Despair

I was shocked by the election results. I could not sleep at all that night. We are a country suffering from profound sexism and an electorate that votes against their own interests. People vote out of anger and a feeling of frustrated lost privilege. There is much to be angry at but there it always seems to be the right nowadays that exploits the anger of those who feel disenfranchised and shut out of decisions and the left that fails to address it.I see the results as a conscious vote for racism and intolerance of all those who are not straight white people. I am upset that so many white women voted for a man who despises them.I imagine anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, Islamaphobia given full reign along with prejudice and quite possibly prejudice made legal against LGBT people. I think of all the families that will be destroyed by the loss of health care. No matter how faulty Obamacare is, it helped people survive. I expect deep slashes in Medicare and Social Security, if not privatization.I see the deaths of women from self-administered abortions and back alley abortions returning and the suffering to women and their families that caused. I see more families pushed into poverty. Little girls will grow up learning they cannot be president and that it’s okay for rich and famous men to use them any way they choose. Little boys will grow up learning women are theirs to exploit and dismiss.Gay and lesbian teenagers will once again learn they must be constantly afraid and it will only get worse when they grow up.More women will be pushed into poverty with their families without even what remains of the safety net the New Deal and War Against Poverty created. I see a culture in power that wants to bring back the fifties when straight or pretend straight white men held all the power and the rest of us had to be very careful indeed.People carelessly write and talk about the U.S. as a democratic country but we are not; we’re a plutocratic republic. I don’t see how we’ll ever get rid of the Electoral College because the present system propagates itself. We will be stuck with an extremely conservative Supreme Court for twenty years, a court we just got rid of in part that was responsible for Citizens United, eroding a woman’s right to choose by state after state, and the dismantling of the laws that protected minority voters. Now we can expect more of the same.