The sun dawns on a new day · 7:23pm Nov 6th, 2020
It's hard to say that this isn't a historical moment for the entire world, much less just the United States.
Now, I don't get political often. Anyone who knows me would know this. As far as I can, I tend to stay out of political talk, but there is something that I just can't hold my tongue on. I pray, no matter your affiliations, no matter your allegiances, please, allow me to express myself.
Even I, someone living halfway around the world, understands fully the ramifications of what might just be the most important decision made in the 2000s thus far. The actions of Trump, for better or worse, have had impacts over here in Asia, sending ripples throughout the region -- ripples that may or may not have warped and corrupted and turned and changed, until the message, and the core, reached my friends in America and Australia and Europe in a slightly different way.
It was frustrating. It was down-heartening. And I can tell you for sure that not many people here in Asia have a very good perspective of one Mr. Donald 'Obese Turtle' Trump. But I won't get into the details. So far, talking about it has only ended up with more and more bloodshed.
Two nights ago, Trump declared his victory on national television.
I gave a little nod, resting in resignation. My heart weighed down, but I understood all this. I understood how much power and influence he had. And I understood the point of the democracy - everyone gets to CHOOSE. Even if I didn't believe in it, and even if I didn't support it, the choice matters. People do have that right. And I agree with that right.
All I could do was hope. Hope beyond hope.
And suddenly, today.
A miracle happened. When it almost seemed like Trump was going to win, the key states of PA, MI, WI and GA slid slowly out of his grasp. Trump flustered, of course. The world watched. A lot of accusations were flung. A lot of undemocratic acts, I personally feel, but that is neither here nor there.
But a miracle happened.
I couldn't believe it. And I still can't. In a way, it's quite surreal. Not the 'wave' that people had hoped for, sure. But still, a tiny splash in the other direction. A small counter-ripple, that might find its way across the world to heal what has been rent apart.
And so, I'd like to just say, to all my friends in America, who have come this far, who have fought and fought and fought --
thank you.
Thank you for fighting.
It might be a little bit premature, because EVERY VOTE MUST BE COUNTED, but I would just like to genuinely extend my thanks, and my heart, to all those who have voted on the side of victory, and I would like to sincerely welcome and accept President Kanye West as the new glorious leader of the free world. May he bring us forward into the future, and may he repair the ties that once bound us together as a planet.
To quote his wise, wise words:
Now that that don't kill me
Can only make me stronger
I need you to hurry up now
'Cause I can't wait much longer
~ Kanye West, Stronger. (To Nevada, god damnit hurry the FUCK up)
Yeah, you have no idea how happy I am. Still have to wait for the official call, and you know Trump is going to call for a legitimate recount in at least two states, but I'm pretty sure Biden will still take them. All he really needs are Nevada and Arizona—PA and GA aren't necessary—and I don't think the gap will be close enough for a legit recount. I think we can stay calm.
But just in case, I've had the TV on in the background on mute checking numbers for the past three days. Fingers crossed.
Yeah, maybe it's because we were closer, but it was obvious to me from day one that Trump's victory call was premature. He was deliberately trying to lock in a victory before all votes could be counted. All the local polls were crap, but the one thing that's been a reliable prediction so far has been that democrats mailed-in more ballots than Republicans (makes sense, the sitting Republican president was hostile to mail-in ballots). Trump is very likely out of office.
We are going to have a lot of rebuilding to do domestically, and I don't just mean getting back to the pre-Trump normal. I mean reversing both the gains he made culturally and finding ways to dismantle or sidestep the power of the senate (which likely remains in Repbulican hands as I write this). America becoming Empire again is... worrying. Trump's continuous dickwagging contest with China is probably over, so that's something.
We'll see what the future brings. I'm cautiously optimistic that some things get better in the short term, and maybe even doors open for gains in the long term. But as the last votes are counted, I'm also filled with anxiety.
There's so much we have to do.
I was an election judge on Tuesday.
I basically spent the last two days with my stomach in knots and running in and out of the bathroom with basically panic pee/poop. (I also drank so much water this week I could have thrown up clear liquid, I think. But hydrated!) Anxiety cranked up to eleven and my productivity at zero as I watched the results.
Today I felt the first real sign or relief in not just this week...but in a while.
So I understand. Hopefully this will help America heal. Or at least send us on a path that looks more like pre-2017 than the shit lord years of 2017-late 2020.
There's a looooot of kicking and screaming to get through first, and we aren't out of the woods. But at least we have the first sign that the nightmare may yet end.
If I can ask, where are you from? It's interesting that I know you via Dust and Harmony, and I always imagined the 'Cowboy Western' genre to have limited interest outside of America.
I'm gonna have to remember Obese Turtle. :)
I'm so happy about the results at the moment. Granted, it's going to be a while, now, to wait on the recounts, but even if we lose one of the recounts somehow, we'll still be alright. It's been a hell of a last few days, but it's the first real feeling of optimism and hope towards the future.
Maybe, just maybe, everything will start getting a little less worse.
5393341
I am from Singapore. Singaporean Chinese to be exact. Ni hao.
5393279
Naw man, Kanye gon' sweep.
5393393
Gotcha, thank you.
5393410
There's a lot of cowboys here in south east Asia. My daddy was a cowboy, and my momma was a cow.
They got together real well yee haw.
Or really, I just watched a lot of westerns as a kid, haha.
How has all this affected you and the rest of Singapore/China out of curiosity? I know our American perspective on things, but it'd be nice to hear details from the other side.
5393503
It's very hard to comment on this because the perspective of events that happened recently around some of my relative's homes (read: Hong Kong) is extremely skewed. As you probably are well aware, China's actions lately for many reasons have not been the best, and I think it is extremely necessary to mention that no one outside of China endorses a lot of what they do.
However, a lot of what happened in regards to Hong Kong specifically was exacerbated by a huge campaign by Trump to stir up trouble and cause unrest in the region as a huge smokescreen for whatever reason.
The reason why I am very very unwilling to discuss this is in more detail than what I will put here is because the perspectives of the truth of the situation are so incredibly different, and hits hard differently for many people, that it usually ends up poorly in discussion. Maybe after a year and things calm down.
Suffice it to say that a majority of Hong Kong citizens had to suffer through a lot of civil unrest due to the underground funding of some strangely unknown American sources. It was something that definitely could have actually been settled peacefully had external forces not meddled.
To make it clear, I am not anti-freedom nor am I anti-democracy. I am, however, against the fact that the whole situation was blown up and escalated out of proportion due to external meddling, incredible lies were told in order to paint China far more evil than they are (they're no saints, but I still do not enjoy lies), and Asia has had to suffer through a year or more of frustration and fighting because we were poked into fighting.
So, all in all, we're very tired. Very tired. I'm lucky to be in a very neutral country, so we don't really ally ourselves in full with either America or China, but Hong Kong and my relatives there have got it the worst, really. It was a nightmare even before Covid hit. We're glad to be out of the limelight, since Trump doesn't need to use 'freedom' as a distractor anymore. It's very telling that the rhetoric was pushed for 8 months and America just recently declined asylum for the rioters trying to flee the justice system of HK.
In the end, as Trump is doing right now with the voting, he had been lying about many many things all along, and so did Mike Pompeo.
As for China, most of SEA is also kind of sick of them for a lot of other various reasons, some true, some false, some once again exaggerated beyond belief.
What was really funny, though, was that the Chinese people (from the mainland, that is, not us) were actually supporting Trump's re-election for a while. Mainly because they thought it was hilarious to see Chinese comments praising Trump on pro-trump videos on youtube (which it was), but also because a lot of them semi-seriously knew that if Trump got 4 more years, China was actually going to be able to take over as the world's superpower.
I don't really want that, tbh, so another reason why I'm happy that Kanye West is winning.
Anyway, thing is, it's all a big mess. It's a huge giant mess fueled by a lot of lies. I'm sorry to have to shit on America like this. I don't feel it's my right as he is not my president, but he has really, truly, caused the world to fracture. He fueled a lot of fires for the sake of the smoke. In the end, the whole world suffers. I can't understand how human beings like this exist in this world. And I'm absolutely, utterly sorry that he had to be yours. He's not even as cuddly, rumbly and tumbly as ours.
5393574
He wasn't the president we needed, but some days I feel like he was the president we (America, not the rest of the world) deserved. I just wish his existence as such didn't have so many international ramifications.
5394301
Maybe! My perspective is definitely limited to how he affected the rest of the world. But that is as it is.
If he did a little good, I'm genuinely happy. I hope Biden will be able to do MORE good. I hope he can help to repair broken ties and help to undo some of the lies.
More than the person in charge, I just wish everyone would move in togetherness.
In what way do you feel he was deserved, in your opinion?
5394331
We deserved him because we as a country have gone downhill for long enough that we actually elected someone like him. The fact enough people wanted him as president and that this current race has been so close is its own proof we kinda deserve everything that's happened by his hand. I'm not opposed to having a non-career politician as a president, but like goddamn did we scrape the bottom of the barrel for this one.
In regards to the good things he's done, it's mainly just economy stuff. The economy got a little better in terms of overall numbers—number of jobs, percent unemployment, and the like (assuming they weren't skewed to improve outlook)—but those are numbers that I'm not proficient in crunching in terms of interpreting beyond "hmm, yes, these numbers are better than before."
But then covid happened. And by God, did it happen, and even more by God did he do fuck all about it and why is it still happening fml. As a healthcare professional, I've had to deal with this bullshit day in and day out since... Fuck, I don't even remember anymore, was it March when it actually became a thing? And it's all cause that fuck stick couldn't just wear a goddamn mask and tell his people to wear one, too. He tried turning covid into a political tool, and all it ended up doing was killing thousands of people and undo any and all economic strides he had accomplished up to that point.
Granted, those thousands of people would have died to covid eventually, yes (they would have been different thousands of people, but the number of deaths to covid would have been certain regardless). Covid would have made landfall in the US no matter what we did—i know enough stupid people personally to know we couldn't keep it out. But it stops being about the death rate and about the strain on the healthcare system, which was already under a good bit of stress because healthcare is shit in the US. Life doesn't stop because covid happens... People still need their elective surgeries, other pneumatic patients still need their intubation. GSW/MVA patients still need hospital beds, as do kidney failure patients, liver disease patients, surgery step-down patients, etc., and so many other issues that covid clogs up and lessens the QoL and prognoses for other patients whose outlooks may well have been just fine before the covid factor. It's not about how many will get sick and possibly die, but at what rate and how that affects everyone else.
All he had to do was go, "masks are cool. Get a cool mask, they're the coolest things, nobody wears masks better than we do, we're the best mask wearers," to get his base to follow, and covid may well have become "just another flu" like people thought it'd be, without any of the economic impacts the stay-at-home orders caused.
And there's more other shit that he did a piss poor job with (some of which was both exacerbated by and blown out of proportion by our media, which doesn't help anyone). He did help broker that peace deal between those two middle eastern countries—don't remember which (or at least got them to openly admit they already had one), which is kudos to him.
There's lots of stuff—too much, really—to both dive into and for me to remember or to even know happened in the first place, given how bad social media and regular media have gotten. But on a personal basis, my reasons for despising him are ludicrously simple: wear a fucking mask.
I thought Kanye won?
5394408
I recall that one of your ex presidents was an actor, right? Ronald Reagan? I think that's pretty cool.
But yeah... the covid thing. It's so weirdly politicized. I've actually had this conversation with my other friends in the US about how culture really makes a difference. I mean, here in South East Asia, especially amongst the Chinese-descendant countries like Singapore, Taiwan, China, Japan and Korea (one of them, anyway), we all don't really mind a little bit of government interference and daddying. Sure, it's a lot of 'freedom' being given up, but our rates speak for themselves. Most of our countries adopted a scanning system where we have to scan when we go in and out of any shop or any public area, and we also have tracking apps on our phones. When someone gets covid, everyone who was in contact with that person is immediately alerted and we can kind of make sure everyone's careful and not panicking. ANd of course, mask-wearing was already a thing here before covid anyway.
But I felt that this kind of mentality would never be accepted in the West. Not just America, but a lot of western countries have a culture which hates being told what to do by authorities. Which is fair! I mean, freedom is cool, I agree with freedom. Of course I'm biased a little bit to the other end of like... freedom is good but we still need to make concessions because of a little thing called empathy for others.
I think Trump latched onto this super hard. He latched onto the fact that a lot of his supporters love too much freedom and can't be nice to others. He fed it and it grew into a mindset. And now masks are just... political. I've been reading the news. It's worse than ever over there. I'm really sorry about it. I had no idea you were in the health-care industry but man I can't imagine how it feels. I can't imagine how it feels to just want to help and save people and have so many people tell you it's fake and not be grateful.
But I'm grateful to people like you. Even here, it's only been contained because of the swift movement of doctors and government working hand in hand.
So keep it up, man. Don't lose faith. Don't lose hope.
Also man, did you see Trump try to take credit for the Pfizer Vaccination?
Which is funny because most of his followers think Vaccs cause autism.
I want to slap him about his big flubber head sometimes.
Also yes, Kanye won. What did I say? Biden? That was voter fraud. Kanye won.