Column: A silence that's harder to break

“You’re probably on a list somewhere,” joked a law student I met last week who was campaigning for a local candidate. After chatting with me about my postgraduate plans and my writing, he expressed faux concern for my ability to write opinion columns openly if Donald Trump was elected president. Following this quip, he chuckled and then sort of stopped himself: “Actually, I guess, you should be careful.”

It is five days after the United States elected Donald Trump as President of the United States. Most chuckles of just last week have emptied into silence; dismissals have forged the way for slack jaws.

As a teenager, the most impactful book I read was Crime and Punishment. It’s a grueling story of a man who tries to overcome his moral impulses, committing crimes for a higher purpose. Every time characters face something horrifying, they all either laugh, swear or remain silent. When characters in this book try to deceive themselves, they go mad or behave like it. This is a literary device to show what happens when we deny the truth we know.

In the past few days, the process of normalizing horror — which has been grinding away for the past year and a half — ran itself into hyperspeed. Amid the completely necessary calls to respect the democratic process also came post-hoc explanations, a huge dose of self-blame and even some despair. Then some silence and some lingering chuckles.

I won’t exclude myself from this. I mourned the selection of someone who represents none of the goodness or the virtues I see in the people of my country.

And I cried over what was lost, too: how close I came to looking like a president. How brutal the rebuke when a woman lost to an unrepentant misogynist.

But now we have work to do. I, for one, have never felt stronger or surer of how to proceed.

Other than blaming citizens of another political party, the next most dangerous thing we could focus on is turning entirely inward to blame ourselves for this election. This would take the bait of a very real temptation to normalcy. Right now, people on the left and right alike truly would like to believe that this is a normal Republican candidate who has been misunderstood.

It’s a collective delusion that will be adopted by commentators, family members and friends in the coming days. They seek a stability after 18 months of restlessness, but it’s a stability that they can create only in their words. There is no sureness in this transition of power, no normalcy in the dangerous leader we have chosen.

And so we must get stronger, surer, kinder and more moral. We cannot slip into the dangerous temptation of inaction — to those silence and chuckles — and start on the work we need to be doing. If we have any comfort right now, it is that civic virtue hasn’t been demanded from each and every one of us like this in a long, long time.

Civic virtue is an application of personal virtues in the public sphere, bent on a common goal of justice; it’s an open, brave celebration of a strong civil society, the backbone of all liberal democracies.

Let’s study our history, become firm in our convictions and ready ourselves to make some sacrifices for these convictions. The main radical act is pretty simple: refusing to normalize sexism, misogyny and racism, no matter the power that backs it or the explanations of those we love.

It starts with defending free speech. Trump has openly taunted the press, making it very clear that he will open up the libel laws against the press; he also did not allow journalists to travel with him in his first visit to the White House.

Trump’s threats to limit free speech exist in an area where he truly does have a lot of control, and where his opponents are fairly vulnerable right now. Coincidentally, a crackdown on media of any kind would be one of the most damaging assaults on our civil liberties — and that would be a silence that’s harder to break.