I am a straight, white, cisgender male, but I am terrified after the results of the presidential election that were announced last week. I am terrified because I am proud to have friends of different minorities, religion, sexual orientation, both trans and cisgender, and last week felt like an attack against all of them.
Last Tuesday, was election night marking the end of one of the most divisive, uncivil and just flat-out bizarre elections in history with Donald Trump emerging as the winner. Like most millennials, I am still trying to wrap my head around the fact that a country that elected President Obama twice, one of the greatest and most progressive leaders of our time completely turned around and elected a man who proposed discriminating against American citizens because of their religion, openly disrespected a veteran, making horrifying comments about females, incited violence against protesters and enabling racists and white supremacist groups.
Of course, the blame game has been circling on Facebook this past week with popular reasons being people voting third party; people not voting at all; the DNC intentionally pushing Hillary on its voters instead of the better candidate, Bernie Sanders; people didn’t want a female as president, or America is still racist. While there are valid reasons, the main point is it did happen, and what is important at this point is we act now. If we don’t want Trump to take away the rights of minorities, we need to be loud and proud in our discontentment, and that has already happened somewhat.
Protests have been ongoing ever since Trump was announced the winner, and there has been some progress made with Trump backtracking on some of his positions. Any mention of a Muslim ban has disappeared from his website and he is now talking about now keeping Obamacare somewhat intact, but we still need to fight on. We need to show that we will not tolerate any discriminatory legislation coming from Trump, and be alert of any coming from a smaller scale. Also we need to spread our attention to his other dangerous actions, including his attitude towards climate change.
After his victory being announce, Trump, a climate change denier announced that the leader of his EPA transition is Myron Ebell. Myron Ebell is a well-known climate change denier, and what’s worse he’s not even a scientist. He has a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and a Master’s in political theory, and this guy is supposedly fit to oversee our environmental issues. In fact, he even wrote an op-ed piece defending global warming by saying it would make cooler places livable. And this one of the only destructive choices Trump is making when it comes to environmentalism.
We need to keep the protests going, but instead of broad generalized protests, we need to protest against his specific policies that are dangerous to America. We also need to keep them peaceful, or else we will come off as the bad guys. We can also help to campaign to finally abolish the electoral college since Hillary did win the popular vote. We can hope Trump doesn’t get impeached, and I know that I sound crazy for that, but hear me out. If Trump gets impeached, his vice president, Mike Pence becomes president, and Trump is a tool that I am sure we can keep in check. Pence is the boogeyman that we fear in Trump, including his support electroshock gay conversion therapy.
Then when the midterm elections come around, everyone needs to go out and vote, and add as many Democrat members to Congress since the scariest part right now is having Trump under a Republican majority House and Senate. When the 2020 presidential election starts to roll along, we need to make sure this time the DNC does not try to push an unlikable and unwinnable candidate on us because if that happens again, we’ll have a second Trump term.
Finally, we just need to lend a helping hand to anyone who feels scared right now. As I said earlier, one of the scariest things about Trump’s victory is that it gave racists and other hate group a new amount of confidence, and we need to let them know there’s more of us that love them than hate them, and that is the only way we’ll survive this, is if we all stick together. If we make every issue our issue, we will prevail.