My girlfriend told me yesterday that a friend of hers cried when she first heard, at the end of October, that the polls showed the race tightening. I thought she was trolling me at first, because she knows I don’t often take tears seriously.
I’m what my people call a hard “T”: I vote cold rationality over unwarranted emotional displays. I’m suspicious of people swinging their emotions around like mallets. People losing an argument on merit shed a few tears and insist that the world hear them out. It’s melodrama. This time was different.
I’ll confess to almost crying about the polls. To a heart that’s been beating a little too fast recently. To a temper even shorter than normal. To a baffling sense of living on borrowed time. After 17 months, I’ll confess the election has gotten to me. Hear me out.
I came to the United States in 2003 with every intention of staying a while. I’d heard a lot about this place; I’d visited a couple of times, and lived here from 1993 to 1996. I knew what America represented in the world: a force for good; invincible power; God’s own people; the capital of the world. I wanted to live in this good place, where people on TV strangers pulled strangers out of burning buildings.
College was a rude shock. You won’t be surprised to hear that I intensely disliked Morehouse. People asked me if I lived in trees. Classmates asked me not to bring my jungle bullshit to the dorms. I never quite fit in with what was – at least on my floor at Graves – a need to be “hard”. They made fun of my dancing during Olive Branch.
Life off campus wasn’t much better. I had the police pull a gun on me in Canton. A young bigot shared his feelings in Orlando. A teacher told me why my young black students in Brooklyn were doomed.
Through all of it, I felt those interactions were the exception. That America was still good, because its people were. That Christianity was at home here, and that God continued to bless America. I made friends.
I’ve grown up. I understand the difference between a Christian and a Bible-thumping traditionalist. I understand the fragility of my black body in these United States, and peril of every traffic stop. I understand why the guard at Yurman follows me around. I’ve learned to walk around certain places with my hands in full view.
But through the depths of the black experience in America, and my growing understand of the history of racism, I somehow always imagined my present-day oppressor an over-represented minority: the last of a dying breed. A pit full of unfortunates and a basket of deplorables. I had a sense that I and mine could wait out these hold-outs. That despite Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, the “United” around me would overcome. That America would continue to be good. I was supposed to file for my green card.
But Trump.
So where I once saw America as “good,” I see a depth of hatred no one warned me about when I arrived 13 years ago. I see a stunningly ignorant population large enough to drag a fool from reality TV to national candidacy on the back of biases and fears. The deplorables are here, and no one is safe. Not the blacks, or the Hispanics, or the Muslims, or the women, or the immigrants.
I see “good” people hide behind intellectually lazy arguments of being stuck between two evils. It’s nonsense. She might be dodgy, but she’s overwhelmingly qualified for this job. And every day she faces the indignity of competing with someone with half her intellectual quotient and none of her experience. Where she testifies for 13 hours on Benghazi, he refuses to accept responsibility for re-tweets.
I see a candidate endure this “competition” with a grace and patience that alone should earn her the highest office. She listens while people debate her “likeability” with the baseless assumption that she gives a damn about them. She answers stupid questions about her emails. Then she watches as her accusers hold up a tax-evading pseudo-rapist racist who repeatedly fails to clear the toddler-on-a-flight bar of keeping his calm for 90 minutes.
I see Donald Trump say things over and over that should make “good” people boo. Not the obvious things like Mexican being rapists and genital-grabbing. It’s the other things: “I am the law and order candidate.” “In the good old days this didn’t happen.” He “knows better than the generals”, to loud applause. He would ban immigrants from countries that have a proven history of terrorism. Yes, you’re imagining Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. But it’s probably also Nigeria. His numbers swell.
I see this America that has wagged its finger at my continent’s dictators and strongmen, revealing itself to be no better. Donald lies about things that are on tape (like Obama “screaming” at his supporter), knowing video evidence to the contrary exists, and knowing that his supporters don’t care. If he can lie in the face of broadcast evidence, what will we hear of his dealings under the executive shroud of the presidency and the clandestine national security apparatus? Even our dictators are not so bold.
I see the media rushing to lambast him. They trot out endorsements like badges of honor: “We, for the first time in our <irrelevant age> history, will endorse the Democratic nominee for president.” CNN and NBC compete in fact-checking Olympics, ignoring that they drank drunk off ratings this idiot provided as they legitimized him. If he wins, it’ll be on them too. (Though this country has a habit of forgetting inconvenient truths.)
This election doesn’t matter to me because of Donald himself. Humanity has endured many mad men, and he hardly strikes me as the herald of doomsday. His hands are too small, and the checks and balances are too robust. It matters because I can’t un-see what it has forced me to see.
I see the deplorables, in all their angst-filled old-era glory, confused in a world that is moving on without them. I see them trumpeting their Evangelical Christian values while their nominee gropes women and quotes from “Two Corinthians.” I see them beating black bodies and celebrating black deaths and chanting against Jews and demonizing Muslims.
I see them, in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, and I realize that they were here when I arrived. They were here when I thought America was the capital of the world. They were here when I thought America was good. I see that they are not good at all.
I see that they’ll still be here on Wednesday, even if Hillary wins. Millions of them. Not a dying minority, but a potent, angry movement large enough to make this a contest.
I see the death of an ideal, or the revelation that the ideal was always a lie. After all this time. And that hurts. Really, really badly.