I just flew in from a tropical vacation abroad, and boy am I upset about the continuing dismantling of my country.
Several months ago — before the election actually happened, in fact — my boyfriend and I planned our vacation. Notice I didn’t say annual vacation, because we don’t go on vacation every year. This vacation was to be the first vacation we’d ever taken in our 10-year relationship, which is not because we don’t want to travel together, but because we are poors who work really hard at jobs with completely different schedules. Vacation hadn’t seriously occurred to us before because we could never afford to pay for it or take time off of work.
So we each drew up a list of criteria and settled on a 4-day, all-inclusive getaway to the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda. We chose this because all-inclusive sounded insanely luxurious to two people who had grown up with very little money, and because no one we knew had been to Antigua and Barbuda before (as opposed to places like Mexico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and St. Lucia, because apparently no one we know can honeymoon anywhere else). Our flight was to leave two days before Inauguration Day, a fact that made me sad when I booked the trip but incredibly relieved when Trump got elected and the mere thought of watching him sworn in as President made me want to throw up the hallucinogens I must have been taking because no way was this possible, amirite?
The resort we booked had very good reviews on Trip Advisor, with a few naysayers complaining about the rustic quality of the resort, including goat poop on some walkways and feral cats in the open-air restaurants. These points didn’t bother us, because goat poop means goats (yay!), and I guess there are signs posted telling tourists not to pet or feet the feral cats but one lady did and then she had to go to the doctor, which of course reminded me of this, which made me happy:
I did notice that most of the Trip Advisor reviewers were from England, which was fine for a couple of reasons. One, even though it likely makes my Irish ancestors haunt me harder, I love England. I love the rain and their peculiarities and at least 3 of their soccer teams. Two, I’m aware that the English get more vacation days than Americans and, because their nation is comparatively small, use them to travel abroad instead of, I don’t know, get in the car and drive to experience the majesty of a National Park. What I did not notice at the time was that hardly any of the Trip Advisor users had uploaded a profile photo of themselves. This didn’t even occur to me when I booked our stay but, as you will find out, became an issue after we arrived.
We landed in Antigua’s capital, St. John’s, and took a taxi to the resort. As the Trip Advisor reviews promised, the place was rustic. Corners had been cut in terms of decorating and the rooms were not as clean as one would expect from, say, a more popular Sandals property (although the thought of staying at a Sandals property made me want to punch myself in the face). But this was a lesser-visited independent nation, after all, and we’re not fancy people. We like hiking and campfires on the beach, coffee in the woods and packs of wandering goats (yay!). Rustic was fine with us.
It took a little longer to realize that something was very weird about the other guests. We missed the first clue, which was the porter who took our bags and asked “Are you guys rock stars?” We thought he was just being nice, or perhaps trying to flatter us after noticing the tattoos covering our arms and legs. But then the same thing happened with the bartender, and a waiter, and someone working at the front desk. After taking a good look around, we realized holy shit, this is a real question.
You see, there was not one other guest who was our age. In fact, we didn’t see anyone who was within 35 years of our age. We’re in our mid-30s and paid a not-small amount of money to find ourselves marooned on an island with a bunch of English people, none of whom appeared to be a day under 70. We had inadvertently booked ourselves at a resort where everyone else went on holiday a few years before the specter of Death claimed them. If our vacation was a world-building video game, it’d be titled “Retirement Home: Resort Version.” In the staff’s eyes, we must have been rock stars who simply couldn’t go to another resort populated by younger people who might recognize us. Maybe our only shot at privacy was staying at a quiet resort populated by vastly wrinkled old Brits. Why else would we be there?
And it wasn’t just that everyone else was old. I get old people, okay? We share a lot of the same sensibilities. I, too, enjoy elastic-waist pants, warm socks, quiet meals and scowling at rowdy neighbors. The age difference itself wasn’t a dealbreaker. The dealbreaker was the way they looked at us. It wasn’t the mild tutting disapproval I would have expected. It was face-twisting, openly hostile revulsion whenever we appeared in a room or spoke amiably (not imperiously) to the staff. To them, we were refugees from Planet Youth, come to steal their jobs and rob them on the street and whatever else they convinced themselves would happen when the majority of them voted in favor of Brexit.
source: Economic Times
Which brings me to Inauguration Day. By this point, we’d been at the resort for two days — two days of dirty looks and really really really bad food — and were feeling pretty glum. When the news alerts of Trump’s arrival at the Capitol started popping up on our phones, we felt sick to our stomachs. The staff noticed and tried to make us feel better, and one, Jesse who spends half the year in New Jersey and the other half with family in Antigua, commiserated. We tried to be stoic about wiping tears from our eyes as the inauguration ceremony (and the degradation of our nation) officially began, and then someone tapped me on the shoulder.
It was the couple at the next table. His accent was southern English but not urban and she was Scottish, so of course it never would have occurred to my brain to label them as Brexiteers or say anything to them that accused them of such a thing. Unfortunately, this small measure of generosity did not extend to them, as he said “I just want to thank you for making our country look less stupid.”
I blinked back at him, unable to reconcile what I’d just heard with the abject sorrow I was already feeling. “Huh,” I stammered, and then collected myself (because I am nothing if not an irascible smartass):
“It is disappointing, especially as we caucused for Bernie and voted for Hillary and have been trying to deal with the fallout by donating more than we can afford right now to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, NoDAPL, La Raza and the IRC. We’re personally not responsible, but we’re committed to staying and helping those who are the most at risk under this new administration.”
He blinked back at me, and his Scottish wife said frostily, “Well, I hope you have a good holiday.”
source: FactMag.com
This scene repeated itself with other couples a few more times that day, and I was reminded of going abroad in the early 2000s, back when we told people we were Canadian. I snapped out of that when I was told that anyone who would paint all Americans as Islamophobic pro-Bush warmongers was just as bad as an American who voted for closing the borders and strafing the Middle East — because this is true, and reasonable people on either side don’t make these generalizations. But in Antigua, surrounded by the demographic that drove the “No” vote during the Scottish Independence Referendum and the “Leave” vote during Brexit, I felt disconnected and kind of bullied, and also I was really fucking tired of withered old prunes screwing up their faces at my tattoos and speaking to the staff as if they still owned them, like, as human beings. (Also annoying af: when they heard we were only there for 4 days, they were aghast and replied “how do you even relax, we’re here for 2 and a half weeks!” as if everyone in every country in the world doesn’t have to go back to fucking work in order to, I dunno, live.)
The next day, I went over my data limit by logging into Twitter and Instagram, desperate to see what was happening with the marches I was missing. I faved every photo of every sign, both proud of my country for resisting and embarrassed for not being there myself.
source: Bored Panda
I felt left out. I felt guilty. I hadn’t stayed to participate; I was writing, I wasn’t doing. I had spent money to surround myself with white colonialist snobs while my friends were marching for women’s rights and Black Lives Matter. Did I feel like we deserved to be “thanked” for making Great Britain look slightly less moronic, at least in terms of media sensationalism of Trump and the not-very-accelerated timeframe of their transition out of the EU? No, of course not. After all, I am a native Midwesterner and current Seattleite, meaning that I have opinions about manners and am almost pathologically reserved. For a country obsessed with propriety, a Kipling-reciting imperialist (or, what a Scottish friend of mine called an “auld ratfuck boomer”) thanking us for our unmaking of the world was just rude.
But I’m willing to take some of the blame in a collective sort of way, just like I’m willing to remain in America and resist until I fall down. I’m willing to allow the shitty comments of some ignorant bastard with plenty of historical sins of their own to come my way. I’m willing to come down with the kind of intestinal issue that causes me to take 4 knee-shaking shits in 2 hours at an airport. I’m willing to slog this out, if only to prove that when I finally reach Death’s door, I won’t be the one looking down at anyone younger than me, because I will have done what I can to ensure that their world is not like this one.