I woke up early that morning, having a couple of things to finish before trudging to my 8 a. m. anatomy lab. The first thing I did was open my laptop to see the election results. The night before, I had stayed awake as long as I thought wise, monitoring the results like a hawk. What I had seen hadn’t looked promising, but I had hoped that somehow it would be different in the morning.
I was wrong. Dead wrong. I looked at the screen and muttered, “Well, shit.” Donald Trump had won the presidential election. I kept thinking, as I got ready for the day, “How is this possible? He couldn’t have actually won. This is a joke.” I stepped outside, and the skies were gray and drizzling—not outright sobbing, but quietly mourning what I thought had to be the death of the free world. I knew I wasn’t alone in hoping that it was a mistake or a bad dream. When I couldn’t put off accepting it any longer, I couldn’t help but wonder what could have possible gotten us to this point. What had gone wrong?
At first, I was angry with the electoral college for voting in Trump when he was clearly not who most of the country wanted. Then I took a step back. Was that really the problem? No. The problem was the fact that America, in 2016, after so much progress, had allowed a candidate like Trump to get as far as he did in the first place. The problem is that as much as we have progressed, we still have miles to go. We had all brushed off the racists, the bigots, the white supremacists—we had celebrated victory long before we actually had it. We may have suppressed the hatred to an almost tolerable degree, but it was still there, simmering like lava underneath us, and still more powerful than we wanted to think. This was made apparent when, starting the day of the election results, came reports from parents of appalling acts of bullying springing up in schools. From elementary to high school, white students were forming walls out of objects and themselves to block out Hispanic, Muslim, and black students from their lockers and classrooms, telling students who had lived in this country their entire lives to go back to Africa or Mexico, telling LGBT students that their “time was up” now that Trump is President, throwing things at their minority targets. Groups of white students ran through the halls chanting about Trump’s victory and “white power.” It wasn’t only kids being targeted or perpetuating there behaviors. White conservative adults verbally and physically attacked their neighbors and strangers. One mother posted to twitter that, while playing outside, her black elementary age daughter had been called horrid names and told to go back to Africa by a small group of white adult men. A Muslim woman posted a tear-inducing story of how a white woman whom she had considered a second mother during her childhood had sent her an email filled with hatred and disgust, telling her and her family to “leave her beautiful country” because they were “ruining it.”
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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were beautiful victories. It was the beginning of a long battle that is still being fought, but it was a win that America desperately needed, a victory against racism. In 2003, when Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, that was another victory. So was August 26, 1920 when the 19th amendment was added to the Constitution and gave women the right to vote. We hold fast to these because they give us hope for future victories, but what we don’t want to think about is that hatred is incredibly long-lived and persistent. We learn about colonies and imperialism in history class, and then promptly put it out of our minds—we neglect to remember that racism and bigotry have existed long before America did. We don’t like to think about the fact that the first white inhabitants of America, the founders of our country, came from England, a country known for oppressing anyone who was not white or Christian, or that they did horrible things to the Native Americans who were already living here. We pretend that the hatred and ignorance have gone away, because it makes us feel better, when it hasn’t. Time and time again, history has shown us that things come back around, especially hatred: hatred for monarchs and dictators, hatred for laws, hatred for wars, but above all, hatred for our fellow humans.
Am I suggesting that we could ever completely stamp out hatred, racism, or bigotry? No, and I think trying to make it completely vanish is not only a foolhardy task, but oppressing someone for it would make us no better than they are. I also do not believe that we should retaliate by attacking them, for slander and physical attacks only perpetuate the issue. It takes two to fight, and fighting the way we have been has gotten us progress, but not as far as we should be. What can we do?
We can love everyone, not just those who think like us. I am a Christian, and there’s one thing that many Christians in this country do not seem to understand, one thing that may have pushed many of them to vote for Trump in the first place—that we should not judge others. Whether you believe in God or not, it is written in the Bible that only God has the right to judge, and I believe that strongly. I may not agree with what a Muslim believes in, but do I hate them for it? No, I don’t. I’ve never hated anyone of another race or belief because of those things, and I thought myself a loving person. This election has made me realize that I was still picking and choosing, still passing judgement on others. Does this mean that we should just lie down and take it when hatred runs rampant? No, not at all. We still need to stick together, we still need to defend each other, but we need to love them. We need to love the racists, the bigots, and the ignorant, even though it’s hard. We’ve failed to do this before. We fought by digging our heels in the ground and screaming until we got our way like toddlers, throwing hatred right back into the faces of those who hated us. This is what got us the Trump presidency. Now, if we’re going to get through it, we need to put aside our hatred for those who have done us wrong. We need to love those who hurt us, so that someday they’ll realize what we already know: that we should love each other, because no matter what else you are, we are all human, and that’s all that really matters.