The whole earth is trembling. The leader of the most powerful country (with the most powerful military the world has ever seen) is an illiterate reality television star. It is true, Trump will be the president of the United States for at least four years. At least if you are a small country, and things go wrong, from a dictator to a flood or earthquake, you can ask the United States, China or Europe for help, and they might help. But if the United States needs help, we have no one to call, no one can help the United States, no one can interfere, we are alone.
I thought Hillary Clinton was going to win, I was convinced of it, I kept thinking, “No one would vote for a person that has so many sexual assault allegations against him, no one would vote for such an overt racist, for such an overt misogynist, for someone so unqualified to lead the most powerful institution on the planet. For such an obvious liar.” But they did, people went and voted for Donald Trump.
My friend called me on Whatsapp from Korea on Tuesday, he was drunk, he said, “The world is changing again, the world is changing again.” Since World War 2 the United States had dominated, for better and for worse, but they ruled, the United States was there, and people, in general, had an idea of how they would behave, but the people of the earth on November 8th, 2016 saw the moment, when the people had to change.
What is this change? The impact of World War 2 is over, it ended last Tuesday. But what are we now? My friends and myself, from college professors with IQs of 130 who speak three languages, to grocery store workers with high school diplomas have said to me, “I don’t know what to think, I’m not sure what I should even be thinking about now, I feel odd.”
It is like ‘time stopped.’
Time stopped.
The whole history, the progression, the movement, was stopped suddenly.
We had worked so hard while Obama was president, we had so much faith things were going our way, that the history of mankind, was going toward justice.
It wasn’t.
We were wrong.
The Democratic Party had failed us, by supporting Hillary Clinton, our fellow Americans were more racist and misogynist than we ever imagined, we are mad at the media for giving Trump so much airtime for ratings, we are furious because the Republican Party outsmarted us, they truly did, they innovated, and we did nothing.
Jean Paul Sartre said “We were never more free than during the German occupation.” What we are ALL experiencing now is absolute freedom, the paradigm set by World War 2 maybe coming to an end, which leaves us out in space floating, it leaves the people of Japan, South Korea, Iran, Russia, the people of South America, the people of Europe, the whole world is floating in space now, anxiety stricken, but what is this anxiety, it is freedom. It is your responsibility. It is our responsibility bearing down on us. The era of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch and meaningless NYC artwork, and making funny jokes at other people’s expense, is over. We have to grow up again, we have to become Committed. We have freedom now, we are condemned to authenticity, to a now, because there is no future now, there is only a now, we do not know what Trump will do, we do not know how the Democrats will react, will the Democrats protect minorities or will they give in? Will the Democrats stick with the Clintons and Goldman Sachs instead of fight for the little people who will get hurt by Trump’s proposals.
Will a Caesar rise from the ranks of the Democrats to restore hope and give us a new direction? We thought Obama was our Caesar, but he said nothing when Hillary Clinton demanded the Superdelegates and colluded with the Democratic Party to win the nomination. He said nothing, and we have to admit that.
It does not seem, at this moment, that anyone in the Democratic Party has the strength to defend minorities, the LGBTQ Community and the environment from Trump’s stupidity.
One of the reasons we know nothing, is that, Trump is such a liar, in Trump’s reality that we all must live in, we never know what is truth and what is fiction, we can never tell what he is going to do. We don’t, we just fucking don’t.
As of this moment, there is no hope. There is only a sense, that something has gone wrong, and we do not know how to fix it.
Noah Cicero has several books published; recently The Bathroom Reader and Bipolar Cowboy have come out on Lazy Fascist Press. Noah Cicero has a Twitter.