You are sitting with a group of politically engaged friends in your cramped apartment in Washington, DC, following on TV the results of what everyone present agrees is probably the most consequential presidential election in modern American history, when at 1:20am the camera zooms in on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago election-watch party in Palm Beach, Florida, where a prolonged roar erupts after Pennsylvania, the clincher state, is called for the Republican nominee.
It was over. American voters had chosen who they wanted to be their next president. Those election results were written neither in the stars nor in tea leaves, but rather in the votes American voters had cast in ballot boxes from coast to coast: Kamala D. Harris won 224 electoral college votes and Donald J. Trump, who needed 270 to get the drop on his rival, won 292.
At moments like these, when you are watching them gradually come to life on your TV screen, numbers seem to have not just voice but texture. So, you and your friends, liberal folks one and all, tell yourselves, in those early, fraught hours of this Wednesday morning, that you are — yes, indeed you are — staring down the barrel of a Trump victory.
And there is nothing anyone can do about it. Get used to it. Eat humble pie and listen to Kamala Harris, the second woman to be defeated in her effort to become president — at the hands of the same man — deliver her concession speech.
Privacy of a voting booth
You think of the joy and moral optimism with which Election Day started for you a mere 15 hours earlier, a time when Americans began to head to the polls to choose whom they wanted as their president, a ritual repeated every four years ever since 1789, when George Washington was unanimously elected for the first of his two terms in office as chief executive of the then young, newly independent United States of America.
You’re American, so you too, like other registered voters, head to the polling station nearest you (often a public space such as a library, a church or a school) in Washington, where you live, to cast your ballot behind a curtain, or between two partitions, in the privacy of a voting booth.
You leave your house around noon. It is beautiful out. You walk along Connecticut Avenue (Conn Av, to the locals), the main drag in your neighbourhood, on your way to cast your ballot at Edmund Burke School — its gym today converted into a polling station — a progressive prep college named after Edmund Burke, the 18th century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, to whom is attributed the saying, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
And, yes, it is indeed a beautiful though somewhat windy day. the foliage on the trees is already beginning to explode in shades of golden crimson and amber. As you walk the tree-lined avenue, you watch, enchanted, dying leaves, pulled by the wind, falling to the ground, each choosing its own way of doing that — in a straight line, a flutter, a pirouette or as if in a whirlpool.
You love this neighbourhood, Cleveland Park, where you have lived for well over half a century, virtually your entire adult life, watching yourself transform from a young buck to an old geezer and the neighbourhood transform, in reverse, from a sleepy part of town to a vibrant urban quarter with its own distinctive rhythmic intensity.
Finally, you get to the polling station, which you discover is occupied by election officials, helped by young volunteers, who, after checking your voter registration card, hand you a blank, numbered ballot to fill out and then guide you on how to slide it into the ballot box.
Leap to a maturing consciousness
One of these volunteers today is a young woman in her early twenties wearing a hijab. The image of her makes you wonder how the times have changed in this dynamic nation of immigrants, how each wave of them, over the generations, has given an added pitch of meaning to America’s character as a culture and a polity, a culture and a polity that are anchored in the ideal of E pluribus unum, From Many One.
So you head to the voting booth and stare at your blank ballot. No, you say to yourself, I am not voting for a man whose political platform — if “political platform” it can be called — is tethered to a anarchic view of the world, nor am I voting for a woman who was vice president in an administration that many critics have argued, not altogether implausibly, was complicit in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Mine, you tell yourself, with pen poised in mid-air, will be a write-in vote, that is, a protest vote given to a third party you know has Buckley’s chance of winning — effectively a wasted vote.
True, every vote counts. But truer still is the fact that the powers that be will count your wasted vote and discover that you object to being told that you must choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. And now you feel good at having put in your two cents worth and head back home with the “I Voted” lapel sticker the young woman with the hijab had given you after you emerged from the voting booth.
When you get back home, you stick it on the fridge, along with several other yellowed-out stickers from the 14 other presidential elections you had voted in since 1974, when cold warrior Richard Nixon was pitted against historian George McGovern — stickers meant to give you bragging rights as an engaged citizen who had done his civic duty.
After you see your friends to the door, at a time when the night is not yet quite day, and you turn the lights out, you feel sad. And then, as you begin to drift into deep sleep, you wonder why feel sad for this nation, now Trump’s America, where you have lived your entire adult life and where your children were born and made their original leap to a maturing consciousness.
— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile
