There was no need to worry about her accepting the result of the vote.
That’s what her running mate said as he introduced her onto the stage.
Just days ago, her opponent had made the same commitment. But he included the qualifier: “if I win.”
Well, he did. Hillary Clinton lost fair and square in an election rigged in favor of ignorance. The most qualified candidate ever to run, she had the audacity to hope she could beat a buffoon.
November 8th, 2016 will go down as a dark day in American history, just as March 5th, 1933 did in Germany.
Already, attention has turned to Trump’s conciliatory tone. After all, didn’t he pay tribute to her contribution to politics? Thank her for her decades of service?
Meanwhile, supporters outside chanted ‘lock her up!’
‘But how much damage can one individual really do?’ people ask each other with cautious optimism, indulging in fantasies of an orange-faced narcissist experiencing a eureka moment in the White House, as the extent of his ineptitude dawns on him. A molester re-thinking his territorial right to a stranger’s vagina. A compulsive liar considering whether the truth might matter after all.
This result is about more than building walls and failing to shatter glass ceilings.
It is about the death of decency. The cult of shamelessness. The triumph of tyranny.
Today, men and women all over America endorsed misogyny and division, wilfully bypassing reason in their rush to restore the myth of greatness in the safety of a ballot box.
Television pundits, the mouthpieces of society, are painting them as disgruntled steelworkers struggling to eke out a living, ordinary folk battling against the evils of the ‘establishment.’
Victims of globalisation and greed. In other words, those in need of a billionaire messiah. Any saviour would have done. But not a woman with a shrill voice and a private e-mail server.
This is the day the American dream was redefined.
For little girls and boys around the world, the message as they turn out the lights tonight is this:
“Say it loud enough and they’ll believe you. Scare them into submission. Claim it, don’t earn it.
Lie, insult and grope your way to the top.”
The sun may rise again but all I see reflected now is darkness without end.
Kate Ferguson 