What we talk about when we talk about naiveté
My dad cried at the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election. When I laughed in disbelief he probably yelled at me because being naive sometimes means falsely thinking adults don’t cry when you’re a kid. He said something along the lines of, You don’t know what the past eight years have been, you don’t know what this means, because I was thirteen and didn’t recognize what it meant to cry happy tears nor did I recognize what it meant to desperately seek change.
As election day has grown closer, I’ve been seeing the same quote from David Sedaris’ Essay, “Undecided,” floating around. He says, “...To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” He continues. “To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked,” (The New Yorker 2008). I remember reading this essay in 2016, eight years after it’s original publication, thinking David Sedaris was writing specifically about the 2016 election. Four years later, this essay is circulating again, and again I pause to think how unfortunately relevant it is.
I don’t understand how the undecided voter exists this time around, but then again maybe naiveté is living in Los Angeles and settling for Joe Biden because our country was too scared of Bernie. The undecided voter is a voter who chooses the Green Party, who votes for Kanye, who writes in someone else. The undecided voter is the voter who doesn’t vote. I struggle to understand the undecided because to be undecided is to decide the last four years haven’t mattered. We can talk about privilege and naiveté, but when we talk about the undecided voter in 2020, we’re talking about selfishness.
A few months ago I was at a bonfire when two boys brought up Kanye West running for President. One of them said, “I just think it’s just funny that he’s actually running for President,” in a tone that showed a pathetic kind of admiration. I knew the two boys that said this in agreement were younger than the rest of us; so much younger that 2020 will be their first election to vote in, but still I chose to scoff. I said, “It’s funny because when you were sixteen or seventeen, people said the same thing about Trump. People treated him as a joke and look where we are now, kids.” Maybe it’s that I called them kids. Maybe they were just kids repeating the words their parents uttered in times of frustration, but when the group had been silent for a few moments, one of the boys said, “I still think Hillary would have done a worse job.”
I spend too much time wondering about the people who actually believe this. Would Hillary have called COVID 19 the China Virus? Would she have declined to denounce white supremacists? Would she, too, have tear-gassed protestors on her way to a photo-op at a church? The list goes on and the longer it gets the angrier I become.
Since Bernie dropped out of the race, I’ve concluded discussions on the election by saying, “We’re only choosing between the lesser of two evils.” This translates to: I’m voting for Joe Biden and although that choice was not my first choice, it is one that I know I have to make. The sad part is, had Bernie Sanders been the Democratic nominee, I don’t think we would have had to describe the choice as choosing between the lesser of two evils. Then I remember what we focus on in political candidates, what our country chose because of our focus, and fear sets in.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is what we’re left with when we focus solely on the political beliefs at hand rather than the characters that belong to the people campaigning for our votes. I can call our President a monster and someone else will tell me new offending facts about his opponent. When I was twenty one in 2016, I was devastatingly wrong in thinking we, as a country, would never elect a man like Donald Trump. I looked at that election as an opportunity to judge someone’s character over politics, yet failed to realize sexism has always played too big of a role in politics.
I hope in this election others look at the last four years and are forced to take character into consideration. There are days that I am still stung with shock and anger when I see the turnouts at Trump’s rallies. I hate that it still surprises me; I hate reminding myself that I have only ever lived in major cities in blue States and I, myself, can be what we talk about when we talk about naiveté. I am the naive who forgets there are people who would enjoy a round of golf with Donald Trump. They might be the same people who spew All Lives Matter, who chant Build The Wall, but ignore the numbers of families separated at the border. There are people who vote for him and say it’s purely because of what he’ll do for the economy. I question why it is that we excuse the person behind their words and focus more on what they’ll do for the economy? Smells like capitalism. In this election when you excuse the man Donald Trump is in exchange for reasons like the economy or his views on immigration, abortion, climate change, you let the rest of us know there is no care for others. Sure, support a man who tells you he believes life begins at conception, but don’t question how many abortions he, himself, has probably paid for.
I cried at the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, but I wasn’t crying happy tears like my dad had eight years before. I am dreading Tuesday, November 3rd, unsure if I should surround myself with moral support in the form of friends or alcohol. The other day I read a statistic that listed the amount of votes already counted as half the number of votes counted on election night in 2016. As I write this, that number is somewhere around 93 million; predictions say we will likely reach 150 million votes for the first time. I can only see that as some sort of light, some sort of hope I have that I’ll cry the same tears of relief my dad did twelve years ago. Or is that naiveté too?
Victoria Crowe is a writer and editor of You Might Need To Hear This. Originally from Queens, NY, she studied creative writing in San Francisco and has since moved to Los Angeles. She writes both fiction and nonfiction and finds her poetry is usually decent after a bottle of wine. Her work has been published in Harness Magazine, Herstry Blog, and District Lit. She is currently finishing up her second novel and afterwards plans to start her first.
