Blog / Our America

Our America: Are We Really Surprised?

November 21, 2016 - By Doug Anderson

I was: I had bought the rhetoric that said Hillary Clinton would win, that she would have all the electoral votes in addition to the popular vote, that we could not possibly elect someone who grabbed women’s vaginas without their permission and was appealing to racists and homophobes at every turn. Women could not possibly vote for him and women were half the country. But in retrospect I was sleeping.

In all the years since Bill Clinton, the Republicans, who are unified around the single goal of dismantling the New Deal and taking all the money, have been winning at the local level all...

Our America: What Kind of World?

November 18, 2016 - By Eduardo Halfon

I flew back to Nebraska from Germany on the morning after the elections, with the final result slowly and painfully becoming evident, overwhelmed by a feeling I'd never felt before. A feeling similar to gloom, or dread, or even complete despair. I've felt all of these before, of course, but always about myself, never in general, never so profound. I think what made it even worse for me was the fact that my son had been born in Nebraska exactly five weeks earlier.

I had come to fatherhood late, and as with everything else important in my life, by accident. I...

Our America: Planet Trump

November 17, 2016 - By Frederika Randall

Went to the bar down the street for cappuccino this morning. It’s been three days now since the US election. NB: this is Rome, my home, where cappuccino takes only seconds to make and is generally pretty good.

I sit at a table outside, daring it to rain. After a few minutes a very elderly woman hobbles up with a friend and a badante, a caregiver, who asks if they can sit with me at this, the sole sidewalk table. Her ward likes to smoke, she says, and therefore they have to sit out in the cold.

‘Please do,” I say. “It’s not very cold.”

They sit down. The elderly lady then asks whether I will mind if she smokes. Oh certainly not...

Our America: Don't Give up the Fight

November 16, 2016 - By Jules Chametzky

On November 9th, the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, that fateful date in German and German Jewish history, I called my sister-in-law Renate in Cleveland to wish her a happy birthday; it was of course my late wife Anne Halley's birthday as well, since they were twins. Renate is a retired physician, head of mammography at Western Reserve, and not ever very political--even though she and Anne were born in Bremerhaven and heard the Horst Wessel song in the streets on their birthday, and were lucky enough to escape Germany for America in 1938. But the Trump victory energized in her an anguished...

Our America: A Path to Citizenship

November 15, 2016 - By Soledad Palmieri

I want to share what happened to me two days after the election, around 3:20 p.m. in the library café, a place where a lot of students, faculty, and staff hang out.

I was having a conversation with a friend and colleague; the two of us were sitting at one of the tables against the wall, under the TV screens. Eventually,...