Today

  

Today has been a day of watching, and waiting, and lost focus, and distracted mind. And that's just for me, who lives on the far side of the Atlantic, removed from an election that might just change the political landscape for a long time - whether or not the person living in the White House changes.

When I was younger, I didn't really understand why people would wait up all night to watch results (and bearing in mind that in my lifetime in the UK, the decisive numbers do tend to come in in the early hours). One set of politicians or another didn't seem to make much difference; they were so far behind where we stood as a society that we would continue to make progress regardless. Oh, there were years of feeling disenfranchised - I was born in the Thatcher years in the North-West - but even the sense that another grey old Tory would be prime minister was not enough to dampen a certain optimism about what was coming and the fundamental irrelevance of government in driving that. Is it significant that I think my first 'news event' memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall? Perhaps. Perhaps more likely is the very fact that during my teenage years we were coming out of the Cold War, out of the Thatcher years, and into something else.

I should also note that I'm conscious of my privilege in experiencing it this way: I certainly felt as a teenager that we weren't going to be a racist or a homophobic place any more - the world had seen that it was ridiculous to be so, and would just... stop. And that's a naivety that I could not have gotten away with had I not been a white girl from a relatively good neighbourhood.

A part of me wants to say that I can't tell whether it was just my youthful optimism that led me to see world politics and society in this way, or whether it is in fact accurate to consider the years since 2016 as a darkening time. Is it just because my world view is no longer the popular view (according to democratic process) that everything seems to be going backwards, and getting worse?

I cannot be sure, but at the end of the day, the people I oppose are the people that deny other people their humanity. It is not okay to say that other people should not / do not / can not exist or do not deserve the same protections or rights that others have.

Whatever the outcome (and I'm extra perplexed by the fact that I am, in US politics, a 'blue' person?!?), the realisation that our rights are in constant negotiation, our voices always at risk of being drowned out, our votes a responsibility, but also a right 'granted' us, and that there is fundamentally no difference between 'Western democracies' and any other state in a situation where a powerful leader may decide to stop counting or declare a victory - nothing special that protects that democracy, is not a realisation that can be forgotten.