, to find meaning in our lives and experience all the things they never did. And now I see that vision of theirs dying. I see their hopes and dreams for us being flushed down the toilet. Maybe not for my sister, an iOS app developer in the Silicon Valley tech hub of California... She'll likely be fine and untouched by this. But the career path that I have chosen and worked towards for nearly 4 years of my life is slowly fading and shattering. My career was going to take me to places like back-country South Dakota and rural Colorado... Places where sexism and racism flourishes unhindered. Places where I would already not be welcome as a woman working for the federal government. I was willing to work at it, to quietly prove my worth to a community that didn't want my presence. I was willing to suck up my opinions and work with people I don't necessarily agree with to try and make progress on carnivore conservation and environmental education, even if I was faced with resistance. However, I am not willing to put myself in the way of bodily harm and person attacks. I am not willing to sacrifice my morals and everything I believe in. I am not willing to sacrifice my sense of safety and happiness fore years...

So, my plan is to get out of dodge as fast as possible. I'm just sorry that for so many people this plan of action isn't an option.

Victim Blaming... The all american pastime of the US

Victim blaming for both rape and murder...

Americans have so many national passtimes... Baseball, flag obsession, racism, sexism, religious zealotry, appropriating the name "football" from the rest of the world and repurposing it and renaming the original sport bearing that name "soccer", bombing innocent bystanders and failing utterly to actually kill the person they're aiming for, and - at the forefront of my mind today - victim blaming. It's been an interesting year for us living in the amazing US of A. We've had Donald Trump turn from an amusing sideline of the election into an actual threat who could possibly have control over nuclear weapons in the not-so-distant future. We've had rapists left-right-and-center getting ridiculously pathetic short sentences, rape victims being disbelieved and slut-shamed. We have had news reports virtually every week about police shooting people all over the place - usually unarmed black kids and adults, the Black Lives Matter movement gaining incredible momentum - and of course opposition. We've had a football player kneel during the national anthem in protest of police shooting unarmed black people and white people going back to the overt racism we saw when the KKK was a popular club to be in, and then that same football player be called a muslim, a terrorist, received death threats, told he's a communist, should both kill himself and allow others to kill him, etc... 

Pretty much the US is a fucking insanely stupid nation at the moment. It's scary to live here, and i'm a privileged middle-class white girl. If i'm scared, I can only imagine how people who are actually in danger from this shit that's happening feel. I'd be fucking terrified to even leave my house. I'd become a hermit and only come out at like 4 or 5 am when almost everyone is asleep and there's less chance of me becoming a target for someone's racist vendetta. 

The US has an interesting history of blaming people for things they can't help. When the British "discovered" North America, they blamed the Native Americans for defending themselves, and punished them by slaughtering them, scalping them, and killing them (admittedly unknowingly) with diseases. When the Dutch and British started the whole slave trade, white people in the US enslaved Africans simply because they had a different skin colour, language, culture, etc... When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Government rounded up all the Japanese (and even Chinese) immigrants they could and shoved them into what were basically concentration camps without the whole gassing chambers part. For thousands of years, women have been considered "unclean", "stupid", "hysterical", and "too delicate" for pretty much everything except embroidery for the simple fact that we have vaginas and periods.

But we seem to have entered an all new low period in our history when we blame women for being attacked and raped, and black people for being murdered. The girl who was sexually assaulted behind a dumpster "had it coming" to her because she was intoxicated, and therefore we cannot even consider punishing her rapist because "it will affect HIM for the rest of his life..." Never mind that she will have to live with the memory for the rest of her life, knowing that when she was helpless someone took advantage of her and tried to stick his penis inside of her... No, the rapist's life and future are what we have to protect right now, obviously...

When it comes to rape the first question is not, "what the fuck did the parents teach their fucking rapey kid growing up?", it's what was the girl wearing, was she revealing too much cleavage, how short was her skirt, did she flirt with the guy, was she a "tease" or "leading him on", did she consent to kissing or fondling, because if so she was definitely asking for sex too, how much did she have to drink, was she wearing makeup, did she tell him she had a boyfriend, did she have a history of one-night-stands, was she "loose" with her sexuality, did she go to parties often, etc... We don't look at the perpetrator of the rape, the person with the penis who - for some reason - thought it was okay to force himself on a resisting woman. No, we look at the woman and analyse everything about her to decide how much she is at fault for another person attacking her. We give her a score of 9/10 her fault for the rape, and the guy only a 1/10, because he must have just misread the signals. 

Universities don't expel rapists, especially if they're on a sports team. They punish the victim of the rape and force her to go to a school where she sees the person who may have ruined her life, who has given her nightmares, panic attacks, a fear of intimacy with people she cares about, possibly even a fear of hugging her parents or friends, and who knows what other triggers and side effects of being sexually assaulted and abused. Judges give rapey little swimming kids 6 months in prison and then let him out after 3 months because anything else will DAMAGE HIS FUTURE... HIS future, mind you. His father pleads with people to be kind to his kid because 6 months in low-security prison was a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action"... Why not teach your kid to respect women and if he tries to rape any of them turn him in yourself or beat the shit out of him until he understands what apparently 20 years under your tutelage failed to teach him in the first place. 

"20 minutes" was 20 minutes too much action. Even 5 minutes is too much, 1 minute, 30 seconds... There is no "amount of rape" that is okay. It's not like there's a line of right and wrong, and when you hit the 30 minute marker you've suddenly gone too far. Like, 29 mins and 30 seconds of rape is okay, but 31 minutes earns you a prison sentence... It doesn't work that way. You don't get a free pass because it was a small time period. That's like saying that you get to murder 6 people without any consequences, but if you murder a 7th, OMG, you done fucked up... 

People get taken to court and stripped of their life savings because they bumped the car in front of them and the other driver falsely claims whiplash, when they still have an open cup of water in their cupholder that didn't spill a drop. We can consign a person to bankruptcy and strip them of everything they own because some dude wanted a fat payout by suing, but god help the person who suggests that we legally punish a rapist. That's "cruel and unusual"...

Similarly, all people seem to do these days is blame black people for their own murders at the hands of cops. They don't look at the little kid that was playing in the park with a toy squirt gun, they look at the dude who called it in and said there was a black kid with a gun. The cops didn't investigate what was going on, they just tore up to the park in their cruiser, flew out of it, and shot a little boy dead. No questions, no "put the gun down", no consideration that this was a little kid playing in a park. White people look at a grown man that was shot by the police and they ask "Was he wearing a hoodie? How tall was he? Did he look angry? Did he put his hands up immediately, or ask questions first? Did he resist arrest? Did he follow instructions? Did he have past convictions? Was he doing anything illegal?"... They tell black people to just "follow the law and do what they say and you'll be fine"... Well, obviously not! I'm pretty sure that by now some black people just drop to the ground with their hands out the minute they see a cop, regardless of what they're doing at the time, even if they are just selling girl scout cookies... It's no longer about keeping your nose clean, going about your business, and being safe. It's about assuming you must look like a criminal 24/7, so you have to always assume someone's going to try and shoot you.

And then when it comes to the protesting, the black community can do nothing right. Either they protest by trying to get laws passed to protect themselves, or they go to court to get punishment for the murdering cops, and nothing gets done. Protesting via the court system isn't effective. So they try getting support from the communities and politicians around them. But no one is interested, or even sees that there is a problem. So they get mad and sit down in the middle of roads and conduct peaceful if disruptive protests. They get attacked by white bystanders and the police, even though they are exercising their constitutional right to protest. Next they get really angry and hold violent protests, marches, smash windows, destroy public property, anything to get the attention of the world and highlight the very real problem that their community faces every single day. Discrimination, racism, hate from white people, unequal opportunities, lack of resources and lack of quality education in their communities... The list goes on and on. Even when a single black person protests in a completely non-disruptive, non-violent, not in your face at all way - by taking a knee during the national anthem at a football game - he is held up as an example of a "dangerous, disrespectful black man". Called hateful names like communist, devil, told to go back to where he came from, told to leave the US if he doesn't like the way things are... 

We blame the victims of crime all the time. We blame rape victims for being too provocative. We blame the victims of cop murder for being ex-cons or just looking suspicious (i.e. having darker skin caused by more melanin pigmentation), we blame regular murder victims for pissing the wrong person off, being disrespectful, refusing to do something for someone, not having better house security, etc... We blame pregnant young girls killed by their boyfriends because they wouldn't abort for getting pregnant in the first place. We blame women killed in childbirth for getting pregnant in the first place, even though they tried to have an abortion for their own health and safety. We blame young LGBTQA people who commit suicide for being LGBTQA, and say that if they could only just have tried to be "normal" heterosexuals then they wouldn't have been unhappy enough to kill themselves... 

When horrible things happen to good and innocent people, we blame THEM for it. Not their murders, or their tormentors, not their rapists and their torturers, not the abusive boyfriend or the religious fanatics, not the unfair court systems that pass laws preventing women from terminating pregnancies that threaten their lives... We blame the very people we SHOULD have been helping. We allow this disgusting victim blaming culture to not only perpetuate, but to thrive. 

Why? I have no idea. I cannot comprehend how little compassion a person has to have not to feel the pain of these needless deaths or feel sorrow at how their lives ended.