Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues for almost 20 years.
BRATTLEBORO-Usually around this time I begin thinking about writing my cheery Christmas letter to share the highlights of another year in the life of our family. This year is different. I'm still trying to grasp what just happened and what it will mean for all of us.
My initial reaction to the results of the presidential election was blurted out in staccato texts to friends who were in the same state as I was: "Stunning!" "Horrific!" "Devastating!" "Dangerous!"
Then I entered an emotionally strange place that felt like a Venn diagram in which anxiety and numbness meet, creating an overlap that felt more like despair.
Now I'm asking myself how and why the shock of the election happened.
* * *
It started with questions.
How could a 34-time convicted felon and a man who was found guilty of sexual assault be able to run for president?
Why was the Justice Department so slow in moving forward on his trials?
How could the Supreme Court grant him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to if he were president again?
How could people vote for someone who lies incessantly, whose language is vile, whose racism and misogyny are so blatant, who dreams of being a dictator?
How was this not enough to stop him?
I moved to what I fear most: people like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Stephen Miller, the architects of Project 2025, and the other like-minded tyrants with eyes on taking control of every government agency and firing thousands of career civil servants.
I worried about what it would mean to close or limit agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and to ignore the ever-worsening climate crisis.
I thought about a country with such a broken, for-profit health care system that would result in skyrocketing illnesses and deaths (with no data to prove it), and millions of people suffering as a result. I wondered how bad it would get without vaccinations, fluoride, and Medicaid, reduced Medicare, and no insurance.
I thought of the women who will have no agency over their own lives, and I imagined the women who would die because they couldn't get reproductive health care when they were in crisis or who would be jailed for having a miscarriage.
I worried about a reprise of the Comstock Act that would ban abortion nationally and deny women any form of birth control (except sterilization, which some young women have already resorted to).
I worried about people of all ages who would be rounded up, separated, and held in the equivalent of prisons indefinitely.
I really worried about revenge politics, roundups of opposition leaders and activists, the disappearance of news outlets, and random violence.
As Robert Reich said in a piece in The Guardian the day after the election, "Countless Americans are endangered now on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America."
I also worried mightily about our lost standing in the global community and the threat of an expanded war in the Middle East as Ukraine is handed to Putin, who can then march into the NATO countries to start a third world war with nukes.
* * *
Then I began to question what kind of a country we have been historically and are at present. How did our culture allow this to happen?
I came to this conclusion: We are a country conceived and birthed by smart, visionary, educated men who were elite white supremacists wedded to racism, misogyny, religious singularity, patriarchy, and conformity.
What we are seeing now, it seems to me, is the underbelly of a United States that has always flourished, and has grown, in modern times, driven by color, caste, economic advantage or disadvantage, religious beliefs, ethnicity, power, and corrupted politics - all of which have divided us into Us and Them.
That makes for a dangerous, disquieted, and increasingly binary way to live. It stokes fear, it limits compassion and clear thinking, and people like Donald Trump rely on it for their own gains.
As an Instagram post said the day after the election, "America has showed its true character, and it's heartbreaking."
* * *
So where do I go from here?
My answer begins with my belief that resistance doesn't die, it re-emerges when it is vital to survival.
Early Americans knew that when they threw tea into Boston Harbor. Enslaved people resisted in various ways, including dancing and drumming. People stood up to McCarthyism and to an earlier American fascist movement in the 1930s and '40s.
We started labor movements and unions to protect workers, and we made sure women could vote by refusing food and enduring forced feeding. We resisted a war in Vietnam and successfully ended it.
It's in our DNA in huge numbers when things get bad because, ultimately, most of us refuse oppression, discrimination, exploitation, and evil, and we choose instead to embrace freedom and democracy.
There are some among us who don't get that yet, but they will soon see how powerful and effective it is.
Paraphrasing Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voter PAC the day after the election, we have what it takes to meet and overcome this moment, as our elders and ancestors did under unthinkably difficult circumstances.
We can draw on their strength and wisdom as we chart our way forward and join what is likely to be one of the largest resistance movements in history.
For now, those of us who opposed the election of Donald Trump must take a breath and remember all we did together to avert this outcome.
In that spirit, let's comfort one another as we regroup before continuing the fight for a compassionate country grounded in equality, justice, and sustainable freedom and democracy.
This Voices column was submitted to The Commons.
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