Days After
November 11th, 2024
10:30pm
When I woke up the day after the American Presidential election I forgot any of it happened. Those first few minutes of ignorance were wonderful. I was up past 3AM watching pollsters describe what had happened, where it all went wrong, how Trump won the day. I was awake when Donald Trump gave his acceptance speech but I couldn’t stomach watching it.
I was up so late cruising Twitter that I saw the real time responses of hundreds of Europeans who woke up to the news of an impending Trump presidency. Statements of shock, anger, disbelief. Then I started seeing the real concerns, how every European country will need to increase defence spending immediately because soon there will be nothing keeping Vladimir Putin on his side of the border.
When I got to class the next morning a young guy behind me was wearing a MAGA hat. He would have been 10 at the start of Trumps first stint in the Oval Office. After class I walked down Portage Avenue when a truck with a massive American flag on a homemade wooden mast went roaring past. My cheeks felt warm from frustration.
Heat rises and unfortunately so do politics.
I’ve never understood Canadian Trump supporters. I can’t imagine a President with isolationist America first verbiage and policies will benefit Canadians. He talks endlessly about the tariffs he’ll slap on everything coming into America which will only hurt the Canadian economy.
Something about Trumps personality draws millions of people in a way that scares pretty well every other democratic nation in the world. Additionally it seems as though the political Left in Canada and the United States has lost favor among voters. In the days after the election I watched tweets about the fear of Trump shift into hatred for his supporters. There is more to the story, it is a bigger picture than what I’ve written, but calling your political opponents MAGAts and Nazis -fascists are not inherently Nazis- won’t persuade anyone to reconsider their vote. This is not to say the state of Right Wing politics today is healthy so much as it is to say toxicity exists on both sides of the aisle.
In Canada we’re watching the same poison run in the waters of our own politics.
Is judgement of others for their beliefs ever okay? Definitely. If someone walked by my house waving Nazi flags and bearing similar paraphernalia he wouldn’t be able to leave the block without hearing every bit of hatred and profanity I have about him. But broad stroke criticism of all people who vote for a particular party will only sew greater divisions between us. I am guilty of this too. That frustration I felt at the truck driver, the eye roll I couldn’t prevent when I saw the young guy in the red hat. This is all part of the same problem.
I’m sure there are people and situations that come to mind as you read this where there is no way you will tolerate being near them because of their beliefs and I know people where I feel similarly. But if the ballot box is where I draw the parameters of who I will speak with or treat with respect then I am creating an enemy of my neighbours and dividing my community into segments of good and evil. This will only worsen the divide we see today and will take us further from understanding each other. Like it or not we are stuck living with each other. At the end of the day our ballot is supposed to be a secret, not a tattoo we get on our forehead or a war cry of insults and catch phrases we throw at each other like apes hucking stones.