Across the Pond: Nightmare of Trump victory has me looking back to the Black Isle
I wrote a whole other piece for this month’s column, not relating to the election at all, because we’re all probably sick of hearing about Donald Trump and the election.
No doubt that one will appear next month, but currently it’s 3:08am on the morning of the presidential inauguration, and I can’t sleep. I don’t even know what I want to write, but given my brain has been wide awake ruminating for the last two hours, I decided to get it all down in the hope I can salvage some sleep before dawn.
By the time you read this, the inauguration will be long past. In reality, it’ll only be a week or so, but in Trump Land, with all its chaos and drama, a week can feel like a lifetime ago. We’ll know by then if Trump has indeed rounded up and deported millions of immigrants on his first day like he said he would.
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One of my favourite books is Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies, who helped hide the Frank family during WWII. It documents life in wartime Amsterdam before and after the capture of the people hiding in the ‘secret annexe’. I re-read this book recently, and one thing really stood out. Miep talks about keeping quiet about political beliefs in day-to-day life because you really don’t know which way another person leans. And it feels like that here now. You just don’t talk politics with anyone unless you know them really well. Yes, California is a liberal state, but there’s a lot more Trumpy folk here than you would think. Within half a mile of the house there’s a number houses permanently plastered with Trump pictures, flags and law signs, their cars decked out with big flags and window stickers. And that’s just his vocal supporters. There’s a lot more who are not as vocal.
There’s other similarities in the book that feel disturbingly familiar: The round ups and raids on the Jewish areas of Amsterdam, deporting them to concentration camps. The talk now of rounding up undocumented immigrants and deporting them out of the country via ‘detention facilities.’
The uncertainty of the future is one of the hardest things to deal with. Just how bad is it going to get? Will there come a point where safety is compromised? It seems daft to me to even have to consider these questions, and maybe it sounds like I’m being overly dramatic. But I’m not the only one who feels this way. This time around, there are no grown-ups in the room to prevent Trump doing what he wants. He’s carefully curated the people around him to be ‘Yes- Men’. He doesn’t care about the rules. He’s going do what he wants anyway.
There’s a real mood of depression here. I won’t be watching the presidential inauguration today, and neither will most of my friends. All I can feel is a deep melancholy and fear, dreading what will unfold over the next four years or potentially longer. We all know it’s going to be a disaster. How can it not be with all these millionaires and billionaires at the top, caring about nothing except making more money?
Recently, I’ve been looking more and more at ‘wee hoosies' on the HSPC website. I really shouldn’t. It unsettles me a lot. I know life in the Highlands isn’t all that perfect either, but it feels much more stable than the circus we have over the pond.
Kerry originally hails from the Black Isle and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and needy rescue cat Daisy. She writes about being a Scot in the USA, plays Scottish waltzes on the accordion, and loves photographing the Bay Area.
