“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain
So, the US presidential election is almost over, and Biden secured the presidency with 290 electoral votes to President Trump’s 232. From the beginning of the election, I’ve shared some presidential memes on Facebook, especially ones that mock Trump. One day, I opened my Facebook page and realized some of them unfriended me…
One of them directed hostility towards me by adding hateful comments on my post before having unfriended me. She’s a Japanese woman married to a hard-core Trump supporter who blindly believes everything Trump has said. Despite the fact that she’s been living in the US for more than a decade, her English was still broken, and it was so hard to read what she has written.
Come to think of it, she’s Asian. So she’s definitely considered as a minority in the country and somewhat still supported Trump. I felt sorry for her. Since she’s been living in Utah, home to thousands of Mormons, for many years, and her husband is a hard-core right-winger, she has no choice but to depend on him to survive in the state. I’ve been knowing her for almost a decade and been following her on Facebook. When she moved to Utah from California a few years back, I remember what she wrote on her Facebook wall: “I don’t want to live like this anymore!”. She wrote she was crying every day in private messages.
Utah is the middle of nowhere and is one of the hardest places to be non-white due to wide-spread racism across the state. She used to be innocent and wasn’t involved with politics and religion. But through those years, it seemed like she was forced to adapt herself to the toxic environment and eventually has fallen into the dark side.
And what she doesn’t realize is that no matter who the president is, she can’t fully depend on her leader. If she wants to make her life better, she has to realize the fact that changes happen within her. This idea could be relevant to us all, not just Americans. We can’t keep waiting for someone else to lead us. We have to think and act independently, otherwise, we would be deprived of our ability to think and cast questions to authorities.
It was sad that I lost her as a friend on Facebook, but it was probably inevitable considering our disagreements in politics. And this was not the first time I lost friends due to political disagreements, especially when it comes to China. Because of my repulsion toward the Chinese Communist Party and their leader Xi Jinping, I lost some of my friends who are from mainland China or those who have Chinese descendant. Whiteout politics, we were just friends. But when it comes to politics, our disagreements become clear, and start judging each other based on what we side with. Ideally, I want to consider myself a citizen of the world instead of my native country. But those realities remind me how difficult it is to be a true cosmopolitan even in this interlinked world.
And I have to point out the fact that I’m not an American citizen so that I don’t have any right to participate in the presidential election. But as a citizen of Japan, which is one of America’s traditional allies, their presidential election is something I can’t be indifferent to. What is happening in the US will eventually influence Japan sooner or later, just like the Butterfly effect. And as I mentioned earlier, not only do I consider myself a citizen of Japan, I also consider myself as a citizen of the world – even from this standpoint, the US presidential election is quite influential for the rest of the world.
From what I have seen, this time’s presidential election was extraordinary in many ways. For instance, Biden has broken the jinx of Ohio. Since 1944, Ohioans have chosen the winner of the presidential race except for one – the 1960 contest between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Despite his loss in Ohio/Florida, he’s won the election. The last president who broke the jinx was JFK. And more importantly, it was undeniable that Joe Biden received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, breaking Obama’s record. In 2008, Barack Obama earned 69,498,516 votes in the presidential election. This time, Mr. Obama’s former vice president has surpassed the tally with a whopping 77,926,591 votes.
All in all, how did you think about the presidential election?
Finally, here are some Instagram contents posed by Trump and Biden. Usually, I post my photos on my blog posts, but this time is an exception.