Right now all but one state’s polls have closed and government employees are hard at work tabulating the results of an election which will determine the direction of the next four years.
On one hand, we have the possibility of electing the United States’s first-ever Black/South-Asian woman president, albeit a former prosecutor who ran on a right-wing platform with regard to immigration and the Gaza genocide; on the other hand, we have a man who has been convicted of multiple felonies, is in untold amounts of debt to myriad foreign and domestic creditors, has currently-open civil and criminal cases in both state and federal courts, and has openly fantasized about killing his opposition and gutting the government in service of his own power.
A small handful of electoral votes in three or four states stands between the current state of things as they are right now – which, let’s be fucking real, aren’t great – and absolute mayhem.
I don’t feel wonderful about how shit’s about to go down, I’ll be honest.
But I also… don’t feel despondent.
And I don’t want you to, either (though fuck knows there’s a whole host of reasons to).
Let’s be honest with ourselves. We knew the results of this election weren’t going to be the magical end to a long nightmare. The work to make a better world has always been difficult and long and slow. Even if the best possible scenario ends up coming true, we’re still going to have to get up tomorrow (and the next day, and the next…) to address the problems and problematic figures in our communities and counties and states, to build counter-power and alternative infrastructures of support so that we’re not fucked or on the cusp of being fucked every two-to-four years.
We also knew the results of this election wouldn’t be cause for celebration one way or another, as no matter what we live in a country that has the blood of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Gazans on its hands. Neither choice would have resulted in a magical stop to a genocide endorsed and supplied by the United States; though it of course would be easier to hopefully grind the terrible machine to a halt under one figurehead than the other one.
No matter what happens next, it’s on us to be louder, bolder, more present and less acquiescent to the status quo than maybe we’ve been – all for extremely understandable reasons – these last eight years. People in our communities and around the world are going to need us to be there, to show up, regardless.
In the world we’re waking up to in the morning, it’s not going to be a fair fight or an easy one. It’s probably not going to have a single enemy, but instead something akin to a three-way fight. But the spectacle and theatrics of the election are now well and truly out of the way; it’s time for us to claw and scrape and scrabble our way to a better, freer world. We have nothing less than the world to win, and I think we can do it if we work together.
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