My Election Day History and Anxieties
In our Internet-supercharged global society, it’s not unusual that the eyes of the world would fall upon the United States during their Election Day. What is unusual is the fact that said eyes are watching with a wish that the US will get its shit together. After all, it was only 4 years ago where people assumed a bumbling idiot couldn’t possibly win the election for the most powerful position in the free world from an established politician. Well, you know what they sat about what it means to assume…
My first election I got to take part in was 2004, Bush vs. Kerry. And I had to vote by absentee ballot due to being on vacation in Australia at the time of the election. But boy, did I hear a lot about the BS Bush was stirring up in the years prior, so you bet I voted for Kerry. It was funny, being down under and having all these Aussies ask my family about what was going on with our election. They couldn’t make sense of what happened 4 years ago, either.
Not to say I was a “vote blue, no matter who guy” my whole life. In some cases, I may have had the wool pulled over my eyes by the local talk radio station. But there was the one time where they had no say in the matter, and I wanted Bob Menendez out of office for voting “yes” on SOPA/PIPA. (As an aside, I did vote for Menendez in 2018, but I also voted for his opponent in the primary the same year.)
So, yeah, I was happy to vote for Obama when his time came. And I remember being in the student store of my community college, buying my books for the semester, when he gave his 2009 inauguration speech. They had the speech on, and I watched while I was in line to checkout. Hearing what I heard of that speech made me proud to have voted for him, both in the primary and the general. I thought for sure that after 7+ years of an endless war against a faceless foe, we might be on the right track again.
It’s kind of fucked up in its own way that a lot of my generation had to rely on The Daily Show and Colbert to make sense of our political system. The major news networks had to compete with the much faster news cycle of Internet news-blogs (Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy), so the quality of the networks’ reporting and journalism went down. And in comes a bunch of comedians and comedy writers to pick up the slack, having to point out blatant hypocrisies thrown out by the networks and politicians. While it brought a more informed populace overall, it certainly freaked out Jon Stewart. I don’t remember his exact objections, but he certainly took umbrage that more people trusted a bunch of people whose whole business is not to be taken seriously over people whose living is reporting on serious issues.
I won’t argue that Obama was a perfect president. He tried to compromise with people that were pretty much bad faith actors. He continued a war that he voted against as a senator. But we made a lot of progress as a country under him. More people had access to healthcare than ever. Unemployment down across the board.
I still remember where I was the morning after the election 4 years ago. Waking up. Finding out the news. Feeling devastated. Getting a text message from my girlfriend who was equally devastated. She wanted me to, and I believe this is the direct quote, “fuck her brains out”. To prove that this was real life and not a sitcom, I was the one not in the mood for sex. In fact, when I went to see her later that day, I ended up breaking down in tears on her shoulder.
I had no reason to cry for myself. I’m the privileged straight cis white male of the two of us. She was a bisexual woman of color. I’m certain I was worried for her sake, and certainly not mine. Or maybe it was because my faith in humanity had been shattered. Or both. It could be both.
I mean, how did we get there? How did we get a guy that bragged (likely falsely, if certain stories that trended in the years following are any indication) about the size of his dick in the primaries? That had a history of failed businesses? That had a recorded history of behavior that would sink most politicians? That was given a literal Nazi salute?
I’m not a political analyst, so my opinion is worth its weight in salt here. But there’s a reason I like to use the phrase “Party of Nixon” when I refer to the Republican Party. Roger Ailes, who got his start as an aide to Nixon, founded Fox News to insulate the next Nixon from what happened to Nixon. So much of what the modern day Republican party is can be traced back to Fox News. (It also is a nice way to take power away from that “Party of Lincoln” defense, since the two parties flipped on the issue of Civil Rights decades before my time. Seriously, you never hear any Republicans stick up for Black Lives Matter.)
As I write this, there’s still hours to go before the votes begin getting tallied. I’m worried about a lot of things with regard to this election. I’m nervous that voter suppression efforts will be successful. I’m nervous that 45 will use the courts to steal the election. I’m nervous I’ll wake up and this country will no longer be one where I’ll be welcome. I mean, 45 hasn’t been shy about throwing out Nazi buzzwords. And the Nazis didn’t look fondly at people on the Autism spectrum, though they honestly cast a wide net of hate to begin with.
