There is now a certain shade of orange smeared across the American flag’s red, white, and blue.
The United States of America, as we know it, will soon cease to exist. No longer the nation that birthed the likes of the Great Emancipator, but one that chose to vote for a potentially despotic bigot instead of following up the country’s first president of colour with its first female-in-chief.
A nation derailed
Despite Barack Obama’s, shall we say, “divided,” reception as president, the man represented something that America had been fighting a long time, but was, at the same time, something imminent: Change.
Being the first black president of the US was no joke; groups and movements such as The Black Panthers in the 70s and Black Lives Matter more recently (opinions about which I will leave up to you) were the byproducts of America’s checkered history of racism. For that same nation to vote in a person with even an iota of the same pigmentation in his skin would not have gone uncelebrated by a world that is seemingly going one-way forward.
“How perfect would it be if Hillary Clinton wins?” A modern-day Susan B Anthony in the making, it wasn’t ever even a choice, really - it was destiny. An unrelenting stateswoman in her own right, for the First Lady who stood by her husband in his times of despair to take up the mantle herself, is the stuff bards used to write ballads about in the olden days.
But tragicomedies don’t work that way, it seems; and America, nay, the world, has now learned that “change” is not linear, nor is it always for the good, as America gets derailed from its rapid forward momentum towards socio-economic progress and prepares to wall itself away from the rest of the world.
A thick smog of fear and paranoia had clouded the 2016 US Election since the very beginning, and, instead of those fears being put to rest, they have only been amplified
The beast of America
Donald Trump’s, apologies, President-elect Trump’s boorish, misogynistic, racist, bordering-on isolationist characteristics have been drummed on by the media quite well by now. He wants to ban Muslims from setting foot in America, he wants to build a wall between America and Mexico to stop the influx of rapist drug-peddlers from ruining his Great America.
All boilerplate ideals of your corner-store bigoted hick, of course. Scary stuff, but still nothing out of the ordinary. No, what’s really frightening in this case is the system through which all of this was made possible.
“You can become the next president!” is something that American parents often tell their children to let them know just how much of an effective democracy their nation is.
No one gets left behind, any American child can become the future president. The doors to the White House are open to everyone. Even to beasts.
God is an American
“This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes. It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin,” so said America’s Sweetheart (but not really) Hillary Clinton a few weeks before polling began, a last-ditch effort to sway voters from electing a man who used to fire people upon whim on television because he didn’t like the cut of their jib or something.
She made a good point, of course. Imagine giving that same guy the keys to the greatest military/nuclear force in the world. What would be the repercussions?
That’s the thing, though. No one knows.
For all the wishful thinking behind Trump’s presidency being America getting a taste of its own medicine, most fail to realise the fallout America nuking itself would have on the rest of the world.
America isn’t a nation, ladies and gentleman, it is Planet Earth. And there won’t be any curved gravitational paths for the nations to orbit if the planet destroys itself.
A thick smog of fear and paranoia had clouded the 2016 US Election since the very beginning, and, instead of those fears being put to rest, they have only been amplified.
This isn’t the end of the beginning that many had hoped for, but maybe that’s alright. In a year that witnessed great men die like flies, maybe it’s only fitting that we witnessed the death of a great nation as well.
Rubaiyat Kabir is a Sub-Editor at the Dhaka Tribune. Follow him on Twitter at @moreanik