On my way to Trumpland

“It feels like when it was 9/11. Oh wait, but it is 9/11” – Facebook post of a colleague

I did not expect to be waking up to the news that I encountered that morning. Disbelief, sadness, anxiety. For the first time in a while the kids did not watch their morning cartoons, but we, the parents, watched the morning TV program. It was an early morning, and still dark outside. Snowstorm didn’t show signs of calming down. Even my kids felt that something exceptional was going on – they didn’t fight with each other, shout, or protest for dressing up to be taken to day care and pre-school.

“Mummy, what are you watching?”, asked my older son.

“We’re watching this broadcasting on who is going to be the next president of America (as we say here in Finland when referring to the USA)”, I answered.

“Oh my god, it’s going to be Trump!”, I called my husband.

“Mommy, why is this Trump man chosen to be the next President of America?”, my older son asked. “Is he a bad man? What’s going to happen now?”, he continued, before I had a chance to reply.

“I don’t know what is going to happen, honey, but you don’t have to worry, ok?”, I said and felt this huge responsibility as a shadow hanging somewhere over me that I could not explain.

Now, only three weeks after the election day, it seems that “Trump’s normalisation”, as Zoe Williams put it in the Guardian, is indeed something that has been happening. While there have been – and it would be fare to say, still are – many reasons to worry about the result of the elections, it seems that at the same time the ’softened’ and evidently more diplomatic approach of the new president leaves much interpretations to be made by the media and the general public about what was said before the elections and how much of this was merely a strategy without a real content for implementation.

Trump’s victory (though I’m not sure whether this can be called a victory in the sense that the fairness of the democratic practice based on the electoral vote is debated about, and moreover, the popular vote was some two million more for Hillary Clinton) has brought some interesting topics into a broader discussion, which I think is not bad at all.

In this sense, I think it is as interesting to ask, why Donald Trump won than to ask, why Hillary Clinton didn’t win – and I do believe these are different types of questions that require separate attention. At the moment I do not, however, feel having enough expertise to start answering these questions properly. I wish that my stay in the US, will give me some perspective to start addressing them in a meaningful way.

“It’s not a surprise that Trump won. And, anyway, you’re not going to notice anything. It’s not like it’s going to influence your everyday life, or anything”, commented a professor to me right after the results were clear. These words have stuck in my mind. What he said felt so definitive, and yet, I felt he could not be more wrong.

The elections have already influenced me, and many other people – who can be considered as outsiders by not living in the US – and continue to do so. Maybe the influence is not so concrete in a way of me not being banned a J1 visa to the country, but  the effect can be felt in a very profound way. These elections have made me and millions of other people not only start finding answers to the questions of why the final votes were as they were, but also, the elections may have opened up a path to start questioning the prevailing ideology of neoliberal and capitalist market order, and the clash between liberal and conservative values, which have been taken for granted without really stopping to think about their meanings – maybe for too long time.

Today, there remains less than two weeks left before our departure. My family and I will be spending the next eight months in California, where I will be working as a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues in UC, Berkeley.

I could not be more excited about this opportunity that I have been given. This blog will be a forum for sharing my experiences and thoughts during our stay in the US.

How will America be made great again?