election 2016 – Elizabeth DeOrnellas

The election I lost

I have tried and tried to figure out what it must feel like to be Hillary Clinton, waiting for the dawn of this Inauguration Day. I will never fully be able to understand what it feels like to come that close to our highest, hardest glass ceiling and be viscerally reminded that our nation is not ready. I am trying to remind myself that our kids are ready. They do not understand why their leaders do not see that the world has already changed.

On the eve of Inauguration Day 2017, I want to tell the story of the election I lost.

This is not a story I tell very often.

It is long, and it is complicated, and it is fiercely personal in the way that only a campaign can be. An election campaign turns a candidate from a private figure into a public figure. For a first timer, the loss of privacy is jarring. For a first timer who had always chosen to remain on the press side of the press / government divide, the idea that my name, photo, and platform were to appear on the newspaper’s front page seemed like an absurdity.

I had always conceptualized the press as a behind-the-scenes role. One of my best friends, a fellow Tar Heel who I met in a seminar course on chaos theory our freshman year, had taken the opposite track. She served on Honor Court for years and then ran for Student Body President as an outsider, staffing her campaign with fellow intellectuals, most of whom had more or less avoided the Student Government scene while at Carolina, preferring to spend their time working for student-run nonprofits or think tanks rather than serving in Student Congress or the Executive Branch. She had to attend endless campaign forums, hosted by any student group with enough clout to demand an appearance from presidential candidates. I had to do one press conference (for the aforementioned front page printing of my platform). I remember it as one of the most awkward experiences of my life.

The Daily Tar Heel limited its Editor-in-Chief candidates to an 800-word platform. I remember this word limit because I stuck to it. My opponent did not.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About War

Some days I think all I have to do as a teacher is just get out of the way. Shine enough light into the darkness that kids can see their own brilliance. Or maybe tell enough truth about the world that students can see the darkness, and that’s when they discover their own inner light.

I’ve been struggling with this pervasive sense – on social media, in the mainstream media, in pop culture, in everyday discussions – that our country is at war with itself. Trump’s election win seems to be the culmination of a host of unsettling, depressing trends that have stoked fear, anger and anxiety. Those trends include (but are certainly not limited to):

-Hyperpolarization fueled by filtered news feeds and the rise of fake news

-Increasingly antagonistic partisan politics and the collapse of bipartisan political efforts (which fuels a collapse in our collective faith in the effectiveness of government institutions)

-Identity politics that sow divisiveness and reject unity / identity politics that raise issues Americans aren’t ready or willing to accept as reality and honestly discuss (the perception of that issue pretty much breaks down along party lines)

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In Honor of My Favorite Nasty Woman

To the highest, hardest glass ceiling – and those who cracked it

The poem below is an experiment in persona poetry. I love reading persona poetry (and using it to teach students about point of view), but sometimes I find writing persona poetry to be problematic. I think that’s because I’ve put so much time into reminding myself that we all have our own filters and therefore it’s nearly impossible to truly know another’s mind; writing in someone else’s voice can feel presumptuous. However, it is an excellent way to build empathy. Consider the following a paean crossed with an elegy (although I’m reluctant to use that latter word, knowing her work is far from over).

Chelsea Clinton, on my mother

Remember that

She sheltered me

And so did my father

When I was a kid

And they wanted me to be free

To be a kid,

Regardless of the color of my house

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Politics in the Classroom

The first presidential election that I remember is Bush vs. Gore, and to this day I’m impressed that we got all the way through that year of civics without anyone being able to discover what party our eighth grade teacher supported.

Looking back on it, I think it’s quite possible that she truly was a moderate, and that made it easy for her to stay neutral. I remember how horrified she was by how polarized our class was and how much energy she put into making us think about the election issue by issue instead of relying on the party line.

In 2012, I pulled off the same trick. I had half my journalism class convinced I was voting for Romney simply because I made them analyze both candidate’s platforms.

This year, I found it impossible to stick to that line. I told all my students that I wanted them to feel free to express whatever political opinion they held. I encouraged them to play devil’s advocate. I also told them I simply couldn’t stay neutral – not in the face of a candidate who was willing to throw away all the rules.

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Dear Michelle Obama

You said, “When they go low, we go high.”

I’ve been trying.

It’s just really hard for me to stay neutral in this election.

I could teach an entire class on understatement with just that sentence.

This year, the politics are personal.

I can’t listen to a presidential candidate call for a ban on all Muslims, knowing I went to Prom with a Muslim from Pakistan.

I can’t listen to a candidate call Mexicans rapists, knowing all the times my students have been ecstatic to go home to visit Mexico.

I can’t listen to a candidate call immigrants criminals, knowing how many times I’ve seen a student break down because they can’t afford college without papers.

I can’t listen to a candidate call sexual assault “locker room talk,” when I know 1 in 4 college-age women in this country have been sexually assaulted. I teach high school. Sometimes I can hear that clock ticking. Sometimes it feels like a bomb is about to go off.

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No, I’m not surprised. I am angry.

I have been trying all day not to write a rant.

I tried to channel my inner “Whoa. OK” Hillary shoulder shimmy. That just made me angry that Hillary has to make her well-earned exasperation cute in order to appear “likeable.”

I listened to Hillary quote Michelle and thought, “When they go low, we go high.” That seems like valid life advice – after all, if there’s one person whose steely grace I’d like to epitomize, it’s Michelle.

Then I listened to the debate.

I listened to a journalist clearly define sexual assault and a presidential candidate dismiss it as “locker room talk.”

I thought about what “locker room talk” means to me. I grew up with Title IX. For me, a locker room is where I learned from female teammates how to be strong. Where I learned what being a captain means. Where I learned the line between celebration and consolation is perilously thin.

Locker rooms were a safe place for me. The talk that happened there felt empowering.

That’s not the kind of “locker room talk” Trump meant.

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The State of Our Union

There’s something about this current election cycle that feels disjointed. We’re entering the part where the horse race becomes real, but it still feels as if the parties are running on two completely separate tracks.

I’m obviously not the only one meditating on how the country got so divided. In the middle of our nation’s most stage-managed political event, our President sounded a note that rang with an almost wistful honesty:

“A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. This is a big country — different regions, different attitudes, different interests. That’s one of our strengths, too. Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, fiercely, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.

But democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice. It doesn’t work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise, or when even basic facts are contested, or when we listen only to those who agree with us. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention. And most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest.

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