Okay, it’s been a few weeks. We can talk about it now, right? We’ve taken time to mourn, and now we all walk into the nearest bookstore and pick up our copies of, “So, Your Next President Is A Total Bigot.” In your post-election turmoil, you might be wondering: What do we do now? Well, I think the first step is obvious. First, we express our gratitude that somebody wrote “So, Your Next President Is A Total Bigot.” I mean, the forethought that must have required! It takes a long time to write and publish a book. Not to mention you’re taking a huge gamble, because if by some miracle the country does not elect a total bigot, then your book is useless and goes in the clearance pile with all the romance novels that didn’t have enough sex scenes to really get the people going.
So first, we thank that guy. Then what? Well, then we start finding a way to laugh. Hear me out, because I know you probably don’t find the current state of our country funny. Hey man, me neither. When the news first broke, I cried like it was my job. I cried and cried until really it wasn’t crying anymore, more like a continuous stream of water that happened to flow from my eyeballs while I went about my business.
“Ugh, I hate that I’m crying so much. My face is all puffy. I used to be pretty,” I whined to my friend, for even the election of a man who threatens all that I hold dear is no obstacle for my unmatched vanity!
“Not really,” he said, clearly delusional. “You were never that stunning.”
“F— you,” I told him. Such was the intellectual discourse that colored the days following the election.
In addition to my ongoing sadness, I was angry. And since I pride myself on irrationality, I took things to the next level. I was angry at Donald Trump. I was angry at anything that even rhymed with Donald Trump, which actually worked out okay for me because it turns out there’s not a lot of stuff that rhymes with Donald Trump. I was even angry at walls, because of that whole ‘Build a wall to keep out the Mexicans’ thing he’d been spewing throughout his racism-driven campaign. You might think it a bit drastic to get angry at literally every wall that’s ever been built on this planet, but I don’t half-ass things, okay? I was out to get walls. All of them. I kicked the walls of my apartment. I punched a wall in Starbucks. I yelled at the walls of the hospital where I had to go because I broke all my bones trying to destroy walls (you win this time, walls!) Eventually this led to a pretty serious existential crisis, since my last name is Walls. I had already set out on my vendetta, and since I’m too stubborn to take anything back ever, I now had to hate myself.
“WHO AM I???” I cried out.
“I don’t know,” answered the delivery man. “Please just stop ordering from College Inn. We’re all so scared of you.”
You get the point. In these first few weeks after the election, I’ve had so many questions. What can I do? Where do we go from here? Am I allowed to call our next president a douchecanoe in The Cavalier Daily? (If that got censored, take your most creative guess as to what I was trying to say). But as the dust settled, I thought I’d give sincere optimism a try.
“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the light,” I said, pasting across my face one of those soft smiles people in the movies use when they are Being Sincere.
“That’s a nice quote,” said one friend. “What’s it from?”
Then I kind of lost it because that quote is obviously from Harry Potter and if people don’t know that then they probably haven’t read Harry Potter and if people haven’t read Harry Potter then what has everybody been doing all this time, like, the character development is unreal and the plot keeps you on your toes and when Hedwig dies, I mean, not a dry eye on the planet (if I just spoiled Hedwig’s death in Book Seven for you, that’s your fault for not reading the greatest series of all time before now).
Anyway, that’s how I learned that when it comes to uniting the people with a grand speech, I do not thrive. So where else do we look for moving forward? I think we have to laugh, even if so much of what lies before us is not funny at all. The next four years will be a long, exhausting struggle — if you go that entire time without laughter, it will eat away at you. You will frown all the time and your face will get gross and wrinkly, and you may even lose your hair and invest in an awful toupee, and soon you’ll start to think that “bigly” is a cool word to use, and — oh my God, I’ve done it. I figured out what’s wrong with Trump (besides, you know, the disgusting racism and the addiction to tweeting like a crazy old man yelling at you to get off his lawn). The man doesn’t know how to laugh! Like a robot who never learned to love. Just kidding. That’s Mike Pence. Pence is a robot, of this I am sure, only instead of electricity or batteries or whatever, he runs on the sheer joy of controlling all the uteruses nationwide.
But let’s not end up like them. I’m not saying you should let go of your anger or dismay. You can find the humor around you while you fight. You can allow yourself the occasional chuckle while you lead a movement — just ask the kids from my third grade class who led the movement to Keep Nora’s Lunch Money Away From Her Because She Is Short And That Is Funny (screw you guys, by the way — I’m 5’4” now)! You can laugh while you effect change (and if you’d like to get started right this minute, go ahead and laugh at me while you donate to this organization or this one or this one or… I could go on — see what I did there? If only I’d been so tricky in third grade, I might have had money for lunch). I stand with you but I’d like to laugh with you, too. And if you’re really too upset to laugh right now, I understand, but for the love of God, GO READ HARRY POTTER. IT’S BEEN OUT SINCE 1997. WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU ALL BEEN DOING THIS WHOLE TIME THAT YOU COULDN’T TAKE A FEW HOURS TO IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THE MAGIC OF HOGWARTS?
Nora Walls is a Humor writer.
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