I Learned A Lot After This Election

Matthew Thacker Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 10, 2016

I consider myself to be socially liberal. I’ve been an active advocate for marriage equality for many years, I make sure I use correct pronouns when speaking with people, and so on. I dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s to proudly wear the label “Ally.”

I’m a straight, white male. I have a white-collar job and live in an upper-middle class neighborhood. I know next to nothing about what it’s like to be in a minority group (I do fall into one minority status, but it’s not a visible trait, hence the use of “next to nothing).

I voted for Hillary Clinton as a status quo vote. I was never a real fan, but I know she’d accomplish practically nothing with a stalwart blockade in Congress. I voted for Clinton to buy time until the 2020 election. And more importantly, I voted for Clinton because, for me personally, I couldn’t look my daughter in the face and tell her I voted for a man that talks about women the way he does. But alas, I awoke Wednesday morning to President-Elect, Donald J. Trump. I attempted to stay up Tuesday night until it was officially called, but after 2 A.M. and seeing the market down nearly 900 points, I gave up. After dropping my daughter off, I saw the sun rise, markets were well off their session lows, and it appeared as if nothing had changed. The world would move on, we’d have Trump for four years and everything was fine.

I arrived at my office and opened my computer to see reactions on Facebook. I keep a diverse group of friends, half were Trump supports, half Clinton supporters, and just a touch of third parties and “not interested’s” sprinkled throughout. After such a divisive campaign, and really a divisive past eight years, I hoped for an opportunity at unity to move forward. I knew not everyone would unify behind Trump, but I hoped we could unify as Americans. As a scrolled through my newsfeed, I was taken aback by the animosity that a lot of people were posting. Things like, “if you voted for Trump, you have voted to have my rights taken away,” numerous posts with contact information for suicide hotlines. There were so many posts with similar sentiments, all coming from my friends from the LGBT, Black, Latino and Muslim communities.

I didn’t understand everyone from minority groups were having such, what I believed to be, visceral reactions. Yes, Trump was elected, but life was going to go on, everything was going to be fine. Didn’t people see the same sunrise I saw? I started asking people on my friends list. One person said, “it’s like being at a funeral. We take 5 steps forward and just took 15 back.” I read an article about a Muslim medical student have comments directed at her about being deported now. Later in the day I was at the gas station, when a man wearing a MAGA hat looked at the cashier, who was Latino, and said, “I guess you and your 10 kids are getting your asses sent back home.”

I realized that I know nothing about life through the eyes of a minority. I understood that we may occupy the same physical space and time, but we exist in very different worlds.

I may have been wrong, maybe everything won’t be as okay as I thought…