It Was Never This Way Before

I've had the privilege to vote for 10 years and here is what I'm still learning.

I’m not great with history. I wish I were.

I tend to scroll back in the digital textbooks when I’m curious about something. I grew up fascinated by the different facts about our presidents, always interested in what they did with their time. But beyond that, I admittedly did not understand much.

My first opportunity to vote in a presidential election was in 2016.

I know, poor me.

It was Hilary Clinton v. Donald Trump. I was surrounded by a mixed bag of a state that hurled things like “lock her up!” or “orange dictator!”

“Has it always been like this?” I asked my grandparents recently. They’ve been around more elections then me, after all. But never in this digital age. An age where we get live-tweets (aka other peoples’ opinions) notified across our cell phones. Or where people make mocking photos and videos that go viral. The influence of social media is still a hot debate but I think we can all agree on one thing: it’s concerning.

Historically, we had political cartoons in our daily newspapers, which you can see here. That’s about as close of a comparison as I can find to the political climate on social media in our modern world.

2024 brought us another woman against Trump. While I commend Biden for acknowledging when it was time to quit, I can’t help but be bitter that we thought America would be accepting of a woman.

Yes, a lot of us were. I was. I think she is way more qualified than most men running for any sort of political office. But America, from my point of view, doesn’t. Not 8 years after we had “lock her up” as a chant by a man now convicted of 34 felonies.

It’s always been that way. This is what a lot of us mean when we say “fuck the patriarchy!” Ask any female in business. Our voice is questioned, our motives are over-analyzed, our existence is compared to every other human comparable.

But that’s what our democracy gave us.

And for a moment, I really believed a woman could be president.

To be clear, it’s not usually about gender for me. But in this situation, it was, because we were going up against a man that has successfully gaslit so many of us into thinking he cares about the same things we do.

I watched my first presidential inauguration when Biden was sworn in. It wasn’t because it was Biden but because I had just never been home to watch it before. I found it moving and inspiring.

Today, I watched Trump’s inauguration. There were a lot of things obviously different. I’m not going to go into the doom and gloom like so many are but I will ask: why are we OK with his seats being filled by the millionaires and billionaires when his supporters are adamant he’s a man of the people? They do not represent the people.

Maybe it’s because his supporters haven’t actually been in a room with the ultra-rich. They don’t know what they don’t know.

Rich isn’t bad. I know that most of them worked for their money. It’s just strange considering how much power they hold compared to the working class. How much they talk about cutting the very services that help so many people who voted.

But they voted this man in and that is the way it is. I like to think that things won’t be as bad as people think it will be. I like to think that historically, we’ve overcome a lot of different political climates. That at our core, we are a democracy, and we won’t fold within ourselves. I like to think that eventually, people will use better judgment on social media and not be so easily persuaded one way or another. I like to think….I like to think….

It was never this way before. Before when social media was not a thing. When a TikTok ban was not such a controversial and sweeping headline.

Could you imagine talking about TikTok in the 1930s? We all need to touch grass, I fear.