on thirst for a woman president in the age of global pandemics and trump

There’s this meme: “Give Trump a chance they said…3 years later the whole country is unemployed, locked in the house, wiping their asses with coffee filters.”

Lately I have been thinking about the complex road that America went on to get to this particular moment, and my thoughts still spin in circles. Reading the news when it comes especially to immigration, the climate or any aspect of the environment, not to mention race, domestic violence and/or a global pandemic can cause me to disassociate. I know I’m not the only one with childhood trauma who finds the whole Trump era a lot.

On the day before Elizabeth Warren endorsed Joe Biden for president a friend posted an article from the Gray Zone where a white male reporter spoke for the people of Venezuela in asserting that Warren is no different than Trump. I felt annoyance burn through me like a California wildfire. Then the question to speak or to say nothing. The thoughts. The self-questioning about those thoughts.

This is the age of the pandemic and trump. I ask myself, was my thirst for a woman president somehow what led me to my current choice of voting for Joe Biden verses Donald Trump? A perverted inversion of The Secret where the opposite of what you wish for most deeply is called into being? Elizabeth Warren isn’t even a candidate anymore and there is an impulse on the left to still annihilate her. Why? I ask myself. And then why do I care? She isn’t even my candidate anymore. But — the rub: I do care.

Decades ago Betty Friedan called “the woman question” a “problem without a name.” Shouldn’t there be better names for it now than the clunky tired ones I carry around in my head?

I lost my job right before this pandemic. I was humiliated at work when I asked to be treated the same way my two male colleagues were treated when they were promoted after five years, instead my boss took pains to try to fire me — enraged to be accused of sexism. I filed a complaint. Showed proof I did eleven percent more of our business than my two male colleagues with better pay and seniority. And I still lost my job in the end. How do you prove sexism? I lost my job right before a global pandemic. One more trauma in an era chalk full of them. Where does my trauma end and your trauma begin? Where does your trauma end and mine begin? I’ll be damned some days if I can clearly tell you.

So a friend wrote recently on her Facebook page that she would vote for her own rapist for president over Trump. I appreciated her honesty. Yes. That might seem to be the kind of self annihilation and humiliation routinely expected from American women on election days. Yes, I would love for there to be a national conversation about how we are still at this point in 2020. And yes, I would vote for the guy who raped me over Trump too. My rapist is not a person I ever want to see again. And my rapist’s voice is not a voice I ever want to hear again. For all the reasons. But I would put up with that hurt to never see or to hear Trump’s voice again in one of those White House briefings. To send off the man who introduced America to tender age camps. Where immigrants already suffering from overcrowded conditions are growing sick with COVID-19.

My friend, when I asked him to hold men as accountable for their mistakes as women are, asked me if I hold accountable the white women who voted for Trump. And that was a good and a fair challenge. I’ve tried. And I’ve also failed to.

I’ve written poems. I’ve had a lot of discussions that have gone nowhere with my own mother. My mom is a Fox news junkie who didn’t vote for Trump. But she believes the lies. I already lost my father to Fox news a few years ago. Nothing I share with my mom is as valuable to her as what Hannity has to say. Her economic interests and mine don’t align. She is supported by a white man. Gender discrimination when she experienced it in the workplace was an embarrassment. But she didn’t lose the means to feed her children over it. She had a “provider.” I provide for myself. She’s not voting for me or for herself. She’s voting for my dad’s world. She didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 because he was “crude,” but she’s come to see him as representing her/their interests. Did I mention she’s a big fan of walls?

If I’ve had no impact on her it’s not from a lack of effort. There is a text message chain to prove it. I told her a few months ago I would only visit her in Seattle again after Trump leaves office. Whenever that is.

Sitting in a dentist office chair a couple of days after London Breed declared San Francisco’s state of emergency, I realized this could mean never seeing my mom again if she gets this disease. She has comorbidities like diabetes. I started crying. The God Damned evil helplessness.

Not just my situation. For all the families ripped apart. And the senseless cruelty of every single day of news headlines and of violence in the streets. And doctors and nurses being exposed to deadly disease for the lack of 75 cent masks. For this nurse. For these essential workers.

Selfish. This is the early female training that gets deep into your bones. If you do something for yourself — if you want something for yourself that’s selfish. I expressed admiration and maybe a little longing for Jacinda Ardern on a friend’s page and she, a white millennial woman, accused me of being a fluffy white feminist.

Fluffy?

I would feel represented or more so by Stacy Abrams, Kamala Harris than most white women politicians. I connect with Stacy Abrams’ refusal to be debt shamed into not running for office. I connect with the look on Harris’ face as she examined the child separation policy. As I connect with Warren’s nerdy plans and eagerness.

Voting is about emotions, but not sentimentality. In the end as a trauma survivor I vote for harm reduction where I don’t have the option of harm elimination. The climate. The people I love. The people I don’t know but who also deserve less corruption, more justice and fairness. The Post office. And life.

Is it selfish to ALSO wish for your biology to be more represented than it has ever been before in the history of your country? A lot of people whose biology has already been represented (most of those for over two hundred years) certainly seem to see this wish as shallow and vain and selfish. Maybe our female selfishness got what it deserved in Trump, they hint. Those crazy white ladies crying in the SNL skit of election night when Trump took office. Crazy because they didn’t see how racism and a whitelash happens. And maybe crazy because they were crying that that we would have a president who didn’t care much about the deaths of Americans.

So I can be stoic. If there’s one thing the history of me proves, it’s that I can take it like a girl.

The logical part of me protests that the talent pool of effective leadership would certainly be a lot larger if it didn’t always have to be straight white guys.

And yes, I’ll admit: I still sometimes do ask myself, is this the current iteration of the old dream of a woman president? That Joe Biden ushers her in the front door as VP. All gentlemanly like? And bows out in 2024 while she graciously takes the reins?

A darker thought: did democratic women choose Biden over Klobochar or Bernie over Warren in part because they didn’t want to see Trump publicly abuse another woman the way he abused the last woman on the way to the presidency? Talk about triggering.

So the past three-and-a-half years are not how I imagined let alone hoped any of this would pan out. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in the era of Donald J. Trump and global pandemics it’s to expect less. People over symbols. Not people in addition to symbols. And then to take that “less” I expect and to stomp it into smaller and smaller bits.