What Kamala Harris’ loss meant to me

My husband and I were at a Fox car rental agency about a mile away from LAX when we learned that President Joe Biden was stepping out of the presidential race and Vice President Kamala Harris was stepping in to take his place. My first thought was, is the country ready? But as her campaign built momentum and endorsements and excitement grew, I felt hopeful.

For the first time in years, since President Barack Obama’s presidency, I thought, (foolishly), that the country was turning around. I thought that the nation that’d elected Donald Trump once had learned its lesson and was ready to turn the page on a new chapter.

Of course, now we all know the outcome.

I’ve had some time to think about what the country will undergo with a second Trump term, and I’ve realized that I’m not just scared of what he and his cast of clowns will do, and how many people will suffer because of his cruelty and ineptitude, but also how true it is that no matter how educated, talented, creative, hard-working, how demure, and how mindful Black women are, we can still be bested by someone completely ill-equipped and undeserving.

A Harris presidency wouldn’t have just been great for the nation, which I’m sure it would have been, but it would have proven, to me at least, that on some small level, America, if given the chance, could do the right thing. The country built on a foundation of theft, rape, and death, could evolve and be its best self. But, that didn’t happen, and now, I’m not sure it ever will.

If I sound resigned, I guess to some extent I am. I will always use whatever platform I have to give a voice to the underdog and in the next four years I will not stop writing about issues I believe need a light shined on them. But, that doesn’t mean that I have any faith left that this country will ever represent my values or will ever truly be equitable.

As we armchair quarterback the outcome of a Trump win and a Harris loss, and interrogate this group or that and what this party or that party did or didn’t do,  let’s simply face the truth. We are largely a nation of hate. We feed on it and like overpriced eggs and gas, we are willing to do anything for it.

Hate drives our economy, permitting our leaders to invest in wars over health care and in guns over children. We hate anyone who takes even a crumb from our mouths, though they may need it more than we do. We are a culture of self-loathing, hating fat and ugly and old, and poor and Black and brown skin and foreign, science, history, and smart and rich and different.

We build each other up and we gleefully take each other down.

I don’t know where my family will go in the future or what nation will ever feel like a place we belong, but this can’t be the best of the best on this little planet. Can it?

I have to wonder if it’s the place or those who inhabit it.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” — James Baldwin