Trump Tower, a 58-story skyscraper that is home to President-elect Donald J. Trump, looms into a grey sky, Tuesday, Nov.
15, 2016, hovering over Fifth Avenue in New York. For nearly the entire week since he was elected, Trump has been holed up in the gilded New York skyscraper, which he owns. A steady stream of visitors has come to him, flooding through metal detectors and getting whisked to Trump s offices and penthouse residence. It s good preparation for the insular, security-shrouded bubble that awaits Trump at the White House. When built, Trump Tower was the tallest building in New York, but it no longer is. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
I recently attended a meeting in a fine private home in Williston, along with 20 or so other people, to talk about the election results of 10 days before, which for all of us had produced a great consternation. A feeling of disaster in fact, to use that most-favored word in Donald Trump s small vocabulary.
A disaster far-reaching, this was, in the view of everyone present at the meeting, and breathtakingly unexpected. The floor of our lives had given way under us suddenly that Tuesday night of the election, landing us in a deep dark cellar of fear. Fear was the other word on people s lips at the meeting, along with disaster.
We were mostly from the Williston area, at the doorstep of Burlington. The rest, one-third, were from around Montpelier, 40 miles away. Three-quarters of us were women, one-quarter men. And here we go everyone was white and most made their living in some form of white-collar work. All of us were college educated, and most of us were in enjoyment of the comforts and sensibilities afforded us by the modest and secure incomes we took for granted. What s befallen us? What are we to do? and Oh, my poor children! were among the themes that came out in the first half-hour of the meeting as we went around introducing ourselves.
Our only agenda, as the meeting began, was to say what was on our minds in the aftermath of the election; together with first faltering ideas of where do we go from here, and what can we humanly do, in the face of what we all felt was a calamity: the ascent of the improbable, irrepressible, irresponsible Donald Trump to the presidency, along with that great cohort of his that s poised to occupy the top Great Offices of the land: Congress, governorships, and bit by bit, the soon-to-be-greater-than-majority of conservative seats on the Supreme Court. We laid ourselves open in talk for two hours. One woman wept as she spoke. The subject of our kids future came up often. What have we landed them in? We agreed that we had to press as best we could, however we could, against the cataclysm of unfettered conservatism reaction, actually that lies ahead. A few of us lamented the prospect of giving over reams of our time in the future, to politics and protest. Two people present said they had no experience of political protest, or taste for it, and that they nevertheless expected to be on the street or otherwise engaged in political action in the future. No actions of that kind were specifically projected at the meeting.
But it seemed that most of the 20 of us of would will stick together and, some of us, act together, for at least a time into the future. A few concrete courses of action small actions did emerge in the course of the undirected meeting. One was to support and engage with existing organizations like the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, etc., which already, in the days right after the election, have been doing their stuff and showing their mettle. Another line of action that brought out perhaps the clearest support was to give direct help to refugees already in the Williston and Burlington areas; the kinds of others who have been the butt of Trump s flamboyant xenophobia and the focus of the nameless fears he invokes. Two women present at the meeting had already and for some time been engaged in practical efforts to help refugees in the Burlington area. They turned our thoughts to providing direct help to make secure and reasonable the lives of refugees already living in our towns; people of the kind we have been advised to be very, very afraid of. We can offer help in small, practical matters like providing them with kitchen utensils, winter clothing, and the like, and helping their children navigate the scary difficulties of school and schoolyard. I was mainly silent during that late part of the meeting, with little or nothing to offer, though over the years my wife and I have housed and supported four or five different sets of refugees. That s all right as far as it goes, I thought about the turn the meeting had taken, but that s mere social work, not a bullseye.
And I thought, too, that mere of mine is dubious, that the women who predominated at the meeting were onto something I didn t fully grasp. My own thoughts about social rectification in these trying times, which tempt us into clich s, take a windier, more grandiose direction, tending toward the bundles of words-words-words that are the building blocks of manifestos and top-heavy, exhilarating declarations. I didn t oppose the can-opener, quilt, and schoolyard talk, because nobody at the meeting had proposed any of the kinds of wide declarations that we re accustomed to endorsing at meetings of the kind we were taking part in. Feel them in our hearts, though I think we all did. The meeting, with its high emotions, had already run for two hours, and our respective Saturdays were calling to us. Barren of ideas myself, high-flown or not, of what can be done right now, I thought that the predominating gender at the meeting was showing a way that I could endorse, too. Could, should, and do, while waiting for the appearance of what I would consider to be more far-reaching efforts and ideas. Meteorological winter is here now, in Vermont, and I m wearing heavy socks and a long-sleeved undershirt. The other winter, the kind that tries peoples souls, is just beginning to show its face, in the dreadful reality represented by Trump s first list of appointments to high posts in his government: All of them determined, old white men of the far, far right, portending what Rebecca Gordon has in just these days called a fever-dream America.
Jules Rabin lives in Marshfield.