Mere moments ago as of this writing, it was officially announced that Donald Trump, business mogul and a supporting player in the 1989 Bo Derek film Ghosts Can’t Do It, is the Republican nominee for President of the United States. I’m not an American, but I’m pretty damn scared.
And that same fear I’m feeling is spreading across my social media feeds, by people in the even scarier position of seeing this happen in their own country. As I scroll through Twitter and Facebook, I see a lot of panic. But I see something even more troubling, too.
“Don’t worry, it’s impossible.”
Already I’ve seen people reassure others and themselves that Trump and his running mate Mike Pence, who I’m beginning to suspect was grown in a vat like in Transmetropolitan, will never reach the White House. There’s no way, right? Never gonna happen. As long as we turn out to vote it’ll be fine.
Bullshit. Of course it can happen. There is, in fact, a very distinct chance of it happening. A Trump/Pence White House is possible, and if you want it to be as impossible as some people on my social media are saying, you’re gonna have to work for it. Hard.
Last month, England voted to leave the European Union, a move many similarly dubbed impossible. People were so convinced that Brexit wouldn’t go through that they voted to leave anyway.
Can you even fathom that? That’s so dumb there isn’t even a funny metaphor for it, it’s just ridiculously stupid and short-sighted. People were CONVINCED that Brexit would fail, and yet here we are watching the United Kingdom begin to seemingly crumble while the office of Prime Minister of England becomes one of the most unwanted pieces of office space in Europe.
Were anti-Brexit campaigners lazy or idle, complacent in their ultimate victory? Of course not. Those people worked their asses off. You know where the problem was? People who considered it a non-issue. People who voted without doing the proper research and actually learning what the issue at hand was. People who somehow thought that the outcome of the vote was an inevitability rather than something over which COULD and SHOULD HAVE taken control. People who wrote it off, even idly.
The prospect of a Trump Presidency is scary, even to people outside America. And right now, to all my American friends I say this: Don’t lose that fear. Keep it. Because if you want to overcome the literally terrifying number of people who want to see Trump and Pence take the White House next year. Make that fear the fire under your ass to keep you from getting idle.
Go to rallies, make your voice heard. If you support Hillary Clinton wholeheartedly, see what you can do to volunteer in even the smallest way. If not, do everything you can to make sure every blunder, every controversy, every racist, sexist, hateful remark by Trump and his people is seen by as many people as possible.
And for the love of all that is good, VOTE. Vote and encourage all your friends to vote. Because treating a Trump presidency as impossible is opening the backdoor to voter apathy, if not from you than for some people. Odds are you know some of those people, and if you can change even one of their minds, you’ve done good.
The prospect of Donald Trump becoming the leader of the free world is NOT impossible. If Brexit proved anything, it’s that nothing is truly impossible.
If you want Trump to fail, you have to MAKE him fail, because he’s not going to do it on his own. Though it looks for all the world like he’s been trying. To people being told not to be afraid, I say be afraid, and turn that fear into proactivity. Your country is at a crossroads, and at the end of one path is a man who read the script for Ghosts Don’t Do It and said “yeah, I’ll be in this.”
