Donald J. Trump is now the elected President of the United States, and Mike Pence is now Vice President. As someone who didn’t vote for either Trump or Hillary, I wasn’t expecting happiness to be the result of this election. I also wasn’t expecting to spend upwards of three hours crying over the results.
To those of you who don’t get why so many people are “freaking out,” or think that liberals are giant hypocrites for saying what they’re saying about Trump and those who voted for him, I wish to shed light, add an alternate perspective, with nothing but hopes that you will reach out to your fellow Americans in love and compassion.
To some specific demographics, a Trump presidency, working from previously made comments and actions by his supporters, is a terrifying and painful result. Being human, people are assuming the worst; the worst being that everything he promised to do, he will in fact try to do and be successful on some level and that their safety is at risk simply for existing as they are. Muslim women are at a point where they’re unsure that wearing a hijab is a safe practice in America right now. Mexican Americans do not feel safe, much less welcome in their own country. Those in the LGBTQA+ community are terrified that their recently won rights to marriage will be taken away, that homophobia will get worse, and there will be no place for them in America. Those in the black community, I’d bet money, feel much of how they’ve felt for centuries: that their problems are going largely ignored by the white community. Women feel much less safe just for being women because now we have a president who has actively degraded women and their humanity, saying that our bodies are for male consumption. How far back those words were said, under what conditions, all of that is irrelevant because of the impact those words will now have in the lives of women in America.
I don’t claim to know or understand everyone from these communities, I know that I couldn’t possibly, as a white Christian female, because of the privilege that I personally come from. But Social Media hurts. It hurts to see the pain, the anxiety, the amount of people afraid to have children, afraid to be open about who they are, afraid to live in a country that, until last Tuesday, seemed just the place to be who you are without fear of your rights being taken away.
This is real. It isn’t something the white conservative or liberal communities can ignore or turn away from. Our fellow Americans need us to protect their rights, they need us to show them that we are good, our country is already great and that differences make us better as a country. If you’ve never woken up worried to walk the streets of your town, never felt like an outsider in your own country, never worried about the safety of loved ones who live a different lifestyle, religion, or have a different color skin than you do, please try to feel empathy as best you can for the people who do feel that. If the suicide hotline is busy on the night of the election because it is overloaded with calls, that is your problem as an American. If transgender or transsexual kids are committing suicide because of the results of this election, that is your problem as an American.
What do you do about these problems?
You show compassion. You look past differences and see humanity. You lay down your prejudices and pick up a bible. See how that Jesus character treated people of different religions, races, creeds?
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He died for them.
And He had plenty of reasons not to, but He knew what the better choice was, and He chose that their opportunity to choose for themselves what their life will be was more important than any disagreements.
Consider this the next four years and please try to understand why this isn’t an easy thing for people who don’t look and think like you. You’ll learn things you never knew you never knew.
