Don't Give Up Your Power.
My response was that I would do the same thing, no matter the election result. I would wake up the next morning, with the same plan I've had now for the last months, to take my students to North Philadelphia to local community center Serenity House, for a conversation and discussion with local residents about neighborhood identity and activism. We spent some time this semester in my sociolinguistics course analyzing the language of the presidential debates, and in the previous semester I was following election rhetoric with students in my course on Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies. If there's one thing I've learned about zombies, it's that things aren't always what they appear to be.
Look, nobody respects women more than I do. *Insert wry laugh* But the last thing I'm planning to do is to throw in the towel, move to Canada (or elsewhere), and give up my social justice work. Hell, no.
The moment we give way to calling this an apocalypse, we script this occurrence and phenomenon as inevitable and out of our control. We seek to absolve ourselves of our shared responsibility for turning this ship around. Now's the time for critical thinking, instead of conjurings about the end of the world, about deportations and mass executions.
I want to instead think about how to work to educate others, communicate with people I don't already know, and push for new elected representatives and legislation. Even in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, survivors had to begin improvising together, and the U.S. ultimately had to form a coalition with support from the Mexican government. There was always a next step, and it's no surprise that a library, a fountain of knowledge, is what saved the movie's main characters.