I write this from Los Angeles, as news of Trump’s presidency momentarily drowns out everything else, and my various friends here and abroad text me: How are you doing? Well firstly, is anyone really surprised?
As much as it’s a bitter pill to swallow, Trump is America’s id. We created him, and he reflects the ugly truth about our country. A country divided, built on violence and sold on individualism. Us against them to distract from the fact that everyone is unsatisfied. The American dream is a faustian pact with a high interest rate. Disenfranchised, no one can foot the bill.
Our eyes are glued to screens, bloodshot and desensitized. Celebrities replace monarchies that replace deities, and the news cycle is an endless feedback loop. What’s one more crazy statement to a nation raised on shock value entertainment as our main cultural export? A nation presidential soundbites are turned into club beats and played over viral dances online.
How much privilege does it take to be surprised? America has a problem. Sure, there has to be a way out—a pendulum swings both ways—but the first step is looking into the belly of the beast head on and calling it for what it is.
Cursed soil yields cursed fruit. America was built on slavery and the murder of Indigenous people. This violence continues today in more covert forms. Prisons overflowing. A never ending opioid epidemic. Systemic attacks on the bodily autonomy of women and trans people. Homelessness. Border camps one word away from their true name. Genocide in Gaza. A broken two party system. Disillusioned youth. Politics so bleak, so detached from everyday life, that many have given up altogether.
The idea of Kamala Harris was nice, hopeful even, but her persona was shaped by the Democratic party’s sanitized, corporate desire to reflect progressive values without really standing on them. And even if she was the perfect candidate, it’s not a perfect world. Bigotry, racism, and sexism are part of America’s DNA, and to change that starts on the ground—from the bottom up not the top down.
America is brutish. It is a red-hat-fandom, hateful and exuberant, drunk off the Kool-Aid that this country used to be great, yelling and cheering in an attempt at a release that should really be an exorcism. But America is also us. You reading this, me writing it. Our existence, our values, our hope for tomorrow, is the antithesis to the idea that it has to be this way. Because for many, it’s not. America is the shared humanity that we all have deep down, past our political differences, class, race, gender.
The power of art, and why I left political journalism to write about it, is that it can speak to the times, capture the nuances of the past and present and deliver everything all at once. It can imagine ways forward, too. Show us things we have yet to see, connect, uplift, reveal, exonerate.
I don’t have any answers now. I am still processing my thoughts as I write this. As a writer who got her start covering activist groups and nonprofits in the Bay Area, I know firsthand the power in community organizing. (And isn’t that what the Trump campaign did in these rural areas anyway?) For a country so big, so divided, a grassroots approach is the way forward: a web of support rather than a centralized source. Fed up? Express it. Start with conversations in your community, online, to friends. Question everything. That is how solutions arise. Then, direct action.
I’ll leave you here with Langston Hughes’ 1926 poem I, too.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.