At the time of the election of Barack Obama, I was in 5th grade.
My priorities included finishing my science project and daydreaming about life in middle school where teachers no longer walked you from class to class. My parents told me on election night in 2008 that there was the possibility of hope. At the time none of it made sense, the only thing I’d ever hoped for was a new Barbie or fruit snacks in my lunchbox. Eight years later, I understand why my parents took me to our polling place and why I was told to have hope for the future. But, with less than a month left for the Obama administration and the impending inauguration of President-elect Trump, hope feels fleeting. This election was the first I was able to vote in and the first election I’d ever felt disappointed in.
To the pleasure of the many millennial haters who label my generation as spoiled, I must admit I was spoiled. For all of my “coming of age” years, I saw a black President with a black family, living in the most prestigious house in the country and arguably the world. I took his Presidency as a normalcy as a young teen. I obviously understood he was the first black President, but at the same time I never connected the dots. Everyday, I saw someone who looked like me, whose family looked like mine, who shared the same history as me and honestly I took it for granted. I didn’t appreciate the complexity of being represented behind the Oval Office. For my parents and grandparents, Barack Obama consciously represented hope and a chance for progress. As I got older, I grew to understand American history and why President Obama walking out of Air Force One was a big deal.
By the time I turned 17, in the midst of what felt like a helter-skelter election, I understood what was at stake in 2016. To me, it wasn’t about back to back Democratic Presidents or the possibility of a two branch sweep by Republicans – but rather it was about an American identity crisis. The question being asked in the poll booth was who are we really, and what do we stand for. I saw the Make America Great Again movement candidly scary, but, I had this unshakable sense of hope about the future. I believed in America and that at the end of the day, we would choose to be the same country that voted on the content of character rather than the color of skin.
On November 9th, I stayed up until four am, holding on to a shred of hope that it wasn’t all over. When it was officially announced that Donald Trump would become the 45th President of the United States, I felt the hope I’d possessed for eight years, disappear. I broke down sobbing, desperately trying understand what happened. It felt like I was waking up from a lifelike dream, where I saw everything I’d taken for granted was quickly snatched away. Almost a month post-election I’ve had time to reflect on the past eight years. For almost a decade I saw the best in this country. The only President I’ve been cognizant of is the one whose face is not the same as the rest. My perspective on politics was definitively shaped around the election of politics. I didn’t notice it until much later, but the election of Barack Obama gave me a sense of security about the future, that we [Americans] were finally ready to address our history. I’ve experienced quite possibility the most hope filled part of modern American history and in turn, I believed that hope would continue even after Obama’s term.
While I cannot speak to the future of the country I do know that in this past month I’ve never felt less hopeful. I’ve spent hours reading Facebook debates over the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement and the true intentions of our next President. In many ways, this election took away my youthful hopefulness. Like many over first time voters, I lost a bit of optimism about the world we live in. Even when the election became unbearably polarizing, I still believed that at the end of the day the hashtags, Facebook debates and overwhelming (and underwhelming) news coverage would fade away and on election day Hillary Clinton would be elected as the first woman President. In short, I had hope in the American people. Now, I see that I was blinded by hope, unable to see the effect of divisive rhetoric. While I haven’t given up hope completely on our future as a country, I recognize that hope is something to treasure and fight for everyday.
This post is written by Madalynn Williams, SparkVision Intern and political guru.