Thanksgiving, Post-Election: Unmoored by Trump

Even as she lost more and more control over her arms and legs and as her voice retreated to a whisper due to the progression of her ALS, my mom had been almost gleeful much of 2016. A bucket-list item she had never dreamed possible as a girl, was now a near certainty. America would join other progressive countries like Pakistan, Lithuania, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Haiti, Mongolia, Mozambique, Thailand, Myanmar and others in electing a woman as its national leader. 

But it would surely split my family apart. My brothers in Louisiana have both voted for David Duke in past elections and primaries. They consider themselves some of the few remaining Dixiecrats—populists against race and gender-based social equity movements. They consider Black Lives Matter activism as essentially racist, the EEOC as an unfair handout system. They think Obama’s presidency weakened the country and ruined the economy. They went Trump, with signs in their yards and embarrassment in their hearts that they had family like me who would vote another way.

My sister is a registered Houston Republican, but an ideological centrist. Texas keeps its primaries closed to party affiliates and she registered so that she would have some say over who runs things. She is an attorney making her money working for big corporate concerns, but spends her time off representing battered women and supporting reproductive rights in Texas. She voted for Clinton.

My mom’s brother, a normally sweet grandfatherly type with a passion for religious-based charity, furniture-making and citizen activism for mental health equity policies in Virginia is a fiscal conservative who voted for Rubio in the primary. He, like many who consider themselves republican thought Trump was a bigot, a racist, and someone with no respect for women. But it was on women’s issues that he ultimately decided to vote Trump. Bill Clinton, he considers, a rapist who spent his whole life degrading women, the country and the office of president. He hates Hillary too for reasons that remain unclear to me but, he saw her run as a way for Bill to get around presidential term limits. “Bill Clinton is our Vladimir Putin,” is something that has been said at family gatherings more than once. And so when my uncle went to the polls he lodged what he thought was merely a protest vote against Bill’s third term.

Next week these characters are all getting together in Houston for what will probably be my mom’s final Thanksgiving. I do not know how this is going to go. Will half my family want to make a victory lap? Want to rub it in for a come-from-behind horse race? Is my mom going to perseverate on Jim Comey and the Russians and all the deplorables who she thinks have just signed the execution order for American-big-D Democracy?

And me. I have been the clown of the family. The peace-maker my whole life, the unexpected intellectual, the chameleon who explains and sometimes apologizes for progressive and liberal ideas—makes them palatable and understandable when they often seem pretty wrong-headed in places where my family lives. What am I going to say?

I have not even figured out how I feel about this whole thing. Many of my students seem so certain. I envy them. I had believed Trump would win for months: right up until the last week of the election and then I thought, Nate Silver won’t be that wrong. The New York Times won’t be. And so I started thinking about what a Clinton Presidency would be like. It seemed fine in my head. I was not excited. I had sort of given up on excitement as an immaturity. Electing Clinton was the grown-up thing to do, like owning a KitchenAid or a bread maker. It is why I did not vote Bernie in the primary. He seemed too childish in his views of the world.

And now we are about to embark on a Trump administration. What do we do now, my students asked in Leadership development. I have no idea! The only think I know right now, is that nothing is ever impossible.

Thinking this is, in itself, a revolutionary act. The world might actually be a tenuous, chaotic mess in both good ways and in bad. Yes, you can change the world. So can Trump. I take heart knowing that the actions of individuals make all the difference. What does this mean for you? What does it mean for public health professionals, thinkers, doers, policy makers?

Consider me unmoored. I have been saying that a lot recently. And today I am thinking about what that metaphor actually means—what it looks like.

Unmoored.

It is that of a boat suddenly being untied from the dock. We use it to say that we are uneasy, on shaky footing, disoriented. These are certainly negative connotations of the metaphor. But think harder. You have to unmoor to go anywhere. To do anything. Saying you are unmoored and meaning that you should have stayed tied to the dock is in effect saying you are chicken shit and do not want to do anything.

Think of it like this: unmoored: liberating the boat from the dock. If Trump winning has given me a swift kick off the shore to actually go into the world to do something in my tiny insignificant little life boat, then this election may not be all bad.  What do we do at Thanksgiving? I think we just speak our minds. And also listen. It is going to be rough at Chez Blaylock, Fleniken, Spurlock, Troemner this holiday. But for families like mine who are so divided, we have the chance to blow up the echo chambers and actually engage with people who we love but are so opposed to philosophically and politically.

We are the front lines of the new American reality. Do not let Turkey and football rule the roost this weekend. Get ready to try and change some minds—maybe even yours. 

by Thom Blaylock