It happened

The dreaded day has come and gone. The world has changed. Donald Trump is a democratically elected world leader. I don’t think I’ve processed the tangible reality of the above sentence quite yet (and what a sentence: four years, eight years, or life?).

The man who inflamed an already polarised American society, demonised his rivals, maddened his supporters – the businessman, the tycoon, the clown, the misogynist, the politician, the actual red terror – is now a victor.

It’s been particularly intense in the office. What are the members of a student paper meant to feel when a man who has threatened to change the laws that protect press and ensure freedom of speech wins the popular vote (but not really)? The man whose followers have insinuated assassination of political rivals and public lynching of journalists? And all this has been taking place in ‘The land of the free’.

Dread, disappointment, and hopelessness is what I’m feeling at the moment. Perhaps a dash of anger, but mostly the numbness that comes with hopelessness. The result of this election, like numerous others in recent years, suggests a social split between groups so disconnected they completely fail to understand each other. This is the scariest conclusion of all this political turmoil. We have lost our ability to communicate, to exchange and discuss ideas that are so different (but are they different at all?) they seem irreconcilable. The fact that different ideas scare us so much, in fact, terrify us to the point of despair, is a problem.

So how do we proceed? We wait and see. And we listen. We remove ourselves from our echo chambers and engage with opinions we don’t like, at least until we understand them.

As for the press, we stay strong. As many have said in the aftermath of the election, we must face our responsibility so that we don’t have to face the music. Today, the need for truthful, responsible journalism is greater than ever.