Not My President
Written following the 2016 US Election campaign
“Not my president.”
Commuters redecorated Union Square station with Post-it notes. Condolences, pleas for change, offers of support, outbursts of disbelief hiding the ceramic tiles. The cleaner swept rainbow leaves from the walkway. Working slowly and dispassionately, his sunglasses hid any clues towards sympathy or irritation.
“Love Trumps Hate.”
People nudged one other. Some pushing to reach the wall and add their message, others simply wanting to board their train. Nobody was rude. The atmosphere was mournful, silent amongst the roar of the overhead pipes and hurried footsteps squeezing past the protest.
I had arrived in New York City earlier in the afternoon. The drive from Burlington was long, and thwarting hunger was a priority. Slumped onto red plastic chairs over sandwiches and coffee I stared at live coverage of crowds in California and New York. Marches were planned in the city over the weekend, but I didn’t know that there were ten thousand people on Fifth Avenue, merely a few blocks away, or that the city would breathe its disgust for the duration of my visit.
It finally sunk in whilst eating a burrito later that evening, down a street which seemed forgotten about. The murmuring chant grew louder as it gained momentum and an errant pod of protesters waved as I stood fascinated in the open doorway.
“Education, not deportation!”
Four days earlier I had dinner with a statistician friend. His San Francisco optimism had us fooled. “Yeah, if he got in it would be awful. But it’s very unlikely.” His wife wasn’t so relaxed. She wouldn’t be watching the television coverage. She planned to go to bed early and hoped to awake to find that the nightmare was over.
The news scrolled across the bottom of the screen as rain beat the surface of Lake Champlain, the Adirondack mountains sighing heavily on the horizon. Having nobody to digest with, I walked into Burlington town centre alone. The neighbours’ ‘HILARY’ pumpkins sat on the wall, crying beads of water into the carefully carved lettering. They looked so warm the night before, glowing orange from the candlelight.
Burlington was deserted. Bernie Sanders territory. His name was stuck to the rear end of every Chevrolet and Chrysler, his face pinned on student noticeboards, ‘Sold Out’ plastered over posters promoting his public talk about the future. I knew nobody apart from the little writers’ group I discovered the week before. I took the elevator up to their adopted office and found Barbie scowling into her coffee. How could he be her president? She’d been writing all night and crying all morning. Pages of poetry lay next to her full, cold mug, waiting for our scrutiny at the next meeting. Traumatic memories pleading for us to believe them, biting at her peace of mind, even harder to heal now that the president thinks it’s okay.
New York City was far from silent by the weekend. Exploring the city in map-less uncertainty, my curiosity led me to Fifth Avenue. Trump Towers offered a chance to process the week’s events. Red letters on white cardboard.
“Standing for what is right is worth it.”
The protestors still chanted, strangers unified in their disbelief beneath the building at the centre of their president’s empire. His old empire, that is. It was about to grow at an alarming rate, and every person in front of me would be a part of it, regardless of what they voted for. The city poured out its anguish on the streets of New York whilst he organised his pencil case in The White House.
“Ma’am, this is not a tourist attraction.” A gentleman from the NYPD was fed up with my staring. His hand rested calmly on a weapon that could cause chaos in one firm trigger click. Following the instinct to be as far away from him as possible, I moved on. Protests or not, the new term was inevitable, yet I took guilty solace in the thought that at least he was not my president.