My son 'Tabish Dayani" who is a junior in University of Chicago wrote the aforementioned piece. He has seen my activist work towards gender equity and family empowerment for the last 25 years. He called me last night when the election results were announced and told me how devastated he was to see all the hope of a woman president fall apart. I felt relieved and painful. Relieved to see my son understand my feelings and the importance of my work and why I felt so joyful about electing a woman president. Painful in my heart for not being able to comprehend how people of a leading industrialized nation could be so ignorant and unaware of all the consequences in the name of change!
Tabish Dayani writes:
It's annoying to see the opinions of others on social media, since it interrupts an oddly-comforting stream of otherwise mindless content that doesn't force me to care about it. Hypocritically enough, I've convinced myself that everyone's interested in what I have to say even though I'm not overwhelmingly interesting, popular, or attractive.
Here's yet another person's long, worthless opinion on the dead horse we've collectively beaten for a year now and will probably continue to beat for a while: I didn't take the election seriously. I don't think most people I know did. It felt a bit scary towards the end, but I never thought the unthinkable would happen. I imagine that's why they call it the unthinkable. Don't get me wrong, I voted. I wasn't that lazy or cynical about my vote not "really counting." I used to agree with that mentality, even though I knew it was kinda shitty. But it took like 10 minutes, so it's not like I had to sacrifice a lot.
I didn't take it seriously on Election Day evening when he took the lead. I continued not to take it seriously as his projected chances rose to increasingly alarming heights.Then he effectively won Pennsylvania and I sat, shocked, and like many others, was forced to come to terms with something that completely opposed a lot of my preconceived notions about the mentality of my fellow Americans, especially in regards to basic ethics and values.
I called my mom to make sure she was okay. Maybe I called her because I wanted to feel better. She was crying, expectedly so. As someone who saw Hillary as an inspiration for decades, this was crushing. It was about more than just getting Hillary into office, because she meant so much more than that to so many people. Hillary represented hope that a woman could maybe actually be completely equal. Hillary represented hope for a brighter future. Or at least a future that would only be tainted by a corrupt establishment instead of by a lack of conventional morality. She represented hope that maybe society was headed in a halfway-decent direction.She may not have meant all of those things to me, but she meant them to a lot of the people I care about, and that's worth something.
In a single stroke, that hope became invalidated both by a man who represented the exact opposite of that hope and by the nation that fairly elected him to hold their highest office. Maybe it's not true every time, but when it came down to it, a rich, loud white dude beat one of the most ambitious, hardworking, and experienced women in the world. That's an oversimplification of what's absolutely a more complex issue, but the fact of the matter is that this happened. And has been happening since fucking forever. And everything that people like my mother have so passionately striven to accomplish seems just beyond reach, yet again. How many times can this happen? Maybe we really are different as a country, but today, it sure doesn't feel that way. At least it's not all bad. Postmates just gave me a $10-off coupon out of nowhere.
I cried a decent amount. Not because I could really empathize with that type of pain. Mostly just because it was sad. Partially because it shows that I'm sensitive and therefore a more appealing sexual prospect (if you're into it). And it turns out the Postmates coupon only applied to delivery charge, so I didn't even receive a consolation prize.Before the election result, I was against vilifying and hating Trump voters. I still am. That's part of the whole reason this happened in the first place. People who voted for Trump felt demeaned and unheard because of it. So they made themselves heard. And it turns out, the way things are is not the way I hoped it was.
Realistically, things won't change for me that much, at least not in a particularly immediate and noticeable way. In the grand scheme of things, people aren't any different than they were a few days ago, a few months ago, a few years ago. And I'm blessed enough to be an educated male who almost exclusively belongs to communities comprised of tolerant people. But it's not really about me. Things were supposed to be different now for everyone.Things were supposed to be different for my people like my mother, who has faced discrimination and obstruction every step of the way on her journey to try to make the world a better place. I've seen her pain. Now, she will continue to face more of the same.
Things were supposed to be different for kids, including my brother, who were too young to remember the period after 9/11, when people with our skin tone were hated openly. I still remember how in the first grade, my teacher would publicly belittle me, even grading my work differently in subjects like math, where grading policy shouldn't have as much room for subjectivity as it should for "can you do math." I'd come home from school crying and told my parents I didn't want to go anywhere outside, least of all school. It's a memory I've actively repressed the shit out of. Now, more children will inevitably experience pain like this, because yesterday, we proved that hatred is accepted and tolerated to the point where it can become one of the loudest and most powerful public voices in our country.
To my friends who are Trump supporters and are still reading for whatever reason: if you exist, I don't mean this to sound like you personally are to blame for these experiences, because you are not. You personally are not at fault for the discrimination many people face and the terrible things Trump represents to these people. However, a lot of us probably do feel that you're either actively or passively enabling a society that doesn't treat us equally. I'm sure you had your valid reasons for voting for Trump - nobody voted for him to try to make the country a worse place - I'm just saying this is what it means to me. And to the choir at whom I'm almost certainly preaching: I'm sorry for yet another post wallowing in self-pity because I can't just nut up and move on yet. I'll probably end up making a ton of really average-at-best jokes about it because my life got a little bit darker today, and I'm bad at confronting and coping with things.
Maybe it won't really be that bad. Maybe it will. Maybe this will be an awakening for everyone. More likely, it will just polarize people even more. Maybe I'm wrong. Lots of maybes. I see a lot of determination and surprisingly gritty optimism from people who cared about this a lot more than I did and certainly had a lot more at stake. I wish I could be like them, but I just feel depressed and wish I could go back to when I didn't give a damn about all of this.
Finally, just a heads up, joking about how you're "gonna leave the country" is played out. We all know you're not going to. Get some better and more original material. The one good thing about Trump presidency is that there's not going to be a shortage of it.
Tabish Dayani
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