US student at UCC: 'I can't go home to Trump's America

2 days ago
UCC

“Well, it’s not like they’re going to put him back in office. They won’t.”

“That’s what we said in 2016.”

This type of conversation plagued the past handful of months of my life.

With friends and family from back home, with new friends in Cork from around the world, there is a scoff laced within each breath that forms the name of our 47th President-to-be, Donald Trump.

He could not possibly win. We have seen who he is, what he has the capacity for. He could not. We could not.

On the morning of November 5 - voting day in the US - my mother, who had taken the entire week off from work to relieve her stress of the election, asked me what Europeans thought and said about our American politics. What Corkonians thought and said.

“Not much, mostly just pointing and laughing,” I remarked. And laughed we did.

For a day.

When I awoke the next morning, I could not raise a laugh, I could not raise warmth. It was a dull ache that bit at my fingers and toes as I scrolled through the dozens of texts from friends who had stayed up.

‘Trump Wins,’ read the flat text from my father at the top of my notifications.

That dull ache persisted through my day. I struggled to raise from the bed. To mechanically eat breakfast. To force my wooden legs into motion and to walk through the streets like a plant hidden in the shade for too long.

I had come to Ireland carried on gusts billowed by the wings of the better parts of my home country. The success of the professors I looked up to, a man who had received a PhD writing on love, philosophers, political scientists, and classicists, had all inspired me to live for more. Creatives and free thinkers. The opposite of my home country’s values.

I wrote in my application letter to UCC that I saw the Creative Writing Master’s programme as an opportunity to prove to America the worth of the liberal arts, the creative arts. That there is more to life and success than finance or law.

That human flourishment is worth just as much as financial gain, if not more.

I saw Ireland and Cork as an opportunity to bloom in the ways I had been raised to see as worthless.

How, then, could I imagine now returning to the country that has once again proven its lack of desire for basic human decency, never mind flourishment?

How could I return to a country whose health will be run by defunct TV personalities and conspiracy theorists? Where the right of free speech means the right to no consequences, and the freedom of the press means freedom to only say what aligns with the current mass hysteria. Where buzz-words and idolatry take the place of critical thinking and personal research.

I am a student through my heart, research captivates my mind, but how could I seek a PhD in a country whose second amendment and stand-your-ground laws are used to wade off science?

I spent the final year of my undergraduate studies in Rhode Island writing a thesis on the classical influences on James Madison’s contributions to the Federalist Papers - a collection of 85 articles and essays written by Madison and others under the collective pseudonym ‘Publius’ in the 1780s to promote the ratification of the Constitution of the United States.

Analysing the teachings of Plato, Polybius and Plutarch, I wrote about faction - “the mortal disease under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”

I wrote about how faction will inevitably be the fall of every modern government, yet that America and American citizens in particular have an odd propensity for plunging headfirst into this selfish vice.

When I was writing this thesis, I was hopeful. Somehow, even now writing this, I am hopeful. But I am exhausted.

I am afraid for my friends, for my family. I am nervous for my mother, my sisters, my future daughters.

I am exhausted by the constant perversion of politics into my mental space, the partisanship and misinformation rampant throughout the internet, the anxiety of the next headline or snippet quote threatening tyranny.

I need a break.

I do not know how long I will need this break for. I am not worried about its length. But, for the time being, and at least the next four years, I intend to allow the passion that the country of Ireland and the city of Cork have reignited in my heart to stoke the hopes I have for the future.

I am impassioned to aid my country, but I must value my own flourishment as well, as I entered this country to do.

In the words of the woman who attempted to spin my nation from the blaze it so clearly desires to set upon itself, Vice-President Kamala Harris: “When we fight, we win. But... sometimes the fight takes a while.”

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