On Tuesday night, my husband and I came home from a long day of teaching to another long evening ahead. Our plan was to watch the election results roll in while we cleaned the house. We always do cleaning night once a week, so we don’t have to spend our days off cleaning. Last week it was on Tuesday night because we both had parent/teacher conferences on Wednesday, and we had a teachers’ union gathering on Thursday night, so Tuesday was our only option for cleaning night. That would be fine, we thought. We were going to be up late anyway because of the election, so we might as well keep ourselves busy while we listened for the results.
We walked the dog first, had some quick leftovers for dinner, and both went to work cleaning the house while we had NBC election night news on two different TVs and all the speakers in the house. Every time we reached a new hour, we would stop and watch the updates. We started out the evening in good moods, but as each hour passed, the mood in our house shifted as we both became less and less optimistic.
By the time we both sat down on the couch when the cleaning was done, our moods were sour. We had both voted for Kamala. I refused to give up until we knew the results for sure, but by 9PM, my husband had lost hope. He didn’t even want an after-cleaning-night cocktail. That was a sure sign that he was depressed. By 10:00 in Montana, he had completely given up and gone to bed. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “I want to stay up until I hear about Pennsylvania. I couldn’t go to bed when it wasn’t truly over.
So, I stayed up for another hour or so until they called Pennsylvania for Trump. The election analysts had already said that without Pennsylvania, Kamala had no other paths to victory. So, there it was.
By this time, there had been reports that Trump was going to speak. Due to morbid curiosity, I stayed up a bit longer to see what he had to say. I listened for a few minutes but had to turn the TV off when he began to ramble on and on about Elon Musk and rockets. I just couldn’t stand it for another minute in my tired state. It was after midnight, and I knew I had to try to get some sleep before the alarm would go off at 4:30 AM to get ready for my 12-hour workday. My husband and I both work at the same middle school as teachers, and the Wednesday after the election was parent/teacher conferences, so we would teach from 8:00 AM to 1:10 PM, and then we would conference with parents from 1:30 to 7:30. It was the absolute worst day for conferences to be scheduled, and it would be nearly impossible to survive that day on insufficient sleep, but it looked like that was what I would be doing.
We survived that day, somehow, and by the time we came home that evening in the dark, my husband and I were both physically and mentally exhausted.
I was disappointed in the election results, but my husband was taking it much harder. I had warned him leading into this election that he was spending too much time on Twitter and watching too much political stuff on TV. It was almost like he viewed hating Trump as a job and duty that he must do. Otherwise, the entire world would fall apart. He had said he would be able to turn off this anger as soon as Trump was no longer a threat to democracy. Well, now he would have to continue hating Trump for at least four more years.
I understood his reaction to Trump’s reelection, and I agreed with my husband’s response, but only to a point. I tried giving him several pep talks. (At least I consider them pep talks.) I said, “I’m alive, you’re alive, our daughter is alive. You need to put this election in perspective. We’re lucky. We live in a nice house, have good jobs, are healthy, and have our sweet dog. You need to be grateful. This is not the end of the world. We will get through this.”
When that didn’t work, I tried new angles. “He’s 78 years old. After four years, he’s done and can never run again.” (Unless he refuses to leave.) “There must be some republicans who won’t go along with Trump’s every wish. There must be some people on that side who don’t want a dictatorship in the United States.”
My husband eventually was able to move on from this. What other choice does he have?
On the other side of my universe, I have family members who are ecstatic that Trump won. They believe that he is the best thing that ever happened in this country. The extremists among them believe that he was sent from God to “save our country.”
Some of my family members literally worship him. They believe he can do no wrong. It doesn’t matter what hideous thing he says or does, how many actual crimes he commits, or which groups of people he belittles or insults. I honestly believe that there is nothing that man could ever do to cause them to question his intentions. They are brainwashed. And that is scary.
I grew up in a house where I didn’t know what my parents’ political leanings were, and I didn’t care. I was too busy being a self-centered teenager, as was my rite of passage at that time. I didn’t develop my own opinions on politics until my frontal lobe developed a bit more and I could see the world beyond how it affected me and my life.
When I was a kid, we would visit my uncle and his boyfriend in Arizona, and all the adults got along just fine. In fact, I didn’t even know my uncle was gay until my little sister pointed that out to me. I just thought he had a male roommate. My parents never talked to us about it, but I never got the impression that my uncle wasn’t accepted by them for who he was. It just wasn’t discussed.
Oprah Winfrey would be on the television when I would get home from school. My mom loved to watch it.
Somewhere along the line, something in my family changed when it came to politics. Gradually there was a divide that entered our family. Now, we can’t discuss politics at all if we all still want to sit together at the same dinner table for holidays.
I’ve seen extreme changes in some members of my family that I’ve known for my whole life. The non-political, happy, accepting people they always were, were being swallowed up by the growing list of things they now hate. The list is quite long.
- Big Cities
- Illegal Immigrants
- The entire state of California
- Portland
- New York
- Seattle
- Oprah Winfrey
- Ellen DeGeneres
- Journalists (my sister was a journalist)
- Higher Education (My sister, myself, my husband, daughter, and I are all college grads.)
- Taylor Swift
- All Late-Night Comedy Shows
- Saturday Night Live
- All News Organizations Except for Fox News
- And the list grows and grows…
These family members are voting for things that directly impact me. They don’t vote for school levies because they believe schools are places of indoctrination. (We have so many family members who are teachers.)
Our newly elected republicans in Montana ran on campaign stances such as, “Boys are boys, and girls are girls.” So, to say they are “transphobic” would be accurate if they all believe trans people don’t exist. I’ve worked as a teacher with students who are trans. Imagine how it must feel for those students to know that the elected officials say there is no such thing as who they are.
I have family members who love their guns and insist that their right to own an AR-15 if they want to, “trumps” all logic and common sense when it comes to keeping those weapons out of the hands of mentally ill people or those who still don’t have fully developed frontal lobes. Guns are more important than anything else in their view.
The divide between the two political sides in my family is now deep and wide. The only way we can all get along these days is to avoid political discussions at all costs. And that is what we do, because despite the flawed views some of my family members have in my opinion, I still love them. And they are good people at the core. Sometimes I just don’t recognize them when they talk about certain things.
I’m concerned about the state of our country. I am disheartened by the hatred shown toward one another on both sides.
I am a teacher, and so it is my job to teach all students no matter their race, religion, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, or opinions on politics. And that is what I do, and I love them and their differences. Diversity makes us a better and stronger society.
I was surprised by my students this week. In the 27 years I’ve been teaching, I’ve been through presidential elections before. I expected this time to be the same as before, but there was a noticeable difference. I heard not one word from any of my 110 students about the election. Usually, they would enjoy poking at each other about who they were for or against. I didn’t hear a peep about it. On Wednesday, one student said her “beautiful thing” for the day was that she didn’t have to hear any more political ads for a while. My whole class applauded when she said that, including me. I thought they were quite mature about the election this round. It was a good thing to see.
My daughter is doing her student teaching in a rural California town, and the school where she is working is 99 percent Hispanic. The most heartbreaking story I have heard since the election is when one of my daughter’s students asked her if she thought that the student and her family would be deported. This student is in middle school, and this is her fear. As a teacher, this breaks my heart. I don’t know the immigration status of my students, and that is how it should be. It doesn’t matter. My job is to teach whoever shows up in my classroom. I don’t know why there are so many people living and working in our communities without documentation. Does the US make it extremely difficult to achieve citizenship? Does it cost a lot of money? All I know is that I have students who are here who work hard, have loving families who also work hard, and I find it heartbreaking that some of those students now can’t sleep at night because they fear their families will be part of Trump’s mass deportation he’s been bragging about.
This election cycle has been stressful for a lot of people, but the majority has spoken. Trump won, he won the popular vote, republicans will control the Senate, and potentially the House as well. The Supreme Court is stacked with conservative judges. There’s not much standing in his way. I’ve tired of hearing, “Thanks Joe,” every time some of my republican friends had anything go wrong for them over the last four years. Now, they will only have their savior to thank if they believe that is how our country works. I’m not wishing for Trump’s failure at all, but the expression, “Be careful what you wish for,” keeps running through my head.
Actions speak louder than words. I remember Trump’s refusal to accept election results in the last round that caused the events of January 6th. I saw him question the results of this election until things started going his way. Now he has received a “mandate” in this completely fair election and there have been no complaints about cheating from him now that he’s won. Hmm.
I notice that Kamala conceded the election eloquently and respectfully, and President Biden immediately promised a peaceful transfer of power, as it should be.
I’m in favor of our elected officials setting a good example for our children. I hope there will be more of that. This country needs a return to the middle for all our sakes.
