Back to 2016 :-(

Back in 2016 I was still blogging. Sporadically, but I still wrote 116 posts that year, so I documented relatively well my reaction to the 2016 election. I guess nobody was reading, though, since there aren't many (if any) comments.

My first post, two days after the election was, The Dystopian Future is Here. The crazy thing is that there is a page on Parable of the Sower that features an entry on November 6, 2024 that is about an election of a president who is going to dismantle many government programs! 😱😱😱

 The next post, from Nov. 15 was Still Grieving and Anxious about this Unprecedented Election... It's Scary to be in Uncharted Territory!  in which I describe how the week after about the election was and finished asking many questions: 

There are just too many worries and concerns. It's hard to stop grieving and move on. What about the environment? Foreign relations? the Middle East & Syria and the refuge crisis? What about the immigrants (including me)? What about marriage equality and access to contraceptives and Roe vs. Wade? And the Affordable Care Act?

Let's all hope we're wrong, that our fears are unfounded, I'm sure everyone would love to be proven wrong. Sigh...

 Roe vs. Wade is gone. Now they will try to dismantle the rest. 

 In any case, 24 hours after I realized that man had won, I am feeling almost ok. My husband is completely reconciled to everything, he thinks he understands the appeal of this person and why it happened. 

I was dreading teaching today, but it went ok. I am still sad and angry -- last night I was just angry, hating the world and everyone who voted for that creature, and I still am, but I feel like the best thing to do is to figure out ways to resist and hopefully in two years we can have the house and senate back.

That is... if he doesn't go full on fascist and destroys democracy as some think he may. I 'm not so sure. He brags a lot, but I don't know how much harm he'll do. Maybe I'm wrong and he'll do a lot. Time will tell.

From Brasil! X Freaking out about the election

 This is a most useless blog. All the people who used to read me here are my friends on FB and IG. I still miss their blogs and their words, but I'm still connected to some of them. 

Obviously I blog more for me than for anything else, but sending words out into the great void for nobody to read is sad.

In any case, I came to Brasil and threw my mom a really really cute birthday "party" -- with about 10 socially distanced people who came at different times and my brother, his wife, my husband, my son, two of my mom's former students, and my cousin on Zoom. 

I rented and bought pretty decorations and hired a photographer, and later my brother helped pay for all that (not that it was expensive, the dollar [and the Euro for that matter, my brother lives in Finland now] go a long way with the Real, and stuff is cheap here).

The trip and trying to work online are doing a moderately OK job in distracting me from the election, but the truth is that I AM FREAKING OUT! I am very upset, I don't think there's a solution for "Trumpism" and how it's going to destroy America (even if he loses) and how if he is re-elected will simply pave the way for all kinds of injustice and the destruction of democracy.

Even if he loses things will be hard and dire. Sigh... 

I cannot believe he may win. I am so so so traumatized by 2016 that the thought of it happening again is just unbearable. I can't think about it. If it happens, then what? How do we keep on living. 

And we had to put up, in the last two months, with a pastor basically preaching from the pulpit to vote for this trash in the name of religious liberty. So outrageous. 

I wish I could stop being mad at people and what they believe -- IN THE NAME OF RELIGION! Of saving unborn children, of saving individual freedom. Hordes of people brainwashed by Fox News and the lies the religious right constructed to make it possible for Christians to support the most anti-Christian president ever. 

Sigh... 

So much hypocrisy. The Supreme Court. That lady. 

It seems it gets worse and worse every day... I'm only writing this so I can look back on it after the election. I cannot have any hope, however. 

Even if Biden wins, everything is so destroyed it will be hard to put it together. Very hard. I can try to dream he'll win and that Kamala will run in 4 years. We can dream, but how can the dream ever become a reality if in the name of "conservative values" people vote on an IMMORAL man who lies and who has been a con artist all his life? How? How can this be?

In the name of religion and of preserving the country's "whiteness" at all costs -- that ship has sailed, BTW. And I get ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY at latinos voting for him. How? Sigh... just because he's a "macho man" who appeals to their conservatism?

I'm mad at everyone... and this is not healthy, but it's just exhausting. 

Some good quotes from John Pavlovitz

From here (published in 2018): 

It isn't political disagreement, it's divergence on a fundamental level; as people realize they may need to let go of relationships in order to hold on to the deepest contents of their hearts, to be their truest selves, to use their most authentic voices.

From more recently (10/12/20) :

I don’t believe any good people are voting for this president a second time—or they are in complete rebellion against goodness as they do.

I believe that act is fundamentally antithetical to anything good.

Sigh... how will we be able to keep interacting with these people we fundamentally disagree with?

Sad for Brasil :-(

Brazil elected a new president today and it was a really difficult choice, people were between "a rock and a hard place" with the two most hated candidates running against each another in the second round, but in min, and a lot of other people's opinion, one of the options was way worse than the other.

The former president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached two years ago and the former two term president Lula (Luís Inácio "Lula" da Silva) is currently in jail. Their party, PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores (the Worker's Party) has been caught in a serious corruption scheme and a brave judge in my home state of Paraná, Sérgio Moro, has been prosecuting, charging, and putting the guilty ones in jail. If you want to understand the background of the investigation, you can watch the Netflix series The Mechanism. It's so depressing I haven't been able to watch it all, just the first episode. The runner up to today's second round of the election was Fernando Haddad who was appointed the candidate for PT after Lula was unable to run and he lost mostly because of the people's hatred for the party.

The winner, sigh... I don't like to say his name, the same way I avoid saying #NotMyPresident's name like the plague, so I'll just link to him. This man  (#AlsoNotMyPresident) is a former Army Captain and he was a congressman for 27 years and did basically NOTHING. He is pretty outspoken like the U.S. president and has made many outrageous statement which were racist, homophobic, misogynistic, really bad stuff. He's also in favor of allowing people to have guns (guns aren't freely allowed in Brazil), torture, the death penalty, the police having free agency to kill criminals (which it kind of already does in Brasil), and many other controversial things. He says he is a Christian and has the support of most evangelicals. Poor people and minorities, particularly Black and gay Brazilians are really upset by all the hatred unleashed by his candidacy. Some of his statements show fascist tendencies too. Hatred was running so high that he was actually stabbed with a knife when campaigning back in September.

He won partly because of the rampant fake news campaigns in social media. Brazilians are apparently the most gullible people in the planet, who most believe in fake news. I cannot find any articles about this in English, but there were a few in Portuguese. The main reason he won, though, is everyone's desire to get rid of the worker's party. Many people didn't like him, but voted against the other party. Others actually literally say that he's "a myth" and that he's going to save Brazil from PT and make it succeed.

This election destroyed lifelong friendships and pitted family members against each other.This whole thing is just too sad and upsetting. I just pray that the situation gets better in Brazil. :-(

Employed until 2022 & I VOTED!!!!!

I signed my new contract this weekend.

With the new 3 year contract we are reviewed half-way through (in the beginning of this semester) and then the contract is renewed for 3 more years, so I have work guaranteed until May 2022 unless the program is closed or enrollment is too low or something bad like that.

Right now enrollment for the Fall is the lowest it's been in the past 6 years, but it's just because I have to wait to let the seniors in the class. I should have two full sections. Sigh...

My title was also changed, and I now have a "fake" real academic title, but it ends with two words that tell the tale that I'm not in the tenure track.

I will have an intense week of work next week designing a new course and redesigning another one. What makes it bad is the nearly 3h commute (round trip). I know I'll live and it will be fun, but there'll be lots of driving.

In typical out of sync fashion my husband is doing his course design thing this week at U#1 and I do mine next week. I think it's good for our 14 year old son, since it would be awful for him if both of us were doing it this week. The 16 year old is working in Florida helping to run a day-camp. He'll be back next week and he'll be traveling with my mother-in-law and a tour group for two weeks, lucky him!

Last, but not least, I voted yesterday! I was so happy and so excited! Much more excited than on the day I got the citizenship. I have a voice now!! And I finally feel like a citizen. I think it will really sink in when our passports arrive (we applied last week) and I go out of the country as an American. :-O

The worst or the best moment to become a citizen?

So, yeah...

Our citizenship interview is scheduled for Thursday. I didn't really blog about this, I only mentioned it in passing in one of the 2018 posts. We got the letters for the appointments when we came back on  12/31.

Sigh... my brothers-in-law are joking that now we're going to have that man's signature on our citizenship certificate. :-( Serves us well for waiting for so long, right? Maybe it is the best moment to become a citizen, though. I can't wait to vote!! 

I'll let you know how it goes. After they interview they have to schedule our swearing in ceremony. I won't be celebrating this event, it's just one more rite of passage in our lives as accidental immigrants (whoa, when I wrote that post in 2009, we had been here only 13 years. Now it's been 21.5!).

My apologies for not being in a good mood today, but I hardly ever am when I talk about this whole process, particularly the fact we have to promise to bear arms. I guess I'm ok with the pledging allegiance part, somewhat.

In any case, wish us luck. I'm hoping it won't take too long. My friend from Belize said she had to wait FOUR HOURS to be called for her interview. That would be awful! I'll report back.

This weekend

I cannot say much about this weekend because of the semi-anonymous nature of this blog, which is already saying too much.

All I will say is that when I picked up my phone after lunch with our family and visiting family on Saturday and began to be really upset and worked up about what a lot of my friends were posting, I had to stop and try put it out of my mind. After venting a little to my brother- and sister-in-law (subject for another blog post!) I had to just be quiet and not think about it because were preparing for a surprise birthday party that was going to happen in my backyard in just a few hours and I knew I just couldn't even begin to talk to most people at this party about what was happening. :-( One of our close church friends has an NRA sticker in the back of the family van. Nice people who are just so clueless about their privilege and the consequences of their political stance.

This disconnect between our church and school community and our values, our commitment to social justice,* and our political leaning sometimes make us feel lonely and frustrated. It's a "neutral" enough community -- most people aren't really politically engaged and controversial topics aren't brought up, but the school... (I mean the boarding high school who just started school) is composed of a near majority of kids of color and I feel for those kids. We need to do more for those kids, not to keep them in a "bubble" which is kind of what the school already is, but to also prepare them to face their world (which most of their teachers and school administrators don't really understand. Sigh...). 

OK, let me now go try and finish this "fluffy" post about my kid's newly started first-day of school. 

* I just found out reading news this weekend that "they" label us "Marxist" or  SJW - Social Justice Warriors - UGH!!!

Ethnic Cleansing, or "Make America *White* Again"

The days following the election, I was extremely upset and spent every waking minute interacting with equally stressed out friends on social media and reading a select few news stories and analyses (while avoiding most media contact, even listening to NPR, like the plague).

It didn't help my mood that my generally calm and collected "geeky scientist" husband was beside himself. I think I've never seen him so distressed and angry in our 26 years together! And the worst part is that as election week went on he became progressively more distraught (he couldn't even get much sleep). I was relieved that after a couple of weeks, the negativity wore off slowly (while I continued to be distressed). Now, over three months later he -- the optimist who most criticizes my "realistic pessimist" outlook on life -- is very pessimistic.

What K was most upset about soon after the election is something that still worries him exceedingly: It is the fact that this so-called-president (henceforth I'll call "it" #45) had and still has the support of millions of people and because of that, there is no way to stop #45. Unless an overwhelming majority turns against #45 it will be hard for anything to be done to remove "it" from power (at least that's what my husband thinks).

The second thing that K kept saying is that #45 and his cronies figured out a way to prevent the seemingly inevitable "statistical takeover" that was going to take place because Hispanics and other current "minority" groups were slowly turning into a majority. K said to me on the Thursday after the election that if #45 really did remove millions of Hispanics and other brown skinned immigrants from the country he would succeed in making it "whiter" and, possibly, make the conservative movement stronger.

In the "lull" that followed the election, K stopped talking about this anti-immigrant/ anti-brown people stance that bothered him, but now that we've seen that #45 is really serious about his pursuit of what can be described as a new kind of "ethnic cleansing" we are upset again. If he succeeds in this and many other changes he wants to put in place, the country will change dramatically.

And now there's talk of spending tons of money on defense and cutting many other programs -- including the tiny budget for various art and humanities initiatives, I'm sure. I mentioned war in my post from a week ago (it seems that Tuesday is the day I blog now) ;-P and war is so terrible and deadly -- but very lucrative to a few people.

I don't know how we're going to survive #45. He is poised to cause so much harm (and already has). I can hardly think of anything else -- I wish I could blog about more light-hearted topics... but I'm having a hard time to do that right now.

OK, I'll just say that I watched most of the Victoria Masterpiece Theater marathon this past Sunday and now I'm hooked and have a new winter "pleasure" to replace Downtown Abbey. I stayed up well past midnight last night just reading about Victoria and Albert and other related things. So fascinating!! And historic! I want to be motivated to read more history so I can enjoy more my future visits to Europe. Especially to Germany and it's castles. I LOOOOOOOOOVE Germany! (well, maybe it's a DNA thing, I'm pretty much 50% German).

The (Relative) Calm Before the Storm is Practically Over/ people like us

I'm bracing myself, I really am. Just waiting for the next horror to unfold and make me anxious and upset.

I meant to post this yesterday, when the new policies on immigration weren't out yet and I could have written that the calm was almost, but not yet, over. Sigh... this new  "regime" of #45 is relentlessly upsetting (I was going to create a new and unfortunate #45 label for the blog, but I already have "Unprecedented times," so I'll keep that instead). 

The worst part about all of this is the utter despair that it's not a far fetched possibility that there will be EIGHT LONG YEARS of this nightmare. And by then it may be too late to reverse the damage done to the country (whose democracy and prominent position in the world may be very well be destroyed), to the environment, to the lives of countless people who will be hurt by the immigration laws and the healthcare act's demise. People will die. And, there may be war, an even worse prospect.

War...

Sigh...

Why would anyone want to go to war? This horrible man Bannon, which SNL displays as death personified, wants to do just that. Some people profit from wars, other people actually enjoy inflicting suffering on others they disagree with. (Shudder)

How will this country be in four or eight years? How will the world be?

By the way it's going, it seems that in this country truth and facts won't matter, racial and gender tensions will become worse and horrible, the rich will be richer still and the poor more destitute. What else?

The past two weeks have given me some small, but much needed respite, but I wish I could have hope! :-( There is no hope. Even my optimist husband is gloomy, upset and discouraged. He refuses to watch SNL because he doesn't think it's funny. He watches Steven Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers instead.

I read those new memes on facebook, the one about the "I will not work with him" to do this and that and this long list of horrible setbacks which you're supposed to cut and paste and add your name to the end; or the one about the country "being great again" because everyone is mobilized, getting informed, calling their representatives, etc. and I just feel worse and worse.

There are news and calls to protest events and countless appeals for signing this or that petition show up, and I am truly thankful that nearly everyone I'm friends with on FB feels that same way. And then these horrible articles are published about how we're isolating ourselves and only interacting with like-minded people and not trying to understand the other side.

How can we understand the other side, though? HOW?? I'm truly afraid to talk to most people in my church for fear that we have next to nothing in common except for our religious denomination/faith. I cringe to think that one of my son's teachers (soon to be homeroom teacher for 8th grade in September, my older son's teacher in both 7th and 8th grade) went to the inauguration. I don't want to talk to him about any of these things. How can I? It's too personal for me, being an immigrant and all... I don't feel like I can talk to anyone without breaking down into sobs and making them really uncomfortable. But maybe I should? I probably wouldn't cry, I would just sound so angry and upset I'd be incoherent and unable to formulate good arguments. I just can't bring myself to talk about politics with anyone. Sigh...

people like you and me

Last, but not least, a few quick words about the three families from Aleppo we are sponsoring. I have met one of them, the young man in his early 20s who came with his parents and whose apartment we helped rent. He came to church twice and sat with our family. The day I met him, it was hard, very hard, not to cry. I quietly followed him and my husband to our seat, almost biting my lip, crying inwardly. Just thinking about the other two family and their 7 children makes me want to sit down and cry and cry at the outrageous thought of not helping such families, such people.

Such a handsome young man. Dark hair, black rimmed glasses, shy and quiet, doesn't speak much English. His family is Yazidi, BTW, that's why he came to visit our church, the other families are Muslim.

I got some snippets of news from our friend who lives in their same town and has visited often the two families and taken them to the doctor/hospital, etc. (the 2 year old girl of the youngest couple was having lots of trouble with her legs, I don't know if there was a diagnosis yet). The older couple who has four children, twin boy and girl (14), two boys (11 or 12 and 9) probably had their application for refugee status granted because the middle boy has autism. After they'd left Aleppo to Turkey 4 years ago the children had never been able to go to school. The autistic boy had actually never been to school. After all their paperwork and immunizations got straightened out, they went to school and the boy with autism loved it. So much so that the next day he got up and got dressed on his own and was next to the door waiting for the bus.

If that doesn't make you want to cry, I don't know what will.

Then, two weeks ago my friend posted that one of the twins and the boy with autism had gotten hearing aids and had been able to hear their mother's voice clearly for the first time. The fathers are working and our pastor helped them buy a car so they can drive to work. The 20+ year old young man doesn't like it here because it's very rural and there's nothing going on -- social life is intense in Middle Eastern countries. I hope that after they get work and apply for their residency they can move to a place that will suit them better.

One of the things I hated the first day that young man came to church, about 12 days after their arrival and 7 days after the travel ban was issued was how several people kept telling him: "You came just in time! You're so lucky!" Why did they need to point that out? Sigh...

Maybe I'll get to meet the other families this coming weekend. I'll let you know more about it when I can. And soon the next storm will start, that will impact the lives of many more people like them -- like us. :-(

The Journey - Full Lumber 84 Super Bowl Ad (deemed too controversial to air)

Doing a small thing/ Despair/ What can we do?

this promises to be long, and rambling, and... but... I have to write tonight, I just do, so please bear with me if you're so inclined. (written on Wednesday night 1/25)
 
I just created two new labels now: RESIST! (can't have exclamation marks on labels) and Unprecedented Times, to go with my older and vaguely feminist "Political and Personal" label.

You know... I have a pretty charmed life, perfect really. Apart from the tough mega commute, some tensions at work, and my heart's desire to be a "real academic" somehow, I need to recognize that I have a really good job when so many people bad ones or none at all. [meta-blogging comment:] I also feel sad that I lost the precious community I had with/through this blog for several years and now I thirstily follow people's updates on facebook (which I hate with a passion) because I miss reading their blogs so much! (sigh... I will never get over this, NEVER. It's an ongoing frustration that I enjoy sharing here, but people who used to read and care about what I have to say don't anymore. Except for Jamie! Thank you so much, my friend!

Anyway... other than that (and some other issues that have more to do with my "fragmented" life), everything is good. Lovely family, husband, kids, extended family.

But I cannot be happy just for myself, and my family. I feel the need to protect the environment, to fight for social justice, to stand up for those who are oppressed, to listen with compassion to people who are different from me, to humbly recognize my privilege (even though I am also part of several minority groups), and do my part to make the world a better place. A place with more equality, less poverty and disenfranchisement, more acceptance and understanding and less racial strife and sexual discrimination (among many other things).

I am having a really really hard time living in this country now. Where millions of people are just APATHETIC because doing nothing, ignoring politics, not voting has no serious consequences for their privileged little lives (or so they think!). Instead of being upset at those who voted, I am upset at those who didn't because they didn't CARE. Because they think politics is corrupt and useless or because they were upset with the choices at hand. I am really angry at those people.

Sigh...

I am getting bitter and bitterer each moment I spend reading what my outraged friends are posting to facebook. So many bizarre things happening all at once. It's been CRAZY since last Friday -- it's hard to take it all in and not despair.

There is one small thing that is making me feel a teeny, tiny bit better right now. It's really small, but it's something.

I mentioned briefly that the network of "house churches" we are involved with sponsored three Syrian refugee families this past December (and it's giving them ongoing support). A couple of weeks ago we decided to stretch ourselves to the limit and sponsor one more family who arrived yesterday. My husband and I were co-signers on their lease.

It's a really small thing, but it's something.

I cannot think that refugees will not be coming anymore, that hard working people (whose jobs NO ONE ELSE WANTS!) will probably be sent back to their countries -- maybe with their American citizen kids (who knows?), and, perhaps saddest of all, thinking of all the people, children, elderly, who will die without health insurance.

I have to keep myself from thinking about any of these things lest I burst into tears multiple times a day.

What can we do?

. . .

I don't know how to title this.

i don't feel like capitalizing anything... as if small letters could convey better how scared and sad i feel inside. more like disconsolate. expecting the worse.

why are there lots of people who keep reassuring everyone that this is no big deal?

this is not normal, it hasn't happened before. such an unprepared, sick man who picked questionable people to help him dismantle everything...

i've never really checked the news, but now i do even less. i may have to stop listening to npr. is npr even going to survive? or any other humanities and arts initiatives that depend on government funding?

sigh...

government in this country is about to change forever. i saw a headline saying that there will be permanent changes in civil rights laws...

the rich will get even richer and polute even more

those who most need help with their health and their kids' education won't have it

. . .

In the meantime, our small network of "house churches" has just signed up to sponsor a THIRD family of refugees from Syria who arrive in 4 days. The first two arrived before the holidays and we were so busy with grading that we couldn't help at all :-( though we donated furniture, money, raised money and donations from my husband's department.

The families, both from Aleppo, if I'm not mistaken: a young couple (she in early 20s, him 30) with three small children (3, 2 and not even 1). A middle aged couple with four kids, twin boy and girl aged 14, autistic boy aged 12 and 9 year old boy -- they had been in Turkey for two, three years and the children had never been allowed to go to school.

The new family is an older couple (50s-60s) and a son in his 20s.

Refugees are being hurriedly brought into the country by agencies before it's too late, before the door closes. I will concentrate in helping the refugees (I haven't met them yet, actually), I will refuse to let this bring me down.

Resist, we need to resist.

Crazy 2016: Joyous Celebration + Unspeakable Loss & Sadness + Devastating Political/Historical Turn

Note: the next post will have pretty much the same content, but the title will be different. Sigh...
 
This was a crazy year. The first half was "sunny" and joyous with our oldest son's 8th grade graduation and two weddings, then we had a trip to Brazil with multiple amazing sight-seeing trips and my husband's grandmother 90th birthday celebration and whole family reunion (42 people who live all over the world!).

Then there was unspeakable loss -- made worse because it was so unexpected -- when my father-in-law had a devastating stroke and died six days later. :-(

And to cap it off, we had devastating unprecedented political/historical changes with the election of a horrible man for president. Sigh... the least said about that the best.

This will be a year to remember, for many positive things, and lots of negative ones too. Some of these things were expected, others not so much (although back in May I was already getting ready to freak out about Hillary not winning -- I totally knew it could happen), and an unexpected death. Precisely the kind of thing that one is always afraid thinking about a new year. :-(

Pledging Allegiance? Bearing Arms? Conflicted feelings about (not) joining the Divided States of America

I have always had qualms about becoming a citizen anyway, always. As a self described accidental immigrant* who spent years proudly saying that I didn't like it here, that I wanted to go back to Brazil, etc., when we ended up staying and becoming residents (back in 2008) I suspected we might become citizens someday just for the convenience of it, if not by conviction.
    (big parenthetical remark:)
In fact, the main reason why we haven't done it since we became eligible in late 2012 is that we weren't willing to "pay up." K's brothers tease us mercilessly about this, but $ 1,600 makes a big difference when you have a tight budget. We kept deciding to use that money to travel (mostly to Brazil). Oh, and there's also the question of travel -- it seems you can't leave the country while applying for citizenship until it's all approved -- and we're always traveling outside the country (even if just to visit brother-in-law K4 and his family in Canada). So, in addition to the money situation, we hadn't really decided we were committed to doing it, we were not convinced we wanted to go ahead, so we kept putting it off.

We seemed to be very close to that conviction when we arrived from Brazil back in August, though (I even blogged about filling the application and What Now? congratulated us -- thanks! ;-). My husband talked about how he felt he belonged here more than he did in Brazil (it's been 20 years, after all) and he started filling out the forms and checking what we needed to do to finally become citizens. His father's sudden death meant that now his mother is very interested in becoming a resident and she cannot do that through my other two brother-in-law who are naturalized because they are living abroad now. K was also relieved that his father got sick and died here because of the good care he received, particularly the "end of life" part of it (facilitated by my mother-in-law's cousin, a nurse who specializes in this area). K thought that being in the U.S. in this heartbreaking situation made very tangible difference for his dad, his mom and him and his brothers. It would have been different in Brazil in many ways, particularly in unlimited access to the patient in the ICU, and the ability to make certain decisions to ensure a peaceful end with minimal intervention. 

However, while filling the forms, K came across a little box that he/we needed to check. It said that he/we would be willing to bear arms to defend this country under circumstances that would warrant it. Interestingly, if you're born here, you don't ever have to say such a thing (a friend of ours remarked that if she had to say that to be a citizen she wouldn't want to do it either). It seems that one can still become a citizen while saying it's against one's conscience to bear arms;** we think that K's uncle did that and we were planning to ask him how it went. Taking such a stance, however, would certainly delay the processing of our application and we were in a hurry, wishing to travel abroad next Summer. 

Then, we got really busy and put it off once more and then...

... the election happened. 

You know, I was upset that I couldn't vote and was looking forward to the day I would be able to, but this "creature's" election has given us fresh new reasons not to "pledge allegiance" to this nation. Being an immigrant is hard enough, but having to put up with this level of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment is excruciating. Maybe being a citizen would be helpful, at least I wouldn't have to hear my young son ask whether I could be kicked out of the country and what would be of him if that happened. I wanted to vote to elect a different president next time, but right now, it feels really good to be able to say that this man not my president because I don't really "belong" to this country in that way. I live here, though, and we have decided to do so permanently. I have nothing to fear -- except in the case of the fear of becoming a political dissident if the threats to free speech continue -- so maybe I should just go ahead and "join" you all, but I'm just too conflicted right now to make this decision! 

I finally (only now!) got to read "Farewell America" an excellent essay by Neal Gabler from Nov. 10 and its opening lines make this decision even more complex:

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

If this country died, why should I join it? Is there anything left to join? And he continues:

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it.

I am looking at this country differently. Heck, I'm looking at life differently, something shattered, life is not the same. Sarah Kendzior's beautiful essay talks about how Americans elected someone bent on destroying the country and advises us, well, more like begs us, to reflect on our lives and values before it's too late. I hadn't read her essay until last night, but its title had already inspired an unwritten blog post that sits in my drafts. I'd titled it "I always try to be my own light" and I do. That's why I'm writing this post, that's why I've been blogging for 12 years. She says: "I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured." Check, I've written over 2,000 posts about this (maybe I need to back up this blog, right? So it cannot be taken away by Google). She continues:

Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today.

Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.

And this is what I have been trying to do all along and will strive to do more.

I am upset and angry, I don't know what to do next. K and I will have to talk this whole "citizenship idea" over a lot. Sigh... I know there's a lot more I wanted to say, but I've been trying to write this post for weeks and I want to "publish" it before it becomes too dated. I'm sure I'll be blogging more about this issue since life as an immigrant is one of the main topics of this blog!

(I wrote the final paragraph before writing the previous ones with the quotations, but I will leave the ending as is) 

*I'm sure I'm not the original creator of this term, but I love to use it and I have yet to do a search to see who else has been using it.

** There is a film about a man from our particular religious denomination who was a "conscientious objector" playing in theaters right now (I haven't seen it, but may see it someday).

scheduled post, finished at 1:24 am.