Imagine being so disliked that even though your party rigged at least one stage of the election earlier in the race, you can't beat a candidate who's racist, sexist, politically inexperienced, just plain idiotic, homophobic, wants to deport so many people and ban all Muslims from the country, is considering throwing us into a nuclear war, comments on air that he likes to walk up to women and grab them by their privates... everything you would assume is terrible and hated by the American public, right? Hmm. Vocal minorities, I guess...
Hillary did win the popular vote, though, so I guess she gets to take some comfort in that. And Trump will still have to get his ideas passed by other people in power... He can't just demand a wall to be build and all of a sudden have a wall be built... We can hope...?
I see no reasoning behind his desire to withdraw from NAFTA (I think that's one thing he's said he plans to do, unless I got my acronyms mixed up). It's called the North American Free Trade Agreement for a reason. We've only ever talked about the positives of it in my history classes. I wonder if there are any downsides that we glossed over. We'll just have to wait for things to unfold.
I was in a mood, so I threw together a quick meme thing when I heard that 11,000 people went out and wrote-in a vote for a dead gorilla to be president:
Anyway... I guess I shouldn't be saying such things on the Internet about the man who'll soon be leading our country, but that's what happens when you have a blog you know very few people read, anyway. I've been surrounded by so many people ready to exercise their right to vote for the first time and regularly discussing things like this everywhere around me. Now I get to spend the next months or years listening to them cursing third-party voters for taking votes away from Hillary. But maybe it won't be quite as bad as before since in Utah, we did have a large showing of third-party and I'm not entirely sure if those votes combined with Hillary's would have given Hillary a boost.
I don't know. It's just the culmination of so many pent-up months of holding my tongue. I can still remember those early days in the race when we would discuss these things and Brexit talk objectively (or at times subjectively) before class officially started in AP Government. I wonder how my teacher and his current classes feel about the news. Maybe I'm wrong about my concerns. It would be nice to be wrong.
I'm just confused. This is the world we live in, and it hurts. I grew up in Georgia, raised not knowing that racism existed until fifth grade, when I was pulled in from hosting one of the field day events to, well... Put simply, I was scolded for not being racist. It came as a shock to the counselors that I had no idea what was going on, or why I'd been pulled in (three black kids in particular used to pick on a few of us white kids and if we spoke back they'd play the racism card and get us into trouble).
So just... This hurts me. How can so many people be so supportive of someone who has pledged to and has already hurt so many people? I've never been one to have an overflowing amount of pride in my neighborhood, school, state, or my country- not that I think America is bad at all, and I would never stay sitting down during the anthem or anything, but I just feel uncomfortable about all my friends and peers trumpeting that America is the 'greatest country on Earth' when, like... That's still an opinion. Not a fact. Why do you mock people who live in other countries? That's mean. And in some senses racist. And weird.
Maybe it's an author thing, accepting that your point of view [character] has flaws. I pride myself on my ability to find the negative qualities in the good characters I write or read about and to find the good in the hated. That's just how I see the world- If someone says that something is good, I find the flaws. If everyone rags on a cartoon character for being a Mary Sue, I gather all the evidence that she is not and that she is a good character and I lay out the facts. I average things. It's just how I am. I like my characters with a blend of moral gray zone. Easy flip-floppers between good and bad choices that they make. Doing good things for the wrong reasons and wrong things for the right. Following the laws only to suffer for it, and breaking the laws only to glance over their shoulders and think, "Hmm, no one caught me and I reaped great rewards, and I could probably get away with doing it again..."
But I'm just sitting here thinking about this election and... It hurts. I shouldn't have to be worrying about the safety of my friends, or the safety of people I don't even know but whom I believe have basic human rights for protection.
And it hurts to hear my acquaintances or strangers or people in authority dragging white people through the dirt almost every single day of my life for years on end, telling us that every racist, homophobic, judgmental, unpopular, undesirable, horrible thing that ever happens is our fault because we're all privileged whites who don't care about anyone. And then pretending that's not racism. Maybe it's not the same kind of racism because whites aren't targeted by police or viewed as dumb by some teachers, as my psychology book insists, but we're still attacked for the color of skin we were born with. By definition, that is racism. Isn't it? Or do whites never face racism, because we're born privileged?
So it hurts a little girl who grew up not knowing what racism was, then upon learning immediately swore it out of her life and tried to be kind to everyone. I'm older now, but I'm still that innocent little girl who tries not to judge, who tries to combat stereotypes and preconceived notions in the little ways, whose first reaction after watching and discussing "Twelve Angry Men" in class was to start to raise her hand in answer to the question, "Do you believe that people in prison are almost always put in because they deserve it?" because for a split-second there she completely forgot that there are people out there who don't care, and don't work incredibly hard to uncover the real story like the characters in that film did, and don't believe in making the world a better place.
Inside I'm the girl who plays her small part in the world through her writing, by not writing allegories specifically about racism being bad, but showing it in more subtle ways. By making my people of color equally as flawed as my whites, and not attributing these flaws to race, but to the choices that they made because of the situations they were in. I'm here to read a lovely story about some people in some situation making some bad choices and some good choices. Country doesn't matter to me. Species doesn't matter to me. Why should color? Answer: It doesn't. It never has. It never will. Color doesn't matter. I'm here for the journey, which one would assume we all are (Although people of color are here for the representation, too, which is totally okay and good).
Or I play my part by making certain characters people of color but not revealing it until later in the story, chuckling, "Well, why did you just assume all the characters would be white?" Trying to combat the notion that "the default character is white", trying to give all my friends and the people I've never met representation of their color in the media where the characters are a certain color for "no particular reason, but because they just are, because why not?" and not because the book is set specifically in a certain geographical location...
It hurts so much. But I've never been able to say anything like that. Because then I'm just one of those white people whining about "reverse racism".
I don't get it. The word "reverse" shouldn't be in that title. This is basic common sense. If you're attacking someone for their race, it's racism. Simple as that. Fighting racism should NOT be "White people are bad, because look at what they did to us for so many years." It should be, "Being racist is bad". Because racism is bad. Duh. It has nothing to do with the person saying so's color, ethnicity, country of origin...
"Racism is bad". Not "white people are bad". That should be obvious.
It hurts me that it's not. It hurt me when I attended that writer's conference at WIFYR a few years back, and instead of selecting the class I had actually been more interested in attending, I veered over at the last second and attended the class about writing people of color. While next door they read an entire Junie B. Jones book and discussed what worked and what didn't, I suffered for like an hour and a half being told that I'm an evil racist because I'm white, that all white people are evil racists (our speaker was a Latina lady who had married a Japanese-American, because heaven forbid she marry one of these evil whites), and that the only way to not be racist is to be born any race that wasn't Caucasian. The people I was with ate it up, and the closest friend I had gained at the conference said she thought it was the best of the classes she'd attended.
It just hurts. It will always hurt.
This is a bizarre country we live in. A bizarre world, where people don't believe in not hurting each other. I look forward to the day it all ends and I can spend the rest of my existence in a peaceful heaven once again. That will be nice. I just have to make it there.
Enough political discussion there. This election has been long and painful and it's nice to have it over with, at least. I am still laughing about the Newsweek magazines proclaiming Madam President that had to be recalled, though. And Trump's son taking a picture of his ballot and disqualifying his vote.
I attended all my classes today, still a bit numb from the shock of finding out who won the presidency. I learned that I don't have horticulture class on Friday, which is nice. I also learned that I need to answer three essay questions in Institute, which is less nice, but not unexpected. I tried to keep a scripture journal so I wouldn't have to do the essay questions, but that only lasted for so long before I realized that I'd rather write three (presumably easy) essays then jot even slight notes for months on end as I went along. Nah. Give me the essays and let me finish all at once.
Upon returning home, I read several chapters of my horticulture textbook and several of my chocolate book. I really hope I do well on my chocolate final. I'm getting nervous. The quizzes are rough. We have to memorize obscure things like the melting point of oleic oil in degrees Celsius and the percent of three kinds of fatty acids from six different countries. The PowerPoint for our next quiz alone has sixty slides. Each slide contains an average of seven facts on it. That's 420 pieces of information we need to study just for a quiz, which will only have ten questions on it.
I played halfway through Day of the Tentacle so I could get my screenshot. I had to play it slower than normal to trigger the cutscene (sometimes I can make it through the entire game only triggering one). It's very beautiful, although I'm still adjusting to the new controls. And I'm scratching my head because the "Look, a guy who looks like Benjamin Franklin!" line has been replaced with "Albert Einstein", and a similar line became, "Has anyone told you you look like Don Quixote?" Weird.
There's also a new cutscene about Benjamin Franklin flying his kite and wishing it would rain that I don't remember. And a few quotes appeared to have changed by a word or two, but that could be me misquoting them. But I got to hear voices all the way through for the first time, and that was kind of fun.
I watched "The Great Mouse Detective" and "The Fox and the Hound 2" each for the first time before bed while I drew some designs for characters of mine, because that's just what I do. I liked them both. I was pleasantly surprised by "Fox and the Hound 2". It was much, much better than the original. But, I've also always been a person who prefers to watch the character development in a single life phase than to orient myself to massive time skips.
The original keeps focusing on a side plot about birds trying to catch a caterpillar to eat. It's supposed to be funny for the kids, I guess, but it keeps showing up, interrupts the emotion and action, accomplishes nothing, and overall detracts from the main story. The sequel flowed excellently and was very, very cute and full of strong characters. Young characters are always difficult to pull off, but they were well-done here. I liked it a lot. Makes the original more bittersweet, just watching how Tod was always the one to put more and more into this friendship even though Copper continuously hurts him, and Copper's the one to tell him in the original that they're grown up now and can't be friends anymore...
Before I settled officially into sleep, I read my scriptures. We're in the "Creating a Successful Family" section of The Eternal Family class readings. D&C 134, 5-6. "We believe that all men are bound to sustain and uphold the respective governments in which they reside, while protected in their inherent and inalienable rights by the laws of such governments", etc. etc. Hmm....
