Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
[I]t’s been over a week now and each morning when we wake up, our thoughts are on the day, where we’re going to go and how we’re going to negotiate the oppressive heat, humidity and gridlocked traffic to get there. An extended trip through several countries in Southeast Asia can be challenging in many ways but the rewards are immense, so you try to work out the logistics as carefully as you can.
It’s been during that conversation — usually around an early breakfast — that one or the other of us realizes that Donald Trump is the president-elect, against the will of the majority of Americans and our planning comes to a screeching halt like most of the vehicles and we sit there, again dumbstruck by what occurred in back home since we’ve been away.
From what we’ve seen and read, the polls that had Hillary Clinton leading by a couple of percentage points were accurate but failed to note that those votes would be insufficiency distributed to provide her with her long-sought historical presidency. Trump’s Electoral College victory insures that for more than half of the first two decades of the 21st century, Republicans will have entered the Oval Office without a majority of the votes.
What George Bush and Donald Trump have in common is that each considered their negative plurality a “mandate” to take the country in a different direction. Bush’s legacy is a long, brutal and unnecessary war that toppled the balance of power in the Mideast … the consequences unending. What Trump will bring is anyone’s guess but based on his campaign, it doesn’t look good.
There are fringe dwellers waiting in the wings throughout the world hoping to step in and take over when enough fear, paranoia and anger are generated, seemingly offering powerful alternatives.
As we drift in and out of wifi and television accessibility, 12 hours ahead of Vermont, our impressions are fragmented yet relentlessly negative, reinforced by anyone we meet from countries around the world: Whether from Israel, Malaysia, Hong Kong or myriad European countries, conversations begin tentatively either out of respect or the fear that we might be Trump supporters but generally get to some variant of how the bleep could this happen … “in America” of all places.
It appears that the world has higher expectations of us than we’ve ever imagined, maybe even higher than we have for ourselves. The USA is on so high a pedestal that the biggest fear voiced by the people we met was essentially, if it can happen here, it can — and very well might — happen in their country as well.
There are fringe dwellers waiting in the wings throughout the world hoping to step in and take over when enough fear, paranoia and anger are generated, seemingly offering powerful alternatives: blaming and subsequently excluding or even crushing minorities or whichever reliable scapegoat is available; threatening responsible journalists with imprisonment; and beginning a “registry” for outsiders or apostates (but not gun owners). Essentially, the Trump campaign.
The longer we’re away, the more we miss Vermont. We look forward to coming home. What we are not looking forward to one bit however, is going back in time — which apparently is where the president-elect wants to take us. And like many other Americans — the majority of Americans — we’re not going backwards.
