This is a piece I wrote the day after the election.  Two notations: I never planned to live my entire life in the States regardless, and I’m terribly disappointed in the ignorance, racism, sexism and xenophobia demonstrated by my countrymen and women.  I had no idea your anger and hatred ran so deep.  It saddens me tremendously.

This is long. Not sorry.

My husband has penned (and I hope he posts) a pointed and elegant thought about this election. I’m on the more emotional side about this, I admit that. My friend Holly boldly and rightly encouraged me to work to be a force for good here because we all need that. She is of course correct as always, but I’ve spent some time in due diligence looking for another home. I mean genuinely, furiously, sadly looking for a new country. Here is why:

I do not recognize my own country any more.

It is not, as you might think, because of the outcome of the election. Do I think we collectively made some bad decisions? Yes. But that is not the greater point. The greater point is this:

Half of my countrymen and women actually felt so disenfranchised that they voted FOR racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. Many of them even voted against their own best interests simply to show how much those values mean to them. Steel workers may well wake up one day to find their unions decimated, but come hell or high water they were bound and determined to put an outsider with no experience into the white house when truthfully he shouldn’t even have been voted into an out house.

Half of my countrymen and women seem to think we need to put the LGBTQ community back into a closet and relegate women back to wire hanger abortions and/or vacuuming in perfect dress and June Cleaver pearls.

Half.

Half of my countrymen and women ignored all the hallmarks of narcissistic sociopathic behavior and gleefully accepted that as their leader for reasons they could not intelligently enumerate. And sadly, they are not even intelligent enough to understand what a narcissistic sociopath is truly capable of doing, the havoc they can and will create in the name of self-aggrandizement.

Half of my countrymen and women felt that it is not only acceptable but quite possibly funny that men like he-who-shall-not-be-named feel it is completely acceptable for men to not only grope women but call them names on national television and treat them however they would like regardless of how any particular woman feels about it. Some of them even, ironically, stated for the record that they had every respect for women WHILE wearing a T-shirt that boldly stated, “Trump That Bitch.”

Half.

That’s a lot.

I am not penning this to be divisive. There is no more need for division. My country, the place of my birth, the place that I thought I knew for all these years, has done that for me. There is no more work to be done on that front.

So, that means that half of my countrymen and women don’t feel that way, right? Probably. So there is hope? Yes. There always is. Are we now going to have a bizarre internal war? Likely. Are there light-workers who will fight? Yes.

Half.

I just don’t think I have another war in me.

I have fought too many battles to jump up and say, “Please! Pick me!!! Put me in the vanguard!!!”

My countrymen and women have spoken, and it is a bitter pill to swallow that they have spoken not only against me as a women but against themselves. It pains me that they are that short-sighted. I grieve under the weight of lost ground, of the many tears shed just trying to get where we are. It is a deep and aching hurt that, after all these years of believing in the better nature of humanity, the fruits of baser instincts have blossomed.

I am simply in disbelief of the now-proven fact that Half of my countrymen and women fought actively to elect people who will vigorously attempt to take away my rights as a woman and the rights of millions who don’t fall into the straight, white, “Christian” (whatever the fuck that means anymore) male category. That half of them think, after eight years of an Obama presidency, somehow there is a vast conspiracy to take away their guns. I don’t know about you, but I still have an arsenal in my house. Half of them blindly believe conspiracy theories for which there is no evidence because someone wants to sell them a bill of goods and is a really good salesperson apparently.

Half.

America, I wish that more than half of you were more thoughtful. I wish that more than half of you could articulate a logical argument for putting an utter madman in the highest office, arguably, in the world. Hell, I wish that I could have a reasonable, philosophical conversation with any member of my family other than my husband whose brain I adore, without it blowing up for some unknowable reason. (Seriously, I love his brain. He is one of the most intelligent people I know.) But more than half of the time, you are not rational individuals. You are the blind, irrational mob ruled by baser instincts.

More than half.

There is a phenomenon in nature called “The Death Spiral.” It is commonly referred to in insurance and accounting, but the origin is a simple one: Ants. Ants typically navigate by following pheromone trails, but if they lose the scent, they closely follow the ant in front of them, because why not? The trail is gone, so I’ll follow this fucking guy. They end up marching in a circle until they die from exhaustion or until something intervenes to break up the death march–be it a fallen twig or a human hand.

I’ve seen a lot, I’ve done a lot, and I know a death spiral when I see one. So I’m trying to figure out a way to be a benevolent force to end my own death spiral. Perhaps that is a psychological shift and perhaps that also involves a physical move. I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. Like everything else, “It’s practice, not perfection.”

But when more than HALF of my countrymen and women clearly indicate that I am lesser than, that freedom of religion and freedom of speech are unimportant, that people of color are somehow evil (what in the actual fuck is that?), that nothing this country has stood for and that is engraved on the Statue of Liberty for Christ’s sake matters, it is more than half time for me to consider other options.

I love you, America, but you can’t grab me by the pussy.

I no longer recognize who and what you are.

I’m sorry we didn’t serve you better.

I’m quite frankly exhausted. It’s time for a younger generation to bear the weight of the mantel they’ve inherited from old people like us.

There have to be more than half of you willing to do that.

See? I still believe in the better nature of humans.