This election cycle has been a tumultuous rollercoaster of an experience. Like, honestly, I feel like I’ve been experiencing the 2020 election for the past four years, and that’s probably because this year’s election has been a topic of discussion since the day after the 2016 election.
And on Saturday, the Associated Press officially called the presidential race and declared Joe Biden our 46th president and Kamala Harris our first Black, Asian American vice president. Donald Trump is the first incumbent president to lose reelection since George H.W. Bush in 1992.
I think I might blame the election fatigue. After all, we have been looking forward to this election since about this time four years ago. For the past few months, I’ve been spamming my Instagram story with information about voter registration, early voting, absentee ballots and voter suppression. For the past week, I’ve been hitting refresh on my Google search of “election day results” to watch the electoral numbers come flooding in. And even now that Biden has won, the sheer amount of the country that voted for Trump is disappointing, to say the least (he received about 47 percent of the vote as of the writing of this article).
But I also think it’s because I, like most other Gen-Z voters, settled for Biden.
Biden was not the most progressive Democratic candidate to run in this cycle’s primaries. For someone with leftist values such as myself, that could’ve been a deal-breaker had he not been up against Trump. So, while we celebrate the victory of Biden and Harris, and the subsequent loss of Trump, I’m feeling a bit unenthused about the situation.
I’m terrified that now that Biden is our president, folks will become more complacent. I’m scared to find out how many people were actively campaigning against Trump for his egregious violations of human rights were doing so not because they were passionate about social justice, but they just really hated Trump. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I’m very desensitized to the yearly trend of companies, celebrities and the average Joe (pun intended) promoting LGBTQ+ rights and celebrating LGBTQ+ culture every June for Pride Month, only for the support to disappear on July 1. Black, Indigenous and other People of Color have been fighting for the continued momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement after it was a huge topic on social media and the news this past June and July, but support started to falter as our feeds went back to normal. Marginalized folks are too used to the fight for our rights being used by others as a popular trend to, for example, vote out Trump or show that you’re “woke” on social media.
So, now that former Vice President Joe Biden is now future President Joe Biden, we all need to recommit to fighting for equal rights and social justice. There is still a lot of work to be done to address the hate and discrimination that has become more public since Trump’s election. This hate has always been in our country, but Trump created an environment that made it acceptable to show it publicly. We need to restructure what is acceptable in our country, and bigotry is not.
We can certainly celebrate the Biden/Harris victory, and I am. But we also need to continue to support Black Lives Matter, hold the Trump administration accountable in its last few months of power and create positive change around us. As Kamala Harris said in her victory speech on Saturday night, “now is when the real work begins. The hard work. The necessary work. The good work. The essential work.”
Biden and Harris are much more aligned with our work and values as a nation than Trump was, but we need to guide and push them into the right direction. Our voices don’t stop mattering after the election. We need to protest; to inform; to spread awareness of all the atrocities and violations of our fundamental human rights that occur on local, state and national levels. I will continue to advocate for myself and others, even after it stops being the popular thing to do, and I invite you to do the same.