Looking Forward
- alexanderrpreston7
- Nov 29, 2024
- 5 min read
By Al Preston
Well.
Now what?
America has voted for its next president, and he has been found lacking. Fear, panic, and anger have swept through most of us at this point.
I fall into the angry category. I am absolutely furious.
Personally, everything about the election feels wrong. It feels off, like something has gone wrong. The morning after the election, I felt as though the nation was a room full of flammable gas awaiting a spark. Deep in my historian bones, I feel as though something is coming.
What is there to do? It does feel horribly hopeless. Fleeing the country seems like the safest thing to do. Everything we’ve heard about the far right’s plans for the presidency, for us as a people, it will all come crashing down the second that man walks into the White House.
That’s what it feels like, and I do not condone anyone for thinking or feeling this way. It does look and feel absolutely awful.
However, allow me to present my fury, my historical understanding, and, perhaps, a bit of hope and calmness.
I will start with the easier things now, inject some calm into the storm so we can consider the basics of the situation with leveler heads.
Fleeing the country, doesn’t stop anything. You can flee to Canada or Europe, or Asia, or anywhere else you please. New problems arise and sometimes the problems are the same. Not to mention the tighter and tighter restrictions most countries are adopting on refugees and asylees. It is okay to want to run. It is okay to want to live to fight another day. It’s okay to just want to live. Fleeing elsewhere is a perfectly acceptable reaction and choice.
Just allow me to try and persuade you to stay.
Fleeing one evil may walk you into another. Right wing ideologies exist everywhere, the struggles you may be met with in another place will be greater than you expect, and at any moment, that new home may turn into the old. Language barriers, assimilation, work, documentation, housing, food and medicine may or may not be available to you on the other end. You may leave with essentially nothing and have to begin anew from the very bottom. The host government will aid you only for so long before you are on your own in a different place with different rules and customs.
European nations have struggled with right wing beliefs and ideas for as long as the United States has, if not longer. They may not even allow you to stay for very long, if at all. The constant looming threat of having to go back lingers. So to, do the eerily familiar rhetoric’s of some of the leaders.
Racism, homophobia, misogyny all exist in those places and they struggle with them just as we do in the United States. There will always be a chance the British Trump or German Trump will be elected into power. Always. And what then?
Outside of all of those considerations, perhaps all of that would be preferable to what could happen here in the United States, there is something rather important about why I bring this up; brain drain—the mass exodus of a country’s well informed to other places. The country literally becomes drained of all of its thinkers, leaving those who do not know how to organize or fight for their freedom and rights to be brainwashed by what they are fleeing from. When brain drain occurs, there’s no one left to fight the oppression of a bad government, no one to rally the masses for the common good.
Fleeing is a choice. Not everyone is made to or wants to fight. That’s okay, I just implore those who can stay to do so. To rally together, to protect each other. The fight is everywhere, but you must choose which theatre you wish to fight in. Why not the one you know the best?
That is a scary choice. Fighting seems like an impossible and momentous task. Thankfully, you are not alone. You are surrounded by people just as scared and angry as you. You do not have to take up the helm and make the choices, but you can push for others to join. Push for others to listen. Push for what is right and for the common good.
How do you be active and fighting? What do you say or do?
It’s not easy, although more so with help and community. The good news is, we have time to plan and act before anything major happens. The other good news is that, withholding any major coup or governmental overthrow, the government is incredibly slow. Even with the support of the House and Senate, getting things done is a long and painful task and no one knows that more than the democrats still in there.
I know many of us have heard of Project 2025. This is a manifesto that’s existed for a long time, updated for every new arriving year. It came up when Trump was elected the first time. It came up when he ran against Biden. We’ve known about it for a long time. It’s a big, scary document with all these terrifying goals and agendas.
While it is not good that he was voted in, the good news is, it is not possible for all of Project 2025 to be done all at once. It will not suddenly become our lives the moment he is back in the White House. Parts of it, yes, he, like other far right political figures before him, have a piece of it that he will enact.
The good news is, we can and will fight whatever that piece is as hard and long as we can. Not to mention, while Republicans as a whole may seem like the enemy, the vast majority also do not want Project 2025 to actually exist or have an extremely hard time swallowing its goals.
To put it simply, it is not the end of the world, but we must be aware that the water is getting hotter and will eventually boil.
As Martin Niemöller said in his speeches against Hitler;
“First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
We must stand for all those who they will come for first. We must realize that even if we are not a person of color or queer or disabled or a woman, we are not safe. They will come for us all, and we must be the one to do something at that first attack, or else we shall all fall.
If you would like to feel active in all of this, here are resources that allow you to get started:
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