The Morning After

Note: This is a political post. This is the morning after the 2024 Presidential election in the United States.

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Hello, friends.

Here, the sun is just beginning to rise. I’ve been awake some three, nearly four hours now. It was a relatively sleepless night. Just under five hours.

When I walked outside, the sky was clear—a rarity for the PNW. The stars shone brightly. I stared up at them for a long time, considering things.

I am not doing okay, in light of what just happened in the United States over this presidential election.

I am a queer artist/creator/writer.

I am a woman of childbearing age.

I am disabled, and I am poor.

These are not good things in a Trump America.

I worry over a great many things. Our justice system was already turned upside-down in many ways from four years of Trump, and now it’s going to be upended even more, turned conservative for what I forsee to be essentially the rest of my natural life. Gods only knows what he and his ilk will do when they start using their Project 2025 playbook.

But we know. If we’ve been paying any sort of attention, we’ve seen what he and his kind want for this country.

I don’t know if I can call it ‘our’ country anymore. It certainly doesn’t feel like a place where I am exactly welcome or wanted.

This is bad. There’s no other way to put it. This is very, very bad.

This country chose racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia over any sort of qualified candidate.

It’s absurd. It should not have happened this way.

I wish I had words of hope, but the only thing I can think to say is: resist.

Resist like your life depends on it, because it does.

Danielle Berggren