It’s been over a week, and I still have a really hard time formulating my thoughts.

I’d woken up suddenly, fearful, in a panic and a cold sweat, at 6:02am on the 9th of November, 2016. I’d deliberately not watched any election coverage the night before. I instinctively reached for my phone and all the notifications confirmed what my unconscious fear was. Trump was going to be the next president of the United States of America.

I felt as if an invisible hand had wrapped itself around my heart and was squeezing. I was surprised by the visceral reaction. Fittingly, a snowstorm raged all day dumping copious amounts. To add insult the injury, the city authorities responsible for snow removal had once again played Russian roulette with whether or not they should budget for snow removal in a cosmopolitan capital just shy of the North Pole. The result was the crash of the machinery of the morning and even worse, the evening commute, transforming the day into a living nightmare that mirrored the one I so dramatically awoke from. This seemed to me a fitting metaphor for the same attitude taken by the entire political machinery around the 2016 elections for US president.

I am a hyphenated naturalized American citizen who spent most of my life in the USA but now lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

I’ve watched the 2016 election campaigns from the comfort of being able to turn off the noise when I wanted to. From day one I’ve found Mr. Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” disturbing. I couldn’t get it out of my head. And not in a good way. I was disturbed by the seeming disregard of history in the slogan. It’s the “Again”. The “Again” was threatening.

The “Again” was then weaponized with insult, violence, racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, islamophobia, xenophobia, all other kinds of phobia and shoved down our throats repeatedly by ratings-mongering media outlets (both left and right) with the excuse that the candidate was “talking straight.” That not catering to “political correctness” made it ok to be racist, xenophobic…see the list above. Whatever happened to civility and basic human decency?

For people like me, even with all the struggles we are still facing; and the fact that we can’t believe we are (as the famous sign held up by the Black Lives Matter protesters states) “STILL PROTESTING THIS SHIT!!”; America is the best it’s been to us in over 400 years. So when the Trump camp started bandying about “Make America Great Again” I wondered how far back he wanted to go. When was America Great (with a capital G)? How many hard-fought and hard-won rights did he want to repeal to get back to his ideal of American Greatness? Before the Civil War? Before the Abolition of Slavery? Women’s Voting Rights? African-American Voting Rights? The Civil Rights Movement? Gay Rights? etc, etc, etc.

Now that Trump and his Republicans have won the whole pot…what now?

What will the rest of us and the world have to give up to “Make American Great Again”? As seen through the eyes of what has turned out to be a minority of the popular vote upset about having had to share any small bit of their privilege so that the rest of us could have a life with dignity. Thanks once again (flashback to the year 2000) to the outdated and manipulable Electoral College, which glaringly thwarts the basic principle of democracy.

If the litany of incidents perpetrated by Trump supporters that have been flooding my Twitter feed since day one of his victory is anything to go by, then we’ve taken a giant leap backwards and have to redouble our efforts to drag humanity kicking and screaming into civility and basic human rights for all. I feel like for a long time we’ve been waiting to exhale and now we suddenly can’t breathe.

Sadly we will still be protesting this shit for a long while to come.

–Andrea Davis Kronlund