Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Hillary

I’ve dropped two longish personal posts onto my Facebook page since last night, and thought it might be worth sharing them here, too. They clearly define my mood. First, from last night:

It’s 10 p.m. in Seattle, and I need to go to bed. But I do so with fear in my heart. If prognostications are correct, and if all the pollsters were wrong, the United States has just elected a bigoted, incompetent, inexperienced, misogynistic hatemonger, serial liar, and would-be tyrant as its next president. I never thought I would see the country of my birth set out on such a sure course to disaster.

Before I head off to bed, I want to first apologize to the rest of the world for my country inflicting upon it what will surely be four years of new wars, economic decline, diplomatic tensions, and a wave of hatred and xenophobic violence. If Trump does indeed become the next president, international trust in the United States will inevitably decline, and this country’s stature as a shining beacon of hope will dim severely, if not be extinguished entirely.

This sharp detour toward misfortune was none of my doing; I did not, and would never, vote into the White House somebody as hateful, vengeful, and willfully ignorant as Trump. Whatever motivated others among my countrymen to cast their votes in his favor, I cannot fathom. All I can do is hope that the United States somehow weathers this horror and puts itself to rights once more, even if I don’t live long enough to see how that is accomplished.

I am an American. But tonight I am ashamed of what my country has done.

And then from earlier today:

To any Facebook “friends” who voted for Trump: please unfriend me now.

I don’t care why you voted against Hillary Clinton. It’s what you voted FOR that distresses me. You voted for a more hateful country; a country that thumbs its nose at the rest of the world; a country that is OK with bigotry and racism and sexism; a country that denigrates people because of who they love; a country that doesn't care about affordable health care for all; a country that thinks women are mere objects for male entertainment; a country that accepts vulgar pronouncements from our “leaders,” without regard to how such language divides us and harms our youngest citizens; a country where elected officials encourage violence in order to maintain their fragile hold on power; a country that despises people for being well-educated and well-informed; a country where Big Business is allowed to run rampant, without legislative checks, and the rich are applauded for not paying their share of taxes; a country with a banana republic government and a megalomaniac at the helm; a country that fears international alliances and therefore must spend more and more money in hopes of self-protection; a country where short-term gains trump long-term accomplishments; a country that is not the country in which I was born.

Our views of the world, and of a productive U.S. future and what is right are too different to share the same space. You’ve voted for isolationism—get used to that by unfriending me now.