Things are a little scary right now; no one really knows what’s going on, much less what’s going to happen next. As I sit down to write this article on Thursday night, November 5th, we still don’t have a conclusive answer. This election, things are a little different. As opposed to casting their votes in-person on election day, many people voted early or voted by mail, some people nearly a month prior to the election. I myself cast my absentee ballot weeks before the election and mailed it in, ensuring that it would be received on time, because everything is different this time around.
Growing up in DC, surrounded by politics, I have always known the importance of politics. I have also had a front-row seat to the last four years in the White House. I was not able to vote in the last election and had to sit by and watch the votes roll in. This year, a couple of friends and I had a watch party to watch the election results on CNN. We naively thought that we would know who won the election before we went to bed, or when we woke up in the morning the next day. However, things are different this year. We are still waiting for the rest of the votes to come in. There is so much more anxiety related to the election because we are still waiting on key states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina to finish counting the ballots. We probably will not even know until after Friday.
I, along with the majority of my peers, have spent hours agonizing over the possible results of the election. I spent the majority of non-class time on Wednesday and Thursday checking the results of the election every five minutes, as if something was going to happen. All we can do now is wait and hope for the outcome that we want. In the meantime, we have to go about our daily lives as if we are not all waiting anxiously to hear about the future of our country. We all have to go to our classes as if nothing is out of the ordinary, write papers, and study for exams as if we are not on the brink of fundamental change. I don’t know about you, but that has only made it worse. Sure, it has been nice to have somewhat of a distraction from everything that’s going on, but it feels like we are just ignoring the obvious.
