Owning Our Shit
By: Adrian J Anchondo
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Hillary, Trump, Donald Trump

I’m about to piss y’all off. I might even lose some friends because of this. If you’re too much of a (grab ’em by the) pussy to handle it or tired of angry rants, maybe you should stop reading now because I’m going in on all of us. It’s been a week since the election and I’ve had some time to weep, rage, drink a bottle of wine, gather my thoughts, eat lots of carbs, weep again and drink two more bottles of wine, but still I have not yet been able to come to peace with the worst thing that has happened to this country since they made a standalone movie for Catwoman. But maybe bitching to you, my friends, my fellow progressives, may help bring some solace and help us understand where we went wrong so we can come together and kumbaya or whatever.

I’ve got one major thing to say to you. HILLARY CLINTON DID NOT FAIL US, WE FAILED HILLARY CLINTON. Now I know, I know, she won the popular vote by almost two million votes, and I know that a lot of you were a part of that so yay go ahead and pat yourselves on the back. You done? Okay. You say she was flawed? Y’all motherfuckers didn’t DESERVE the candidate you got, and every day I watched as progressives posted on Facebook about how much they hated corrupt Clinton, talked about how imperfect she was as a candidate, posted articles that were flat out lies, or wrote things like #ImWithHerIGuess. Your enthusiasm for the former First Lady, Senator of New York, Secretary of State and first ever possible female President was shameful when you compare it to the enthusiasm the other side had for their “flawed” (racist homophobic tax evading possible rapist who has to make his undocumented Mexican maids wash the orange out of his bedsheets every fucking morning) candidate. If you would have just swallowed your pride and given Hillary half of the love you gave Obama, then we might not have woken up on November 9th worrying about families being torn apart, marriage licenses being taken way, guns getting into the wrong hands and women having to stay pregnant after getting raped. Does that sound too harsh? Too bad! This reality show is now our reality and we need to accept it and own our shit. We stepped in it and now its going to take at least four years to clean it off.

And to you people out there saying “Don’t blame me, I voted for Bernie”- suck a dick. Oh noooo- I’m so sorry you didn’t “like” Hillary. That’s so saaaad! I guess that’s worth this result. Your “I told you so” is so worth the millions of people who will suffer because of selfishness and pride. We all act like our nominee has to be the perfect representation of us regardless of how many years they’ve spent working tirelessly for the people. I didn’t give a shit about John Kerry, but I voted for the rest of my country. Every candidate has an email/Swift boat Veteran/Born in Kenya/Benghazi/Reverend Wright/Gennifer Flowers bullshit scandal that gets played over and over again, and for some reason we thought Hillary’s private email server (WTF is even a server?) was more damaging than Trump ADMITTING TO SEXUAL ASSAULT AND CALLING MEXICANS RAPISTS. Who’s talking about those damn emails now? NO ONE. Think about how the world must perceive us.

Who the fuck said you had to LIKE your nominee anyway? Guess what? There has always been and will always be at least half the people in the country who hate a Presidential nominee! This kind of thinking started with the whole “who would you want to get a beer with” bullshit from the Bush/Gore era and now it’s just gotten out of control. We didn’t always have primaries. Our parties used to pick our nominees for us. We had to deal with our choices. Now we get angry and picky if someone doesn’t meet every single criterion that we have created or if we don’t trust them because their positions evolved in a more progressive way over the years. If I had to talk to one more gay person about how Hillary wasn’t always for same sex marriage I was going to start having sex with women. Oh really? She wasn’t for gay marriage? WHY WERE YOU SO SUPPORTIVE OF OBAMA IF THAT WAS YOUR MAIN REASON FOR NOT LIKING HER??? AHHHHHH! Is it because she’s a woman and it reminded you of your own mother when she didn’t fully accept you as gay? We found a way to forgive our mothers who raised us, but we couldn’t find it in our hearts to forgive someone of no relation who evolved in their beliefs and ended up speaking on behalf of the LGBT and providing AIDS medication to people all over the world? I swear I saw more gay people posting about Hillary hating LGBT than articles about Mike Pence believing in electro shock gay conversion therapy for children, or the fact that in Indiana you can get put in jail and fined 10,000 just for applying for a marriage license if you weren’t a man and a woman. So what did we do? We’ve given a billionaire who hasn’t paid taxes the most power of ANY PRESIDENT SINCE THE 40’s. It’s like we’ve given a plumber permission to do open heart surgery on our kids. It’s because of us that one of the best Presidents this country has ever seen actually had to shake the hand of a man who was blatantly racist towards him and tried to get him out of office. Shame on us.

To the protest voters (whether you voted or not) I hope you are proud of yourself for being “right” while others continue to struggle and lose their rights and healthcare. We are in such a place of privilege to pick and choose what we like in a candidate when people died just to have the right to vote. I’m so over all the self righteousness. Bernie himself begged his followers to do the right thing, but we were too selfish to come out and support our nominee. Did you know that 11,000 people wrote in “Harambe” for President? Does that make you angry? It should. It should also make you angry that progressives voted for candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson WHO DID NOT HAVE THE PROGRESSIVE POSITIONS THAT BERNIE HAD. These people weren’t able to put themselves in the shoes of a mother who lost her Black child to a bad cop, or the shoes of someone who lost their best friend in Orlando. How quickly we forget.

And to those of you that say Bernie would have won? Suck two dicks. We look back and say that the Democrats should have focused their campaign on the white middle class and criticize Hillary for focusing on racial and gender equality. FUCK YOU!!! I am sick and tired of people making the white middle class the biggest victims in this election. Oh the Caucacity of it all! The real victims are the Black and Latino kids out there living in a trailer park eating canned food for the 4th day in a week. That was me. I know how it feels. I’m sorry, Becky, for hurting your white feelings and for being upset by your privilege, but your pain and guilt are a small price to pay for the millions out there who are struggling in this country. And we are thankful to you for trying to help- that goes without saying. White people lost limbs and lives fighting against slavery, but they knew it was caused by them and probably didn’t complain when they received criticism. If they can accept that, I’m sure you can handle when people point out inequality and racism amongst white people in general.

Bernie wasn’t perfect either. Let’s stop spreading the rumors that the primaries were rigged for Clinton. That’s what radicals say to fight against the establishment (Trump, can you hear me?) but if that were true, why didn’t she win the first time she ran for President? We are all out here talking about how we hate the establishment? Well, the establishment got you healthcare and many other good things. I’m not saying we shouldn’t change the establishment and get money out of politics, but it’s dangerous to point fingers at people and call them something to make them a villain without even knowing what the definition is. There are plenty of reasons why Bernie lost the primary. There are tons of articles from reliable news sources that you can look up to prove she won fairly. Did Debbie Wasserman Shultz say bad things in emails? Yes. Did they actually act on anything? No. Should she have taken responsibility for this? Yes. Was this all just over exaggerated because people were mad? Yes. Of course the establishment Democrats are going to favor one candidate over an independent who turned into a Democrat just so he could have a better chance. And he did a great job; he really pushed Hillary left and in turn helped us fight for more progressive things. But to say that a candidate who lost by both the popular vote and the delegate count would have beaten Trump is just not fair or accurate. We have no idea what Russia or the FBI would have done and Republicans would have painted him as a socialist with no business experience who would have bankrupted us with free college for brown people. You can say whatever you want about the polls suggesting Bernie would have beat Trump by a larger margin, but as we’ve all learned, POLLS DONT MEAN SHIT. People voted based on their hate, NOT THE ECONOMY.

But you know what? IF Bernie would have been the nominee, I would have marched on the streets and made videos and voted the shit out of him if it was to keep Trump from being President- because that’s what we do, we come together to support whatever is closest to being right. That’s what I did for Obama when my first choice didn’t win the primary. Because this isn’t about how I FEEL about a candidate. This is about the overall well being of people less fortunate than myself. If Bernie were the nominee and would have lost, I would never ever ever post something about Hillary being a better candidate just to make myself feel better. I would show sympathy for the man who worked his ass off to defeat hatred no matter how imperfect he was. So please cut that shit out. You know a lot of this defeat had to do with Russia committing espionage, the FBI favoring Trump, and tons of other totally illegal things that no one seemed to be outraged about.

This isn’t a dating show. Hillary didn’t have to be perfect for us, she just had to work for us. It breaks my heart seeing what she went through. She was always getting knocked down from everyone around her, even her damn husband. But what did she do? She rolled up her sleeves and fought for children, for healthcare and for women’s rights. There are so many stories out there of people who have personally been helped by her and they still to this day have Hillary checking up on them. In her campaign, Hillary worked tirelessly on policies that the news paid zero percent of time talking about. She had a plan for almost everything. She updated her website constantly with plans to help homeless gay youth, to provide AIDS medication to those in need, to work with police and urban communities, to help women get equal pay, to help small businesses, to promote more love and kindness and most importantly she fought against racism. She was the candidate that was able to stand with the mothers of innocent children killed and say “Black Lives Matter” but all we focused on was whether she would say the words “Radical Jihadists”. She fought an honorable fight against racism because in the end, that’s what people voted in favor of. “Take back America” and “make America great again” weren’t about the economy; they were code for “don’t let the brown man be equal to us”. Hillary believed that this country and its different colors were what made America great already and I’m not sorry that she lost fighting for that belief. No one puts themselves through this much work and this much abuse for so many years just for a title- they do it because they care. I will always support the person who fights with their heart over their ego.

She did all of this and we still called her unlikable and untrustworthy. We called her out for saying that people in gangs were “super predators” twenty years ago, and then when she apologized and went into Black communities we said that she was pandering. Beyoncé sings about carrying hot sauce in her bag and we attack Hillary for saying she does the same thing even though there was proof that she had done it for years! We beat her up every single time and she fought back till she became an ugly callus that we didn’t like looking at. We poked at every flaw of hers and refused to see any of the good she did over her 30+ years of public service. We wouldn’t let her get away with a single mistake. And yet we chose Trump. A monster who was also created by the ugliest in us. We and the media made excuses for his hatred because it was entertaining. We didn’t take him seriously. And now, I cringe as I watch CNN and they praise Trump for acting mature and respectful in the home of the motherfuckin President of the United States.

WOO! Okay! That felt good. As you can see, I’m a little angry at all of us. I’m sorry if you felt personally attacked but I knew you could handle it. It’s important that we be loud and angry and in each others faces. It’s also important for us to be able to take criticism and take responsibility for this. I’m not perfect either, I wish I did more, I wish I didn’t fall for the sexist traps, I wish I didn’t coddle peoples feelings or let them believe conspiracies. I wish I didn’t keep apologizing for Hillary. We progressives have a lot of work to do. We have to fight for what is right and know that change takes time. This country operates on incrementalism and Hillary was doing her best to be the bad ass progressive bitch she has always been while still listening to the concerns of the other half. If the protesters out on the streets right now (which I just read that in Oregon half the protesters didn’t vote- WTF???) showed half as much passion for our candidate before all this happened, if we wrote and called and told news stations to stop focusing on bullshit stories, if we didn’t share skewed articles before looking up the facts- things could be very different right now and the whole world (except for Russia) wouldn’t be so scared right now. Damn yo, we let Hillary down and this fucking sucks. I like to think she’s at home with her dogs drinking Rosé and finishing Stranger Things, but we all know she is probably thinking about how she can still help people now that she will never be President. Thats who I wanted to lead our country- the fierce woman who kicked ass in every debate, who comforted a crying girl sitting on her lap by telling her to leave the worrying to her, the woman who even Republicans said was pleasant to work with, the person who gave two of the most inspirational concession speeches and then immediately went down to comfort her staff. I hope she goes down in history as one of the most respected people in the world, as a gay icon, as a mother for America, and as a reminder of one of the biggest mistakes we ever made.

I’m so sorry, Hillary.