This is the essay I did not know I needed to write until I did.
The first days of November began with me drafting a post about one of my pet interests, the punk movement. It was the militant energy of it that drew me, an energy that matched the rage I felt against my circumstances. I was unemployed; my health was in unexpected jeopardy. Every day felt like barefoot walk on a ledge made of broken glass. The rawness of punk felt good. A reaction to the economic crises and drive toward commercialization that characterized the 1970s, musicians in London and New York transformed their songs into musical fists that hit hard and fast. Aggression was salvation because they were children of the capitalist Cold War apocalypse.
I wanted to write about this history to understand why I’d felt the need to thrift military fatigues and cherry red Doc Marten combat boots online. Who—or what—was I really at war with? My hardships? The injustice of an appalling year? A suburbanized, aging self? At first I accepted it as a way to indulge my perennial love for youth, rebellion and radical feminism. I was just doing me and externalizing my own inner conflicts as I always had, this time through the lens of nostalgia.
Then on November 5, America did—or appeared to do—the unthinkable.
Now, in the painful aftermath of that choice, I wonder whether I’d also been sensing the emergence of another, greater conflict. The country was divided; we all knew that, just as we knew that the race between #45 and Kamala Harris would be close. But most of us believed that justice would prevail and the most reasonable candidate would win. That didn’t happen; or at least, didn’t seem to. By the end of the election night, the American map looked like what one YouTuber, recalling George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, called a “red wedding.” He was referring to a fictional massacre staged as revenge for a broken marriage pact between two powerful families. By all appearances, #45 had finally gotten the vengeance he had sworn was his.
The Harris/Walz campaign had been a light in a darkness that had been as much collective as personal. Like so many others, I had been swept up by clear, bright energy of their two-and-a-half month blitzkrieg campaign. Happy warriors, they symbolized the best American ideals—tolerance, generosity, reason, diversity—but also the best of an underestimated—but deeply divided—generation. Screw tech billionaire Xers and their Xer friends on the Supreme Court. Finally we other Xers have a chance to show the world what else we can be.
Now I sit watching the light fade in the post-election silence that has followed. It’s not a total blackout because votes still need to be certified and the suspicion of fraud continues to grow. But the sense of betrayal remain, less for the “red wedding” results and more for the story they tell about my fellow Americans. If at least half of this country, including women and people of color, did indeed want the apparent president-elect, then who are we as Americans? After centuries of struggle against own demons, are we still capable of vulgarities like the Madison Square Garden rally of October 27?
My shame is immense, not only for what appears to be the current political reality, but also for the role—however small—I played in its manifestation. For years I refused to vote because I didn’t believe in the two-party system. What I could not see was that my participation in the democratic process was what was really at stake. My immigrant parents, both of whom were part of the wave of European immigrants who came to America after WWII, knew better. You’re spoiled and you don’t even know it, my father used to say. Sitting in the confused twilight of this post-election phase, I tell his ghost that he was right. If not for the healthcare legislation passed in the era of my apathy, I would no doubt have been forced into making plans for my own funeral.
Born under and shaped by a society ruled by Benito Mussolini, my mother left Italy seven years after the end of WWII. My father lived under the Nazi Occupation of Paris and watch his country split into two. Both appreciated everything that mid-twentieth century American seemed to offer them, despite the occasional bigotry they faced as immigrants and—in my mother’s case—the sexism she encountered in her work as a scientific researcher. Both voted, grateful to have a say as naturalized citizens. They believed in the process; they believed they counted.
Just before she stopped caring about everything including the vote, my mother told me that she had wept the day Kennedy died. She had loved him, his youth and the purity of his faith in America. Though I did not wish to summon her ghost, I remembered her as I cried, wondering if the election was showing me the death of something larger: American democracy and the fragile planet that, like women who lost the right to bodily autonomy, bears the injustice of corporate greed and plutocratic excess.
Despair is easy now and seems a comfort. Yet in this strange twilight, I am also reminded of what fellow Xer and immigrant daughter told Americans during her concession speech: Only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars. I am—and will remain—a survivor of many battles. And in my second-hand fatigues, I speak my truths like sparks of hope for all who follow me and my generation into a reckoning with the darkness in our collective national soul.