November 9, 2016

Ah, the day after the US elected Donald Trump. I mean, kinda sorta elected him. He received the majority of electoral votes but Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more popular votes. So the only thing to take heart in is that the majority of Americans didn't want this. But we are in a system that dates back to slavery that gives rural states more weight in both presidential elections AND congress. As if that's fair. "But if we didn't have the electoral college then only the major population centers of New York, California and Texas would decide the president!" they argue. So the fuck what? With the EC, the states of Ohio and Florida decide. Yep, apparently it's better to let the backward uneducated armpits of America decide the president. Because you know, those rural fuckers with no teeth and disdain for education who live in the wide, non-city swaths of Ohio and the fucking panhandle of Florida matter more and get more of a voice than the diverse people in the cities. What exactly do these people contribute to America? They refuse to learn new skills since losing their manufacturing and coal jobs to technology. The people in the cities fund their food stamps (because you know, if you're white and need food stamps it's because you fell on hard times, if you're black it's because you're a welfare queen. This is a fundamental cultural truth of America). By choice, they contribute almost nothing. And they would have helped themselves more by voting for a president who actually wants to help them! Hillary would have fought to get them access to health care and improve their job situations! They are so fucking stupid that they believe Donald Trump cares about more than just getting their votes.

But I digress. The day after the election. I didn't sleep on election night so I was in a fog. I cried for hours. I begged Derek to take a sick day because I knew I wouldn't be able to handle taking care of the kids (damn I am such a privileged asshole). So I laid in bed all day, on my phone. The only thing that made me feel better was to vent with my internet friends in my doctor spouse current event group (it's full of lefties like me so pretty great for political venting). Why my internet friends? Well, because being Mormon, I don't really know any other lefties in real life, let alone in this dump of a town. Now that I'm out of the church, the next time we move, I won't immediately be thrown into a circle of Mormons. I'm looking forward to finding new friends elsewhere. Anyway, my internet friends were great for discussing WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED type of things.

I also spent some time in another doctor spouse group that leans much more conservative. The Trump supporters had mostly been quiet in that group, save a few loud exceptions, before the election (because even in a conservative group it was pretty widely recognized that Trump was an asshole and you were an asshole if you supported him). But on November 9th they all came crawling out of their swamp or wherever it is racist gun-obsessed selfish assholes hide. I watched several DOCTOR WIVES defending their choice to vote for Trump. Like, you can't even claim that you're just a simple country bumpkin who heard that Hillary wants to take your guns and kill your babies and something about emails so you voted for the other guy. No, you are insanely economically privileged. You have the resources to know better. But you deliberately voted to keep everyone else down so you could stay on top. I'm still wrestling internally with the irony that I will very likely personally benefit from the decision those fuckers made to vote for him, because I am in their demographic, but I HATE it. I guess it's because while maybe I will pay less taxes or something, and I'm not brown or black or gay so it's not likely anyone will commit a hate crime against me, I feel like we would have ALL benefited from more inclusive policies. We ALL benefit when everyone has access to healthcare and decent education and isn't oppressed based on factors they can't control, like skin color. Because then everyone can contribute their best to society. But I learned that day that many, many doctor wives--which I'm extrapolating to well off white women everywhere, since most of that demo voted for Cheeto Benito--simply don't care. As long as they got theirs, which they do, fuck everyone else. It's almost like they believe they are somehow inherently better than people who aren't as privileged as them. Oh wait. Yeah. That's exactly what they believe.

Someone in that group, on the morning after the election, had the audacity to ask that everyone please be kind to Trump voters like herself. She had just been berated by her mother because she voted for Trump. Damn it, bitch, if I had raised a daughter to be a kind and caring individual and then found out she voted for Cheetolini I'd be fucking livid. A tongue lashing would be the least of her worries. I commented on the post that I couldn't wrap my head around the irony of Trump voters asking for kindness and respect when they elected a narcissist who espouses the opposite of that. The reply, given by a particularly crazy Trump supporter who I decided before this thread that I wouldn't engage with because wrestling with a pig and all that, commented that "I see him as kind and caring. No irony here." Just fucking what. How the hell do you argue with people who literally do not know reality from fantasy?

Here's a few more examples of the crazy I witnessed on the 9th. In the conservative group, we were discussing the anti-Trump protests and the thread got crazy. First, people jumped right to "looting and rioting" because that's what white people call it when a group of people who aren't all milky white congregate (if they're white it's a peaceful protest, yet another fundamental American truth). There were the usual calls of "well of course they have the right to protest, but they shouldn't block traffic! People might be late to work!" Idiots, if it didn't piss people off or inconvenience anyone it wouldn't be a protest. Then they started going off about a video where it looked like a couple black men were attacking a white man for voting for Trump (later shown to be a road rage incident, nothing to do with the election). It was just so awful, they said. Violence is never the answer! they said. Yes it was a sad video. But where were your fucking tears every time a black man was shot by a cop this year. There were several this year where video evidence showed there was NO need for the cop to shoot. Black women live in constant fear for their black husbands and sons. But these ladies don't care about that. They only care if someone is mad at a white Trump supporter. And then the thread kept going. They started complaining about the flag burners and someone said "burning a flag is just as bad as all the violence!" Yes, welcome to 2016 America, where a piece of fabric is just as important as a human life.

In still that same thread, I witnessed an example of fake news having real world consequences. I pointed out that if Hillary had won, the violence from the right would have likely been insane (I am still 100% sure that would have been the case). Someone told me that if I would just look at the FACTS instead of the LYING MEDIA, I'd know that the violence at Trump rallies was staged by Hillary supporters to make Trump look bad. I asked where I could find these facts. Ironically, she posted media sources as her evidence (I thought you couldn't trust any of them?) I followed a trail of a story that was almost completely fabricated. Turns out some right winger who has had legal consequences in the past for deceptively editing video posed as a volunteer for the Clinton campaign. He recorded someone there joking about wearing a planned parenthood t shirt to a Trump rally and then getting a Trump supporter to punch them. The poser goaded him into saying this. There is no evidence, not a scrap anywhere, that anyone actually did this, and the guy caught on tape resigned so as not to damage the campaign. So I looked at the FACTS and that's what they showed. I of course pointed this out, but the Trump supporter never replied to me. All I got was a reply from yet another Trump supporter who said "and it was all funded by Soros." I asked for evidence of that too, but never fucking got any. So this is the level of discourse we are dealing with. People believe this bullshit and propagate it, and when it's called out, they just ignore it.

I only lasted a couple more days in that group. There's no point in engaging with that kind of crazy. They weren't worth losing sleep over.

So that was my day on November 9th. It was the beginning of the process of my trying to make sense of this. I'm still working on that, but seeing right up close just how selfish privileged white women can be (because I'm privileged enough not to have noticed that before) was a huge clue. Fuck you, rich white women of America. Fuck you very much. From a fellow rich white woman of America.