For a lot of people, the end of election day is the end of their concern about who’s going to be the next president. They don’t want to see any more ads or hear any more about the other candidate and they don’t want to listen to the losing party complain.
For others, that’s just not reality.
Donald Trump’s campaign for presidency was built off of fear and hate. The races he’s attacked, the women, minority groups in general, don’t get to just stop caring about it.
When Donald Trump stood up and called Mexicans “criminals and rapists,” he started building his platform of hate and fear against any race that wasn’t his own. When he encouraged his followers to “rough up” the black men in his audience, he was doing his part to encourage racial violence, period. Asking the people who’ve been targeted by Trump and his supporters simply for their race to just move on and stop talking about it is an injustice to the battle they have to keep fighting every day.
As a woman in today’s society, it’s frightening that our president-elect has boasted about the way he feels he can, and the way he repeatedly does, take advantage of women. It’s discouraging to know that simply because I’m a female, Trump views me as unworthy of the same treatment as a man, as unequal in the workplace, as not only a burden, but as property he owns. I refuse to stop fighting for and speaking up about my right to equal pay, for my right to my own body, for the same level of respect as a man.
The people of the LGBTQ+ community feel fear. While the president-elect can’t directly overturn marriage equality, he can end the protective laws put into place that guarantee them their rights and their safety, that make it so no matter what, be it healthcare or renters insurance or service in the military, their sexuality doesn’t effect the way they’re treated. Not only that, but the open homophobia displayed by Trump is a message to everybody that that’s okay, that treating people differently because of who they love is normal and part of who we are as a society.
Every day, people wake up and fear what’s going to happen next. They wonder if another right will be taken from them, if their families will be taken from them, if the people who feel encouraged by Trump’s open bigotry will attack them. They don’t get to wake up and tell themselves that, no matter what, the country they call home wants them here and thinks they are important.
So, maybe the next time you say that you’re “tired of hearing about the election,” you’ll remember that just because you’re privileged enough not to feel fear, doesn’t mean everybody else is, too.
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