Other Americans get to vote, too

Now that the shock of the election results has subsided a bit, we can take a deep breath and rejoice that we’ve all returned to some semblance of normalcy. Said no one, ever. The last week has been filled with anger, desperation, accusations, pretentious pronouncements of moral superiority, threats of vengeance, attempts to flee the country and seek asylum in places where the government subsidizes Aperol Spritzes, and other such nonsense.

I have noticed on a list-serve maintained by immigration colleagues, there is an increasing number of requests for attorneys who help people obtain citizenship in other countries, like Portugal. I have noticed women, in particular, have been doing things that make them lose their jobs, like the nurse in Philadelphia who posted on Facebook that she hoped any woman who voted for Trump would develop an ectopic pregnancy, and the special education teacher in Connecticut who threatened bodily harm to Republicans in a Tik Tok video. I have noticed that a local official in my town called Trump voters “insubstantial minions,” and that his wife attacked a critic by accusing him of having a small penis, only she didn’t use that word.



I have noticed the Democratic senior U.S. Senator of my state, who has not held a private sector job in over three decades, desperately attempt to find votes to close the gap with the challenger who beat him.

That is fine, because all votes should be counted, except the fevered desperation with which his team is operating makes me think that landscapers at local cemeteries might notice a few unexpected excavations in the next few days. To be honest, none of this surprises me. I expected that people would be horribly upset if Trump won.

The writing was on the wall, when the Harris team enlisted superstars like J Lo and Bruce Springsteen and that old geezer Robert De Niro (dude, stop having kids at 80!) to tell us democracy was in peril, and the “Handmaid’s Tale” was real. The feral social media posts from women who thought they were going to be forced to bear children for the patriarchy, and the threats issued to white women to vote for Kamala “or else,” multiplied like flies on a rotten piece of meat. There was no way a Trump victory was going to be easily digested by that crowd.

Initially, I tried empathy. I know a good many people who are sincerely devastated by the results of the election, people who believe the Republican winner truly is a threat to our way of life. They are not drama queens, they simply make the quiet but deeply-felt argument that he will turn back the clock on women’s rights, immigrant’s rights, the rights of minorities and cut us off from our allies.

To be honest, I don’t disagree with them about immigrant’s rights and our position in the world. There is truth in what they argue on those points. But we have dealt with disappointment before, and we have been forced to face the fact that half of the country doesn’t agree with us.

I had to stomach the presidency of one Barack Obama, who deported twice the number of immigrants in his first term in office than either Trump or Joe Biden. I remember the morning after Obama beat a war hero, I wrote a column about trying to find light in the darkness of that result. Of course I was called a racist because I used the word “darkness” to describe the victory of the first Black president, but that was predictable.

My real point was that we have to figure out how to deal with the inevitable fact that democracies are messy things, and we don’t always get what we want. I’m not even sure, and apologies to Mick Jagger, we get what we need. But if we wait long enough, we will get something to make us happy.

That’s something I wish the apoplectic Americans would figure out. They did not obtain the desired results on election day. Some of them had their hopes dashed, some of them still cannot believe that over half of the country disagreed with them, and many of them are unwilling to face the reality of four more years of Donald Trump.

I am no longer willing to humor them with kindness and understanding. I’m just going to live my life and ignore the noise. They will eventually figure out that this is how a democracy rolls.

And if they don’t, there’s always Portugal..