It’s Going To Be A Long Four Years For The World

A New York Times notification woke me up at 5:50AM: Donald Trump has taken North Carolina as well.

2016 feels like a coup on global lucidity, first Brexit, then Columbia and now the U.S.  

Seems somehow futile to wonder if there are any thought through, informed choices we make anymore.

This was the first US presidential race I followed that was never even remotely about the agenda, it was about Hilary Clinton constantly explaining and apologizing.

About what Trump was and she was not. It was about Trump mastering the language of the uneducated, now immensely energized by finally being saluted. “I see you” they seem to have heard, no arguments needed. “Now I see you, now I don’t” being actually the game is. This race was about the media constantly feeding Trump’s monstrous ego with the most consistent coverage. About 120,000,000 google results in 0.39 seconds on a simple google search for “New York Times Donald Trump presidential election”, about 112,000,000 results in 0.68 seconds for Hillary Clinton just to name one of Clinton’s endorsers. 

This race was about the polls, so exhaustively debated and so immensely inaccurate because lots of people would have been ashamed to admit they’d vote for Trump but clearly comfortable enough to act on it. Because they despise the elites so deeply, but would never want to become the topic of their debates. Because they voted out of rage, again no arguments needed. Because it was impossible to convince them rationally, that was not what drove them to the ballot. 

It was about the white people reclaiming their supremacy, their territory, their bigotry, their misogyny.

I had my Facebook feed flooded with post-election comments and opinions. Some angry, some terrified, some amused others criticizing the sudden interest and apparent expertise in international politics. But it’s not only about the politics, it’s the international bullying of the superstar that is America and that everyone is following. The misinformation, the irrational, the fanatic. Above everything else this is impossible to grasp at a human level. The raw legitimization of violence at this extent seems surreal. You’d think a punch in the face, a sexual assault, a person shut to death, must be perceived in a similar manner by the elites and the illiterate, irrespective of how much they know, they read, no matter the school they went to, the color of their skin, their religion, their gender, the source of their information and convictions. But it’s not. Not when you vote just to revolt, or out of fear.

I thought a lot if I should write about this but it has been eating at me all day. Cause like the distant European that some think I am; this was not the election that I wanted. These were not the candidates that I would have wished for. And neither was Bernie Sanders, whom I actually really like. I would have loved Elizabeth Warren to run, I’d love to see Michelle Obama run someday. I’d love to have the mix of brains, charisma, truthfulness and pragmatism that neither Bernie Sanders nor Hillary Clinton had.

And it’s not only because it’s America. I equally don’t want Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for Turkey, or Bashar al- Assad for Syria. I equally don’t want PDS to win the parliamentary elections again in Romania. I equally don’t want any other female candidates for the Romanian presidential election that cannot take a stand on women’s issues. As I equally don’t want any other candidate that doesn’t take a stand for human rights in general.

I watched Trump’s speech this morning. He managed to say absolutely nothing relevant, like he always does. Thank you, special and great, four simple words all people want to hear and he successfully overused reducing the complexity of the English language to basic supermarket talk.

And I myself barely know what to say, and not particularly because of a tremendous restrictive vocabulary. Except maybe, let’s all try to be decent human beings and think harder before we act. I would imagine there is a limit to human fuck-ups this word can take.