Bleak Beauty Blog

What happened was a national election — In a dark time when some people thought there would be no election. Others that troops would be in the streets. That ICE would be at the polls. That people would be kept from voting and even if they did vote every single election would be contested ad nauseum. That if the Trumpites lost, there would be violence, and disruption. None of those things happened. We had an election. I was born during World War Two, when Roosevelt was president. In the first election I recall I was saying “Doody on Dewey” (he lost to Truman.)

When I reached adult hood , I normally did not vote. I thought Democracy was in the streets, that the way to affect change was through demonstrations, such as the glorious Civil Rights Movement, the massive anti-Vietnam war movement, through my own work in the media, and in more recent times through Occupy (which established the ongoing attack on the “One percent”. ). If I did vote it was for hopeless candidates like Eldridge Cleaver. Then I got older, had property, waved to policemen, and considered voting. I might have voted for the first Bill Clinton only to regret it after the genocide in Rwanda (he apologized for his inaction after the fact.).

This election did matter. It proved that we can have an election during an American dictatorship. When I was young I lived in Atlanta. The Governor was Lester Madox who was in the Ku Klux Klan (he denied it). He also hit Movement people with baseball bats that tried to enter his segregated Atlanta restaurant. In this election, a Black woman was elected governor of Georgia. It took sixty years. And it happened because of SNCC, the SCLC, Julian Bond, John Lewis and all the tireless workers for a better world, over the decades. That’s progress. Out of the darkness of Fascism blossoms Freedom. In Mississippi, where Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were murdered in the woods for doing voter registration work, a Black man has been elected to the US Senate, the first since Reconstruction. A Pueblo Indian woman, once homeless, has been elected Governor of my home state of New Mexico. Natives were not allowed to vote in New Mexico until 1948, when I was six. Non-English speaking Alaska Natives were excluded from voting until 1965, when I was twenty there. Alaska, still counting, is about to elect an Indigenous woman to the Senate. That’s progress.

For all the ugliness, of living with Fascism, of watching people tortured with gas and shot to death in broad daylight by ICE, the Pretorian Guard of Herr Trump, we have had an election, with glorious results. May it stop his stupid arch, and maybe in our lifetime, bring all the President and his corrupt cronies before the bar of Justice, via a reconstructed Justice Department of which he has gutted and perverted.

Here in the East Village of New York City people are free. They were Free before the election, and are Free right now. I work in a skate board park, which attracts humans of every sort in an unsupervised example of joyous anarchy. The park has Whites, and Jews, and Blacks and Asians, and my favorite, Trans girls of every race. There is not supervision. Police almost never enter the park. The park has functioned like this for thirty years. It is a celebration of American Freedom. Freedom before Trump. Freedom during Trump. Freedom after Trump.