By Debra Walker
(Editor’s Note: For months, Debra Walker worked tirelessly on the front lines of the election, supporting Hillary Clinton. She wrote this article just before Election Day and before it was announced that Trump will be president. Walker is also a talented, award-winning artist and is the creator of the poster cover of this issue of the San Francisco Bay Times.)
As I started this piece, I just finished packing for Vegas. I am starting this a few days before the election, and I am traveling to Las Vegas to help get out the vote in Henderson. The experience of working on this campaign has been life changing. Yes, of course, it is also history making, but for each and every one of us who signed on to help get Hillary Clinton elected, our lives have changed.
As I left the San Francisco HQ of the campaign, workers were busy putting final touches on the gigantic pair of rooms that used to be sound studios at KRON. They were being readied to house the hundreds of volunteers piling in to activate the GOTV phone bank and text bank. We spent the day putting up art, decorating, and breathing a second life into those rooms. Several of the media who came by to take shots of the action had worked there in its previous iteration as KRON. It was really moving in many ways for all of us. As I departed, the building was buzzing, and by the time I walked out the front door, the news teams were starting their live feeds.
I realize that we have become a family at 1001 Van Ness. Whenever you work this passionately together towards electing someone, especially with the historic nature of this election, you bond. But this election means so much to so many. Across this country, growing and expanding groups of supporters came together and hit the streets for Hillary Clinton and democrats down the ticket.
Now I am in Nevada, my hotel on the “Strip,” here to do the same things in Nevada that I did in San Francisco until the election. Even though it felt like I was leaving my San Francisco family at the holidays, there is family here—many, many friends from California and all over the country.
As my anthem, everywhere I go I take “Fight Song” with me. When my phone rings, that is what plays. It really has become my rally song and moves me forward. We are in the fight of our lives.
The fact of what is going on in America—the attacks being waged against our democracy—has woken a resolve in many of us. The attacks from within and without are terrifying even for the most stoic of us. That the FBI looks to be trying to tilt the scales against the first woman likely to be elected president is just jaw dropping.
What happened to our country? What happened to a country that has prided itself on climbing out of the wounds of civil war, slavery, discrimination of women … that only a decade ago seemed on a path forward? Where is that America?
What we are left with is at least forty percent of the public who are voting proudly for an admitted bigot and racist who routinely disparages all women, all Muslims, all Mexicans, and anyone else who challenges him. (Editor’s Note: Clinton won the popular vote, receiving more votes nationwide than Trump, but he was still able to win the state-by-state electoral vote.) What happened to the America with open arms?
I’ll tell you what happened: partisan politics that ignores the voice and needs of most Americans. Trump came to represent an America ripe for the picking by the alt-right and self-interested egomaniacs. What has risen to the top of this is the basket of “deplorables” whom the rest of the world is ashamed of, horrified for, and tired of already. People looking at the U.S. can see how our prisons are swollen with African American youths whose biggest crime is that they were born black in our country. They watch the possibility of our nation rolling back to the Jim Crow days of winning because you are white, and losing because you are not.
This America will wither against the weight of the rest of the world unless we shake it off and elect the only candidate really qualified to lead: Hillary Clinton. By the time this article publishes, she will hopefully, and prayerfully, have won.
One of the reasons I am so passionate about Hillary Clinton is that she has lived the “America we love” and has always worked, her entire life, to make our country one that we can be proud of. Even as the new “gross America” spits out its venom on her, she gets up, raises her head and looks to the America we all want it to be. She lifts us up. She has changed America’s mind before: on LGBT rights, on HIV/AIDS research and funding, on same sex marriage, on healthcare, on nuclear containment, and much more. On so many issues that she herself evolved on, she helped America to change its mind.
We need her leadership now more than ever. We need her strength, focus, and compassion to wrap around us and to pull us together again, conquering the hate.
Hillary Clinton has formulated real solutions to pressing problems over the course of her entire extensive career both in and outside of politics. She has had to bear the consequences for her husband, for Obama when she served as Secretary of State, and for everything anyone wants to blame her for. Her shoulders can, and have, borne the weight of centuries of the oppression of women. The piling on is a familiarity to many of us, and she can take it.
I love living in America, but I am angry that America has been hijacked by Donald Trump and his followers. I am confident that our collective conscience will overcome the fear and hate that presented at the urging of Trump, and will offer up a new direction to our better tomorrow.
If I am right: Welcome, President Hillary Clinton—our 45th President. Our leader of tomorrow.
If I am wrong … we are screwed.
Debra Walker is a Commissioner for the City and County of San Francisco Building Inspection Commission. A past president of the Commission, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club and the San Francisco Arts Democratic Club, Walker is also an internationally recognized painter and printmaker. For more information: http://www.debrawalker.com/
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