1. Pretending like everything’s fine
You get dinner, and there’s a weird, quiet sort of tension in the air. People are talking, as usual, but every time you head over to grab a waffle fry, you hear the radio playing at the back of the FFC. There’s no escaping it.
2. Utter and complete disbelief
Watching the map turn more and more red, you think, “No way this is happening right now.” With all the progress in our society over the past decade, no way this man is going to just undo it.
You’re going to wake up and this will all have been a terrible dream. Clinton will have made a miraculous comeback... Or maybe you just hallucinated all of this. Yeah, maybe you’ve all collectively lost so many hours of sleep that you’re just confused. No way Mr. P*ssy-Grabber has his “very big” hands on the nuclear launch codes.
3. Canada’s nice this time of year.
Canada seems like a wonderful place, with Justin Trudeau and the pandas he hangs out with. Oh, and tickets to Sweden seem pretty cheap! Going to New Zealand and living as a Hobbit doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world. At least you’ll have two breakfasts. Elevenses would be worth the cost of a ticket to New Zealand, right?
Maybe you could go to Antarctica. Penguins seem pretty cool. It’s worth the cold. Maybe in Antarctica you won’t have a good enough Internet access to even know what’s happening to the world.
4. Recount? Let there be a recount.
The polls said this wouldn’t happen. Of course, the polls could be wrong. But today would be a great time for them to be right. There has to be a recount. What if the machine weren’t working at the polling station yesterday? What if someone’s votes didn’t get counted?
Clinton won the popular vote. This could all be wrong. A computer program messed up. Mine messes up on the daily. Florida was just one percent. So was Pennsylvania. There’s going to be a recount, and then Clinton will win, and things will go right back to normal.
5. The snooze button
The snooze button seems to exist for a day like this. You don’t want to wake up because you were up too late last night worrying about this. You don’t want to know that you’re waking up in a world where such an outrageous human is the president of the United States.
So you snooze. Not the usual five times, but a new high of 14 times. You can’t go to class now and pretend like everything’s normal and that the biggest worry in your life is how you’re going to finish that nine-page paper.
6. Facebook rage
Obviously, instead of waking up and actually doing anything, you lie there scrolling through Facebook. Facebook is like an echo chamber. The only views you see are the ones you share, for the most part. You’re about to open the status bar that you haven’t touched for months and actually answer Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?”
A lot of things are on my mind, Facebook. A lot of things. Except, there’s nothing you can say right now to change anything that happened. Scrolling through the posts, you see your friends already said everything you’d want to say. So you keep scrolling, and you wonder what on earth Bernie Sanders is going to say about this at MSE.
7. Acceptance... ish
It happened. It doesn’t feel real, but it is. Who knows what’s going to happen from here on out? A part of me is still clinging desperately to the possibility of a recount because someone somewhere made a terrible mistake.
Things are really going to change, aren’t they? I’m going to graduate and exit the liberal college bubble into a world where the U.S. President thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese and that the best way to solve problems is by building walls instead of tearing them down. I could get deported.
I really wanted to end this on a message of hope — that we can stick together and hold out for just four years and work on reducing the ignorance that allowed this to happen.
The truth is, in all my 18 years, I’ve never been as uncertain of my future.
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