I
n the spring of 2016, I voted for Sen.
Bernie Sanders in the Democratic
primary for president. I’d gone to
a rally that March, and Sanders had said
things I’d never heard any politician say. He
wanted to give Americans universal health
care, economic equality, affordable college
education, a more sustainable economy and
easier access to reproductive health services.
When I recall my excitement at these
endeavors — and his — I feel the frustrated,
pointless burn of misplaced naivete.
The future I imagined through him is so
very different than the one I live in now.
Even though Sanders lost the Democratic
primary in June 2016, I was still excited to
vote in the presidential election. I thought
that when I voted for former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, I would be voting for
America’s first woman president. Besides,
the fact that Sanders made it all the way to
the primary felt like an omen of a coming
progressive wave. This was the world my
friends and I lived in: one where experts
told us it was very likely a woman would be
our next president, one where truth and
democracy seemed possible even when they
failed to create justice.
On Nov. 8, 2016, I voted in Palmer Commons
and immediately texted my mother. She sent
me a selfie with an “I voted” sticker on her
forehead. I promised to call her later that
night so we could celebrate together. My mom
was one of the 6,972 people in Emmet County
who voted for Hillary Clinton. 10,616 cast
their ballot for Donald Trump. Michigan —
like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — would go
Republican for the first time since the 1980s.
As I walked through the Diag to my
Sociology exam on Nov. 9, 2016, I tried not
to let my mind wander away from Trump’s
win. Later, my professor projected Hillary
Clinton’s concession speech live in my history
class. It seemed to mark the magnitude of
the occasion. We were unashamed to cry
with one another. A girl who had defended
Trump during a class discussion the week
before excused herself to the bathroom for
a long time. When she returned, she looked
embarrassed and only a little smug. I almost
felt guilty that she was excluded from our
collective grief.
As college students, national politics are at
once distant and immediate. From the protest
of the Vietnam War at Kent State University
to the anti-Apartheid demonstrations at
Harvard University and Wesleyan College,
college campuses have always been hotbeds of
political and social anxiety. Protests centered
on individual issues — U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, Israel-Palestine,
Brett Kavanaugh — still abound at the
University. But many of the anxieties that
have accompanied the Trump administration
are difficult to understand and articulate,
much less protest against effectively. What
good would it do to march around Ann Arbor
with signs decrying Russian collusion? To
chant in the Diag about nepotism in Trump’s
White House? The menace of the Trump
administration vacillates between insidiously
subtle and glaringly apparent, and students
are coping with this uncertainty in a number
of ways.
College culture has become self-conscious,
half-ironic hedonism: Juuling and throwing
away Juuls, binge-drinking but fetishizing
health food, using Tinder for meaningless
hookups while also secretly hoping to find
love. We want immediate pleasure because
things seem so bad right now, but we’re not
ready to abandon a future that doesn’t require
indulging in these temporary escapes.
Two years after the 2016 election, my
classmates and I are living in the world that
many of us feared. I am trying to remember
a time when there wasn’t an endless barrage
of news every day –– news that only serves
as a reminder of how deeply bizarre and
unbearably tragic Trump’s America is. For
college students like myself, it’s hard to
remember anything else. I’ve been having
an unsettling sense of déjà vu this semester.
Just as they did during the first semester of
my freshman year, everyone is talking about
voting. It’s making me think about how the
world has changed over the past two years,
and about how college is both a protection
against, and a microcosm of, our country’s
anxieties.
I’ve been wondering recently: Was I just
guileless before the 2016 election? I know now
that I entered college lulled to complacency by
a false hope and security. As a white person, I
recognize that America has always felt much
safer for me than it has for people who hold
minority identities. Still, I think it was more
than youthful ignorance, white privilege and
economic security that made the world seem
so different two years ago. This is why I’m
struggling to reconcile the near-immediate
impact of the election on my sense of America
and of the world.
Has everything always been so hateful and
violent? Have people always been so cruel and
selfish?
Sometimes my friends and I play a game
where we name everything we are worried
about. We start small and then we work
our way out, and out, and out. This makes
the scope and depth of our fears feel almost
comical. It’s much worse to let the specter of
our anxieties remain private.
Many of my friends share my identities:
white, woman, middle-class, heterosexual.
These majority identities protect us. Like
numerous students at the University, I do not
face immediate bodily harm from some of the
things I am afraid of. At a university whose
student body is majority white and wealthy,
there’s a striking disconnect between anxiety
and tangible impact.
There is a pervading sense on campus —
among students as well as professors — that
we are living in an unprecedented time, no
matter what identities we hold. People are
constantly making broad reference to the
news or what’s been going on recently. They
never need to explain. We all know. We are all
worried.
What are we worried about? We are
worried about our exam next week. We are
worried about paying off our student loans.
We are worried about getting a job when we
graduate and about leaving the warm bubble
of college. We are worried about being shot in
our classrooms before we even have a chance
to leave. We are worried about being shot in
our synagogues and in our churches and in
our newsrooms and at the movies and at the
grocery store and in the street. We are worried
about not being able to get birth control or a
legal abortion, about being sexually assaulted
and having our attacker walk free.
We are worried the National Guard will
fire at the migrant caravan. We are worried
Trump will issue an executive order to negate
the birthright clause. We are worried about
private prisons and nuclear weapons and
Flint’s water and gerrymandering and voter
fraud and Russian meddling in the 2016
election. We are worried about antibiotic
resistance, PFAS, the UN Climate Report,
Monsanto and the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Most of all, we are worried that as bad as
things seem now, we will remember these
years as the final ones of a dying country and
a dying world. We are worried that right now
is when we still had time to act — that these
are the days and months when we could have
saved ourselves and yet did not.
Of course, these issues did not begin when
Trump was inaugurated, and many of them
have nothing to do with him. Somehow,
though, they feel connected. The past 18
months have been struck through with a
particularly forbidden thrill. There is an
urgent, awful specialness to being young right
now. The threat of all-out chaos permeates
everything, giving each day an aura of tense
hyperreality.
For college students, it’s tempting to be
cynical — especially while we’re still on
campus and shielded, to some extent, by
the distraction of classes, social lives and
extracurriculars. It’s much more painful
to devote ourselves to speaking out against
what we deplore and still falling short. The
amputation is far easier if we say we never
cared about the limb in the first place, that
it was gangrened and rotted long before
we tried to save it. What is the limb in this
metaphor — our rights? Our planet? Our
future? I don’t know.
I think there are two ways to cope with
the frantic anxiety of our time: numbing
ourselves against the fear or trying to live
with it somehow. I want to say — like we all
do — that I’m choosing the latter option. I’m
really trying. It’s just so much harder than I
thought it would be.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018// The Statement
3B
“There is an urgent, awful specialness
to being young right now”
BY MIRIAM FRANCISCO, COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE CHRISTOU
Managing Editor:
Dayton Hare
Copy Editors:
Elise Laarman
Finntan Storer