The headline was
wrong on Steve Lopez's helpful survey of people who didn't vote today.
The situation is not "Apathy still rules despite the era of Trump."
Some of us have apathy because of the era of Trump.
Steve captured our
feeling in his sentence about Andrew Hernandez:
"He's also a little
disillusioned after voting for Hillary Clinton and watching Trump drive her to
defeat."
AND after learning:
- How much Russians interfered.
- How much the Trump team colluded with them.
- How fake news posted on Facebook was targeted at vulnerable people.
- How the Electoral College decreased the value of a California vote as well as the popular vote.
We Hillary voters
should be outraged and fight bravely on, but energy is hard to sustain in the
face of the daily onslaught of idiocy and dismantling of environmental
protections, health care, decency for immigrants.
I studied my ballot
and walked into my polling place only to be confronted by the question,
"Are you pink?"
I stared in disbelief. I'm supposed to know what color I am? Showing up with a driver’s
license is not enough? I was supposed to read the fine print and know
which table to approach. Bickering ensued.
Then
it hit me: This is where the trauma of Nov. 8, 2016, happened. I hadn't
been back in that room since then. No wonder I didn't feel safe and
confident.
And I wasn't even one
of the 120,000 LA County voters whose names were not on the roster.
I will never again
walk into a polling place. I will vote by mail if I can regain the faith
that voting matters. The era of feeling good about voting is over. I'm 69
and really wanted a woman president. Instead I have a philandering fool
who conspired to steal the election.
It's not apathy I
feel. It's absolute despair that my act of voting will ever again make a
difference.
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