I am an assistant professor of English at a small community college in South Texas. I try to leave my political baggage at the classroom door, but I wanted to believe that my students, in whom I try to foster critical-thinking skills, would vote for Hillary Clinton.
I had never felt so strongly about an election in my voting lifetime. I used to have confidence that even the more conservative candidate could serve as my president despite our differences. I had always regarded those who voted against my candidate with a respectful nonchalance.
Not this time. As the election grew more and more contentious, I felt something new bubble up inside of me: anger. I was angry at voters blind, despite the marquee evidence before them, to what Trump is: a lying, delusional, logical-fallacy-addicted misogynist and bigot who instigates fear and hatred, a textbook demagogue.
My fury just about spilled over when one particularly troublesome student waltzed into class a few minutes late while proudly wearing his bright-red “Make America Great Again” hat. “What could you possibly be thinking?” I wanted to ask him. This student is Hispanic and was supporting a candidate who had repeatedly insulted and generalized minorities. I wanted to dismiss him from class right then and there. Not an option. Unacceptable. I felt the irrationality, the utter unprofessionalism, of the impulse.
The day before the election, I, like millions of Hillary supporters, felt confident enough to breathe a sigh of relief. I actually felt guilty for letting my own political agenda almost get the best of me. My anger started to subside.
Then the unthinkable happened.
I arrived on campus the morning after the election with the same numb, terrified outlook I had on 9/11. A deep, amorphous fear: What next? No, of course an election isn’t an immediate tragedy in the way a terrorist attack is. But in the longer run, it could be a far greater tragedy. And on November 9, I felt the same acid stomach and pressure on my shoulders that I had felt 15 years before, as an undergraduate on September 11.
I was relieved that the troublesome, Trump-supporting student was not in class. If he had been, I might have lost it. I was terrified over our future — hell, over our present — and I knew he’d have an “I told you so” smirk on his face. I had never explicitly revealed my politics to the class, but, college-educated, earning my living in the humanities, and not originally from Texas — how hard could I be to figure out?
In my next class that day, creative writing, I felt more at home. I saw the sleep deprivation on students’ faces as they settled in. I sat up front and quietly took attendance. And then it just came out, after a student made a joke about having a nightmare that America elected a fascist only to realize, upon waking up, that it was true. The dark laughter turned to a somber quiet.
I told them how sad and hurt I was over this horrific outcome. I told them I had no lesson plan for them. The election results had derailed my thinking one state at a time.
They joined the discussion with their own fears and sadness. How could the country slide backward? More than half of the population of our city might be racially profiled. About 75 percent of Del Mar’s student population will be in fear of just coming to campus, as accounts of racially charged vandalism and harassment begin to pop up across the nation. The most powerful office in the world will now, it seems, be pro-sexual-harassment. Civil liberties? Soon, quite possibly, to be a memory. Climate change? Accelerated by an administration that doesn’t believe in it, never mind that if sea levels continue to rise, our port city, Corpus Christi, will be swallowed up.
We tried our hand at political analysis. Hillary had been a little vague on some points about her foreign-policy plans, a bit defensive about emails and Benghazi. But Donald Trump’s answers during the first debate would not have passed my English Composition 101. His paragraphs were unfocused, his supporting evidence nowhere to be seen, and he ignored the prompt. Maybe something unusual will happen, we speculated: impeachment or prison. (Malcolm Gladwell thinks it could happen.)
The session reminded me of the writing class I took on 9/11 as an undergrad. My instructor just let us talk and start the process of feeling and healing. She was sensitive and gracious.
Now I was leading that process. How do you address group shock? The usual approaches won’t do. We settled on watching funny dog videos on YouTube. In one, a dog tries to take a stick through an opening that is too narrow — a metaphor, we suggested, for Hillary’s trying to win Michigan. We viewed a short documentary about one of the world’s largest species of bats, often viewed as the Filipino version of the chupacabra, the legendary beast that sucks the blood from livestock. That too was a metaphor — guess for whom. The humor in the room was gloomy and fleeting.
The students have shared some of their darkest secrets in poetry and thinly veiled fiction. Three women have written about being abused, having miscarriages, and overcoming male-dominated households. Imagine their thoughts about the boastful groper in the West Wing. One student has written about becoming the stepfather of a child who was the product of a deceitful and dangerously abusive prior relationship. What will Trump World have in store for that child or those of others in the class?
That morning, teaching nothing was more important than teaching anything. Students needed to see an instructor dealing with the terrifying and complicated future about to unfold. They needed to see they weren’t alone.
