Scenes from the Edge of the Universe: Aftershocks

First encounter: Report from the trenches by a working class, Hispanic man

I left for work quite late that morning, after a very restless, mostly sleepless night.  I was headed down the stairs to my car, and at the ground floor landing, there was one of the men who works in the apartment complex.  He keeps the place clean, and as usual he was cheerful in his greeting, which puzzled me, considering everything.  He asked me how I was doing, and I said, not so well and started to cry.  

He said, “How about that election?”  

I was beyond superficial politeness, and I said, “I’m devastated.”  

Then, he got real and dropped the “all is well/don’t mind me, I’m just the help” façade, and said, “I know, right?  Last night when I got home, the white guy who lives below me got drunk and started shouting at me, ‘Wetbacks, go home,’ and bragging about how now ‘we’ were going to get rid of all of the wetbacks and Muslims.  And then, this woman I buy tamales from in the building comes up to me, selling her tamales, you know.  She’s like 70-something and lives all alone, and I buy tamales from her every day—it’s a dollar a tamale—I try to help her out—she lives all alone.  The drunk guy sees her and starts cursing at her, calling her names, telling her to go back to Mexico, and he looks like he’s going to hit her, so I hit him and tell him to leave her alone, and the whole apartment complex comes out.  Somebody calls the police, and these 2 white cops show up. But everybody stands up for me and tells them what the guy did, and they tell me they would have hit him too, and they haul him off to jail for drunk and disorderly.”  

He said he was ashamed of himself for punching the guy, that it’s not who he is, and he won’t do it again. He showed me the scraped skin on his knuckles and said he hit the guy real hard.  He explained about how he was worried about his relatives who work in the fields harvesting food that people all across the country eat, and how hard they work, and the hatred they were now encountering from people and their fear.  

We cried and hugged.  I told him to be careful, and he said for me to be too, and we hugged again and each went on to work, as we had to.

Second encounter: An educated, progressive young woman

The next person I saw on my way into the office was a female student I know well.  A young, beautiful Jewish woman who is majoring in international studies and wants to work for a non-profit helping women and children. I had parked my car and was heading out of the garage, when she appeared.  

She took one look at me, and started crying, and we hugged and cried together.  She was so distressed, she said, that she had forgotten her wallet and couldn’t park her car without a permit.  I bought her a permit.  “Perfect timing,” she said, and it was for both of us.  

She said she had also caught her boyfriend of 2 years cheating on her a few days before and had just broken up with him.  I looked at her and said I was so sorry and thought about how her entire career goal and future was now threatened.  What would become of the world now?  My mind reeled at how much harder her life—and mine and all women’s and anyone’s life who was not a white, heterosexual male that supported the agenda of the incoming regime, and anyone who wanted to do anything positive in the world--had become over night.  

The man who was declared the winner of the election brags about cheating on women and about assaulting women.  He has been charged by 17 women with assault and is being investigated for raping a 13-year-old.  He also made anti-Semitic remarks and encouraged anti-Semitic behavior in his followers and is supported by the KKK, and is planning on appointing an anti-Semitic racist leader to his cabinet.  For starters.  

But she and I—at this moment, we were solid together.  She said she had not been without a boyfriend before, but it was okay, that she was going to work on herself and take some time for her. Then she went to talk to one of her professors (male, Asian)—another ally.

Next: Light

The next day, the campus was a little calmer.  The state of alarm and fear was still palpable, but the volume was dialed down a notch.  A female colleague and I acknowledged how we no longer felt safe walking to our cars on campus at night and hurried on our ways before it got dark.  It was already dusk. 

As I walked to the parking lot, I saw a light on in one of the classrooms.  Inside were 3 people huddled together:  2 young women, and a man with a hipster beard.  He was earnestly explaining something to them, and they were listening.  It was dusk, and the room glowed like an old master’s painting—a tableau of our global, multicultural world.  

I know the man. He’s a teaching assistant in our world history program, a gay man from a Mennonite background. He was meeting with these students to go over their first paper, which they had failed for not correctly citing their sources and were now getting to revise.  

The women were Asian international students, who often have a hard time understanding when, why, and how to properly cite sources—the concept of individual ownership of words and information not quite translating across cultures.  But here they were diligently trying to do whatever we asked of them so they could succeed.  

Meanwhile, we had just put a man in office whose theme song could be “I know you’re lying cause your lips are moving,” who is known for breaking contractual promises to pay people who work for him and suing them if they complain about it, who violates every rule of logic and argumentation that we teach in school, and whose wife plagiarized in at least 2 of her speeches in the campaign    .

Postscript: The Bully

When I got home Wednesday night, I looked at Facebook, and up popped a post by a college-educated white man in his 50s, raised in the same Southern Baptist church in Zachary, Louisiana, that I was.  He is prosperous, fit, and has a job that carries weight and authority—a professional job. He hasn’t been threatened with deportation, or had his basic sense of safety eroded by having a sexual predator in the white house.  He’s not disabled in a way anyone can tell.  He is apparently straight and has been able to marry. 

Yet, here he was posting something on Facebook to ridicule a young woman who was actually threatened.  He had put up a video of an 18-year-old college student who identified herself as queer.  She talked about her very real fears now as a result of the election and her feeling that her country hated her and didn’t value her.  His response was to make fun of her and of her major—gender and women studies—and wonder what she’ll do with such a degree and complain about the state of education and that it’s publicly funded, as is the school where I work. 

Why would he ridicule this young woman who is in obvious pain and fear?  Why not be compassionate?  Why repeat these clichéd complaints?  Why not try to understand and learn?  Why so judgmental?  Where is his curiosity and desire to learn? 

What is he so afraid of?

I remember that he was always like that as a child. 

The racism, sexism, bigotry, xenophobia, and hypocrisy I saw in the world all around me as a child—and have witnessed in one way or another daily even as an adult in the most cosmopolitan places—hasn’t gone away—as any of us who are non-white, non-straight, non-mainstream people can attest and have been saying all along.  I knew it, but thought it was under control enough and that enough progress was being made that I could relax about it and enjoy my privilege and that we would keep making progress.  I was complacent and complicit. 

This election has brought all the ugliness and hate to the surface in a way that defies complacency, and I will not be complicit. 

It is painful.  It’s a big gaping black hole of a wound.  It could swallow us up.

We can be like the bully and try to defend ourselves from the pain and ridicule those who express it.  

We can be like another white, heterosexual male I know and gloat and blame anyone who feels pain for being negative.  

Or we can be like those who just want to go back to sleep and hit the snooze alarm forever—it will be okay, give him a chance, get over it, etc.

I prefer Barack Obama’s approach—look the hater in the eye and shake his hand—but make it clear where you stand.  I prefer the approach of all of us who are feeling the pain, reeling, and still standing up with more determination than ever for the values of love, equality, freedom, justice, and peace for all.  

May we stand strong.  May we stay alert. May we take wise, intelligent, decisive action when the time is right. May the hidden wounds of our culture that have been festering beneath the skin for so long be completely healed.   May we keep shining the light on them until they vanish.