On Nov. 8, exit polls sounded alarm bells as Donald Trump steadily climbed to victory. Then, he won. How could this happen? We blamed pollsters for their inaccurate reporting and getting our hopes high, Washington attacked the FBI for bringing Hillary Clinton’s emails back on the table in the final days of the election season, and pundits blamed Facebook for circling false news in the midst of open investigative reporting calling out Trump. Yet, we have conceded to his victory, and convinced ourselves that it was our own fault. In our echo chambers, we completely missed the point Trump successfully tapped on: in the face of economic anxieties, releasing tax returns hardly mattered.
I have come to America to study, and that decision has not been the easiest for me. This is not what I had hoped for, and I am scared. To tackle my feelings, I knew I had to get out of bed and join the protests. Even still, I never wanted to forget how I feel and decided to document the protests at Union Square.
I hope these pictures from protests on 12th Nov., can remind us all about the fight we have ahead of us. If the going gets tough, we have to remind ourselves, as Adam Gopnik writes in his article in the New Yorker, all we can do is all we can do. We are not alone, and we need to move ahead together, and that, as the pictures will reveal, is our real victory.
