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Okay so that just happened. It did. It happened and there is nothing we can do about it now. Our country just ran over a dog with our car, the dog is dead, and we can’t bring it back to life.
So okay. Fuck. What do we do now? How do we proceed from here? Can we even proceed? Shit. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
Okay yes. Yes we can. We can proceed. Regardless of how threatened we may be (and some of us are very threatened), we can all at least make the best out of the situation we’re in. This goes for where we are now, and where we’ll be a year from now (you know, when we’re all in bunkers eating tomato paste out of cans and wondering if our neighbor survived whatever the fuck just happened outside).
But let’s focus on how we can proceed now.
1) Regather Yourself
Item number one is taking some time to get yourself together. This is a healthy instinct that I think many of us have already begun to follow. So go on. Get it all out. Cry, vomit, punch a couple holes in your dry wall. Work through the stages of grief. Escape for a while, watch a 90’s cartoon, wallow into a pile of candy wrappers and Cheeto dust (or actually, maybe avoid Cheeto dust at all costs right now).
Hold onto your friends. Do whatever you need to do and take the time you need to get through the initial shellshock…and then the other shocks that come after that every time you step back and realize just how fucking insane this all really is.
2) Have Faith
Losing all faith in everything, and being paralyzed with fear is totally understandable—especially for those of you who don’t look like me. If I were black, and a candidate who was endorsed by the KKK won the election, I’m guessing I probably wouldn’t be like “Oh yeah no, that’s fine.”
And so with that said, I know it’s easy for me to say this, but you have to maintain faith in the face of the current shit storm—not because it makes a ton of sense to have faith (because holy shit it doesn’t), but because it is our only choice. You cannot move forward from this without having faith that you can move forward from this.
There’s too much uncertainty ahead, and too much to legitimately fear from this tiny-handed citrus goblin. Logic is going to have one hell of a time prevailing for a while, so you need all of the blind, senseless fucking faith you can muster—not in a God necessarily, just in good prevailing. You may not think it has this time, but doesn’t mean that it can’t eventually. Even the most foul shitstorm leaves you with a whole lot of fertilizer.
3) Seek to Understand Others
This means we have to calmly and earnestly seek to understand those we disagree with before we seek to persuade them. Do not give up hope on this. A lot of these people aren’t that far gone. They’re really not, and you can make a difference.
4) The Silver Lining: Motivation
Yes, yes! Even the orangest cloud has it’s silver lining, and it’s not just that the anxiety of a Trump presidency can do wonders for your waistline (Diarrhea, AND a loss of appetite? Watch those pounds fall off! Make Will sexy again!).
Here’s the actual silver lining.
We do almost nothing all of the time. Hell, half of us didn’t even fucking vote, and that involves getting paid time off of work, standing in a line, and marking a thing. We’re unbelievably lazy and indifferent, quite simply, because we have really, really great lives. We live in the safest time in human history, we mostly have our basic needs met, and endless opportunities for fun and adventure.
But even with that status quo, we’ve needed some changes for a while—changes a lot of us (myself included) were personally never going to be a part of, because why bother? I’m fine here sleeping in my bed. If I could, I would keep hitting the snooze button over and over and laying in bed, and wrapping myself in blankets forever and ever.
Welp. I’m not in bed any more. For the first time in my life, I’m up, and I think a lot of you are too. That’s the silver lining here. Whether it’s a hardship in your personal life, a threat to your health, or the election of an unhinged bigoted demagogue, we often need a terrible outside force to make us get up and change things about our world. Sometimes, the greatest horror is a blessing in disguise.
For a sleeping populace, a Trump presidency is someone dumping a bucket of fireants into our beds. You can’t keep hitting snooze now, can you? You have to get up, get out of the room, and find some bugspray (You can’t find a new room. Canada doesn’t want you.).
So now, we have to be better, more active, kinder, and more productive people. We have to stand up for those that need help. We have to pull our politicians towards us. We have to find out what actually works, and not just preach to our own echo chambers, and we have to get fucking pissed off and take action.
Yes, the circumstances blow, but the end result can be amazing if we use our fear instead of hiding from it.
Imagine how good of shape you could get in if someone chased you with an ax for an hour a day. That’s basically what we have here.
As for what specific political actions to take…I don’t know. Donate to something. Call a congressman. Maybe restart Occupy Wall Street if you can avoid being such dipshits about it this time (Rule 1: No fucking drumming).
In general, I’m not here to tell you what specific political actions to take (For that, look here, here, and here.). I’m not the guy to talk about that. What I can suggest is this.
We’ve already seen in the past couple of days what we all feared: that electing someone like Trump has motivated some terrible people to do terrible things to marginalized people because they now feel this behavior is okay. This is one of the worst parts of a Trump presidency, but it’s also the part we can most effectively combat.
So here’s what I’m thinking: We all go the extra mile to make ourselves, and therefore the country as unlike this man as we can possibly be. It’s very simple to implement. Before you act in any way, think “What would Trump do?” and then do the exact opposite (I’ll be selling these bracelets soon).
So as part of your protest–of your attempt to combat this presidency, be extra inclusive, insanely kind, over-the-top humble. Be dangerously generous, be endlessly genuine, and for the love of God, get a decent spray tan. Go the extra, extra mile every single fucking time you can to be a better, more courageous, more thoughtful, more mature human being.
Also never say “bigly.”
The world really, truly needs good people now more than ever. We all need you to step your game up.
I’m not going to tell you everything will be all right. I don’t know. But I do know that we have a unique opportunity here. Motivation is such a precious, finite resource, and we’ve all just been gifted a big heavy tub of it. We haven’t had an opportunity like this before. Let’s use it to become better, stronger more impactful people than ever before.
If we can do that, maybe some time down the line, after this rained hellfire has passed, America can be greater than ever.
