As the post-election blues have set in, The Equinox wants to reflect on what the results mean for all of us going forward.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris faced off in a mad dash for the presidency, with Trump prevailing as the next president-elect of the United States. With uncertainty looming over the American electorate, we particularly want to focus on how we move forward.
The most unfortunate consequences of the 2024 presidential election is the finger pointing and immaturity of people on both sides. Being closed-minded and unwilling to hear people out is not productive to making any meaningful change, it alienates people more than it does support them. This has unfortunately been a primary focus of the Trump campaign, making it a blaming game and polarization in the community, when we should be working together. Social media has seen a large part of this division, with people on both sides posting about their no longer wanting to be associated with someone regarding their political views. While the acceptability of those actions more broadly is uncertain to The Equinox staff, we can understand why people may want to take those actions on an individual basis given their situation. We, as a society, need to shift our focus to community building, reaching out to people and understanding their perspectives. This would give people a greater breadth of knowledge and help their fellow Americans and move policy in a more effective and meaningful direction. We need to become more active citizens in our communities.
While this national election is important for policy changes, the state elections are more impactful. State-level elections are what really affect people’s lives; these are the laws that guide and inform or restrict the choices of the public. As an example, the overturning of Roe v. Wade was not the primary issue of the decision, the real problem was its ability to allow states the liberty to make drastic changes to abortion law. Urging citizens to become an active electorate at the state level is very important to combating unfavorable policies, especially now post-election. If people are unhappy with the results this should be the catalyst for their activism and a motivator to alter the current status quo.
On campus we can certainly make strides to change this by becoming politically active in our community and having conversations. An important aspect to creating open dialogue is meeting people where they are politically. Avoiding these conversations creates too much tension and hyper-polarization, which leads to tribalism and dangerous and ineffective conversations. There are many issues which affect our fellow Americans that we can unify around and change people’s’ lives for the better regarding healthcare or economics; we do not need to fall for the culture war trappings that are dividing us so well.
