On November 8, 2016, I was living in San Francisco. My first cue that something might be wrong
was that my friend Amanda in Ohio called me around 5:35 as I was starting the
walk home from work with Paul. I let it go to voicemail, and I later learned
that she was having a panic attack. Around
8:35 pm EST, the returns coming in were starting to show that something wasn’t going
as expected and that the woman universally touted by the media as the most
qualified candidate for president ever might not win.
Child of a political scientist, I’d always wanted to have an
election night party. I’d reached out to
a few people, but it hadn’t worked out so we were on our own. In hindsight, this was a blessing as I am
sure it would have been the worst party ever.
Since July, I’d been saving a Build
Your Own White House cookie kit for the occasion. Once home and settled in to watching the
returns, I set to work on my project.
When I went to vote that morning, I had filled in every other
blank first leaving president for last.
Living in California, the state would go to Clinton, but I stood there
for maybe 5 minutes staring at my ballot and internally wrestling with my
unresolved political dilemma. Given my political convictions, I was not sure
that I could live with myself voting for Clinton and thus implicitly endorsing
all of the actions that I was sure she would take that would cause so much harm
to those I love and the world I love. Yet in the back of my mind was the thought
that the other guy could win. I filled
in the blank for Clinton rather than Stein and turned in the ballot.
That morning I wore a button from my vintage political collection
that said “Nixon Now More Than Ever.” As I was walking from the polls to work, I had
a conversation with a stranger on a corner while waiting to cross the street
about the election, and I didn’t need to explain a thing about my accessory. Living in San Francisco was a
politically wonderous thing.
As the evening’s events progressed, my cookie model building
project took on the character of the unfolding events on the television. Around
9:30 PST it looked like we knew the result.
Only in the beginning stages of denial, I said to Paul, “Let’s walk the
dog.” Strangely, our Tenderloin apartment
was about 2 ½ blocks from Hilary’s Northern California HQ. As we walked past with Elsa bouncing along in
front, they were just locking up. There was
a circle of people talking on the sidewalk in front. One looked like he was embracing an overly
large coffee pot. A few were
crying. In this moment Paul said, “It
looks like we are in for some interesting times.” Truer words…
In December of 2016, we were married in a small ceremony in Muir
Woods, a redwood forest just north of San Francisco. Of our guests, if I had to wager, I would say
that half either voted for the winner of that contest or abstained. The day after the Inauguration, we loaded
cat, dog, inflatable mattress and what was left of our apartment into my Prius
and began our move to the Midwest.
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This Summer, we were able to get out of town and visit my uncle
in Northern Wisconsin. It was the week
of the Republican Convention, and for as many Biden signs as there now are in
our little blue dot of Kansas City, we felt surrounded by Trump flags and expressions
of outright hatred towards non-Trump supporters. (Even while kayaking, we saw lake side Trump flags
proclaiming “Make Liberals Cry Again”.) Watching the Republican Convention
and spending time with my increasingly right-wing uncle, I had the long overdue crystallization of the
realization that supporters of the two camps are living in opposite perceptions
of reality. What I saw on FOX or in that
convention bore no resemblance to the reality of life I live or the lives of
those I see around me. To be fair, when
MSNBC or other center-left mouthpieces report on “Trump supporters,” those
pictures don’t match those that I love on the other side.
So, I have no wager on what will happen this time. Both sides are talking as if they have it sewn
up, and this is probably because they only associate with those who hold
similar views to themselves. I have so
many thoughts, but I will save them for another time when they are more formed. Even this is just a series of experiences, bits
of memory in a life of straddling seemingly different worlds.
Love each other. Try
to be kind. Try to take time. Work for what is right and resist the urge to
give in to hate. None of us know what
the hell will happen from day to day, and right now we are just a bit more aware of that than we used to be. My
friend Amanda died in July of 2019. When I think of election night almost four years ago, my first thought is that I wish I’d picked up the phone rather than letting it go to voicemail.
