A few weeks ago I went running in the early morning and two men in TRUMP gear were flanking the sidewalk.
I felt my heart rate quicken and I darted past hoping they might not notice a small Chinese woman in liberal athleisurewear passing them.
I was scared.
I did not lift my chin and puff my chest, or draw on my girl boss self. I was a rabbit at the dog races. I have not felt that way in very long time. I had a quick flashback to age nine, moving to a new town and being taunted with "Hey Chopsticks!". I grew up feeling small. So, so small because of my Asian-ness, my slanted eyes and rosewood decorated home.
I am now an almost forty-something, wife, mother, physician who has seen her fair share of life, trauma and loss. I am not supposed to worry that two older men in my small suburban community might try to assault me for my race. I am the product of two immigrants who came to the United States in hopes of a brighter future for their children. A place where girl babies were cherished and not cast down a grassy hill, where women were equals and there were no quotas on childbearing.
I felt that that America had been lost last night.
So, like the rest of my peers, I retreated into my Facebook bubble. I felt the weight of this giant oil spill, slicking our skin with its filthy tar. I feared for my mixed race children, for women seeking reproductive choice, my Muslim friends.
I didn't want to feel small again. What did this mean about the country I lived in?
Wait, yes! This is America. It is just because of our Democratic process and collective right to vote, our ability to exercise free choice that TRUMP happened. The same America that elected Obama, elected TRUMP.
We HAVE to listen to this vote. I know minorities, women and non-Christians who voted for the president-elect. They are not all bad people or deplorable. There were Muslim, Ivy League-educated, lesbian, millennial undecided female voters who called into NPR and told Brian Lehrer that they just found Clinton to be disingenuous and didn't know what to do. I would have knocked on doors for Bernie, waited in the pouring rain to hear him speak, hosted randoms in my home to campaign for him. I felt no enthusiasm for Hillary and I am a liberal, minority female. ( I did not vote for TRUMP to be clear). It's too easy to scream, RAPIST, RACIST, SEXIST! And to shrink away like a field mouse and run away to Canada. When I was a nine year old girl, I shrunk and looked down, I should not be doing that now.
The country needs change. Huge change. We cannot ignore that 58 million Americans were so disillusioned with establishment politics that they elected the most outrageous outsider.
We need to be honest about how the divide between the richest of rich and those barely making minimum wage is expanding and expanding, forming a chasm that conjures images of a starving Fantine, a real life Les Miserables. This is not hyperbole. This election was about feeling disenfranchised and about an America that we New Yorkers just don't see.
It's about women (and some men like my husband) who make family choices to stay home and make their kids lunch everyday and want to feel valued for that and don't want liberals yelling at them, belittling that decision. It's about the lovely man who delivers my takeout, afraid he will go to jail because he can't afford to buy the health insurance that he is required to by law. There is no way in hell that he can pay those premiums....even though he works 16-hour days.
I should not have bowed my head that day and run scared. I should have said good morning and smiled, because painting those two men as racist, sexist assholes who victimize the women in their life is just widening this gap. It's playing into the media-driven stereotypes that galvanized TRUMP. Those same stereotypes paint me as a Socialist who wants to put lollipops in the mouths of the homeless and lazy, raise everyone's taxes to 90% and destroy free markets. This is not the time to call TRUMP "learning disabled". How are we any different if we sling petty insults back and forth?
Part of why I left Washington DC was because it felt so very bifurcated to me. Gray suited slabs of humans in stone castles running the country, not noticing the city they lived in had the worst public schools in the nation. It felt very black and white as a city and I could feel the resentment brewing, bubbling in the Metro everyday.
I am fearful of publishing this blog, because I know this is an unpopular opinion. We don't want to believe we are all at fault. That the divorce wasn't one-sided. Blame, blame, blame and yell and call names. Hillary was a bad choice, TRUMP, a far worse one, but they were born of a broken two party system and a growing discontent among a working class that is simply faltering economically.
We need to really look at this and ask why. We can't write off 58 million humans coexisting among us as Nazis with psychiatric disorders who want to deport us.
It's far more complex than that. I am not running scared. This is a wake up call. We are in a powder keg of emotion. I have to make choices now that are for my children's future. I want to help protect their rights in a cooperative way. This is not reality television, this is just reality.
