On Election Day, I Grieve

Beyond the Book: I am human

Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash

It’s the day before the U.S. presidential election and I’m preparing. I’ve been in a small group chat for months now, with friends that I’ve grown so close to in this past year of protests. We’re checking on each other, talking about fears and hopes and anxieties. Just connecting in this horrible day in a string of horrible days before what comes next. We are a mixed group - Black, Palestinian, Jewish, Asian. We are bringing our own intersectional hopes and fears into the chat. We’re straddling a line between sharing and triggering, commiserating and crying.

I’m in my office today. I’m working. I’m shoving my anxiety down while I plan. While I answer emails from people who’ve been fired from their jobs for saying that genocide is wrong. While I go through requests to post deeply disturbing and enraging and horrifying information on my social media pages and trying to figure out if this is content with which people will listen, learn, or look away.

I’m weighing whether or not it’s worth it to say anything today. To make another video, to make another plea. To ask people to do anything at all when it seems like the whole country is just exhausted. Just watching the clock and waiting for it to be over.

When I scroll through social media I see people share their excitement about voting. There are less people sharing this sentiment than in past elections it’s clear, but there are still enough to shock my senses. What little air I feel like I can breathe is knocked from my lungs. How? How can you be in the same space, on the same platforms, that for me have been feeding me death and destruction all day every day for over a year? How can we be in the same space and you are smiling and sharing hopes for your chosen genocidal candidate?

I did vote. Weeks ago my partner and I did. It was the most depressing vote I think I’ve ever cast. We got to vote for one single representative who has consistently called for a ceasefire. There wasn’t a single initiative in our ballot that wasn’t aimed at making rich people richer and further disenfranchising BIPOC, disabled people, and poor people. We voted “no” a lot. We wrote in “Palestine” where there were no candidates to choose from who weren’t pro-genocide. We wrote in “Palestine” a lot.

Today I’m setting up meetings for the week. I’m researching for future projects. I’m staying busy and doing things that I know are important and yet feel like weights around my neck because we’re all just treading water here. I will work as much as I can today, I will be as busy as possible.

On Election Day, I will grieve. Tomorrow I will sit in my pajamas and I will cry. I will think of what could have been. I will think about how we had an entire year to come together. To say that our freedom is linked. An entire year to say that our votes will be earned and no longer given away. An entire year to let these systems feel our collective power.

We were told four years ago that it was too late to get a better candidate. We were told to fall in line and then everyone would join us in the fight. But nobody did. For four years nobody did. Then a year ago, when genocide started being livestreamed onto all of our devices we were told that it was too late to demand more. Too late to get a better candidate. Too late for accountability.

Then it suddenly wasn’t too late for a better candidate. But it was still too late for us. Still too late for accountability. Everyone felt sorry for what was happening to Palestinians but we didn’t have time to focus on that and also address what might happen here. Because that is there and this is here and Palestinian-Americans and Lebanese-Americans don’t exist. Because they are them and we are us and those of us who saw them as us were really not thinking logically. But people promise, this time, they will stand with us. Later. After. If this goes the way they want.

If it doesn’t go the way they want it then it will be our fault.

Tomorrow I will let myself forget for a minute that I preach love. I will be spitting with rage at everyone who looked genocide in the eye and said, “hey, this happens. This has always happened. But my rights are on the line.”

Tomorrow I will want to yell at people and instead I will scream into a pillow because I’m so angry at people, but I’m really angry at systems and I’m angry at how easily manipulated we are into believing that someone else’s liberation could ever be a threat to us.

Tomorrow I will let the “what-if’s” take over my brain a little. I won’t push them away as I have been for so long. I will fear for my Palestinian kin, my Arab-American kin, my Black kin, my trans kin, my disabled kin. All of us who lose this election no matter who wins.

Tomorrow I will grieve the friendships I lost. I will allow all of the moments this year where I discovered that people I loved didn’t truly love me back. Where I discovered that I had invested so many years of time and energy into building community that was never truly safe, that never really existed. Where I discovered that people I loved had limits on who they viewed as human and who deserved to live. Where I discovered that “being uncomfortable” was enough of a reason for some people to never speak out against genocide.

Tomorrow I will let my heart break that we couldn’t believe that we were strong enough. That we treated ignorant, hate filled “supremacy” like a team of genius supervillians instead of like the scared, unimaginative, desperate dinosaurs they are, who don’t want us to know that the only reason why they aren’t extinct is because they keep bribing us to keep reassembling their bones in different terrifying configurations. That we couldn’t believe that together we could build something better, so we decided to toss others into the maw of the machine first, hoping it would be satiated for a while.

On Election Day I will stay in bed with my spouse as long as possible, wrapped up in a ball of grief and love. I will hug my teenager until he finds it annoying. I will laugh at his jokes and weird impressions that he loves to do (and does quite well) like they are keeping me alive because sometimes they really are. I will ask everyone if they are hungry even if I can’t bear to eat. I will ask far too many times, just to be sure. I will make food, just in case. I will text my friends who I know are also grieving and ask if they ate. If they need me to send food.

The day after tomorrow, on Wednesday, I will get out of bed. I will shower and put on clean clothes and maybe a little makeup. I will get to my office early. I will get to work. I will remember that I do know we can do more. That I exist because so many past generations had to decide that they could do more. I will keep trying to find a way. I will keep trying different combinations of words and work to try to get more people to see that we can do this, that we have to try.

But on Election Day I will grieve. I will grieve what could have been, what should have been. And what isn’t.

On Election Day I will be a human who is hurting.