I will not let fear triumph
IKNOW I shouldn’t look at my phone in the night but there are times when I just can’t help myself. Like at 4.23am last Wednesday morning. My plan was to sneak a quick look, see that Hillary Clinton was on her way to becoming the first female president of the United States, and then roll back to sleep, wrapped in a cosy cocoon of duvet and progress. Except, of course, my plan was foiled. As I saw Donald Trump was winning the US election, my mind (and stomach) churned and I couldn’t put my phone down. I sent messages to friends who live in Los Angeles.
One replied that she was crying as she looked at her eight-week-old daughter, wondering what kind of world she was going to grow up in. Another, a teacher in an inner-city school, worried what she would say to her predominantly Latino students in the morning. “They have already cried to me,” she texted, “Eight-year-olds in fear of deportation.” I asked why she thought people hate so much. “Fear,” she replied. “Fear breeds hate.”
I felt their sadness, their anger and their shock. It reminded me of June 24. But it wasn’t quite the same. As night became morning and the votes came in, confirming that a man with the views of a pig and the temperament of an active volcano had become leader of the free world, I felt something else. I felt fear. I shuddered under the duvet.
Being a young, middle-class, secular Jew in 2016, I’ve never really been scared before. Sure, I have feared for the health of loved ones, avoided horror films and taken my time when entering a revolving door (those things are lethal) but I’ve never been scared about the state of the world we live in. I’ve had an inbuilt faith in society, thanks to the privilege of growing up as an inconspicuous minority in a loving family who wanted for nothing.
That faith was a little shaken back in the summer of 2014, as antisemitism stirred its ugly head in far more visible ways than I could remember. But, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, I trembled. And, as I dragged myself out of bed, I cried. I cried again in the shower. And I cried watching Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, as she implored little girls to never doubt that they are “valuable and powerful.”
I didn’t cry just because I am a woman. And although I’ve always been a fan of the States, living there briefly and finding a near-spiritual experience, I didn’t cry for America either. I cried because, as a world, it just felt like we’d stooped so very low.
But, the next morning, after a proper night’s sleep without looking at my phone, I had a little word with myself in the shower (clearly where I reflect). I told myself to stop feeling fear and refused to cry any more. There was only so long that I’d let myself feel hopeless and a day was enough. Plus, nothing would please Trump’s racist supporters or similar Brexiteers (yes, not everyone who voted for Brexit was racist, but anyone who denies racism was a part of it is denying reality) more than the idea of a cardcarrying female member of “the North London liberal media elite” quaking under the covers and sobbing in the shower.
If I want to live in a society where kindness, respect and tolerance wins, then fear is a useless, corrosive emotion. Instead I choose to take action. Whether that means smiling at people on the tube or reaching out to those feeling the brunt of a toxicity in the air, I am more determined than ever not to let hate triumph. And I am definitely not scared.
I’ve never been scared about the state of the world