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

