This week, we got to know Isabel Fields from FEM Project LA. As a young woman on the cusp of the legal voting age, she wrote us an essay detailing her frustrations and fears surrounding the presidential election.
by Isabel Fields
In wake of Donald Trump becoming the President-elect, I feel defeated as many of my fellow sisters and brothers do. I have never seen my country so divided, my community in such despair or my family so defeated. The hope of having our first female President was something that, as a young woman, excited and liberated me. I believed the world was changing; female equality within my lifetime seemed possible. Barack Obama made history as our first African-American president and Hillary Clinton was supposed to follow as our first female president. To our mutual disappointment, this was not the case.
Yet the loss of Clinton is not our greatest obstacle, for now we have a President-Elect that is racist, homophobic, sexist, a bigot, and a bully. I am scared for our country, yet this is the person America chose.
As a woman, the threat of rights that my mother, grandmother and ancestors fought for being taken away from wounds me. As First Lady Michelle Obama said, “It has shaken me to my core.” To know our President-Elect has said “Grab ’em by the pussy,” been accused of rape, and openly stated that abortion should be “punishable” upsets me. It weighs me down to know that our Vice President-Elect believes in conversion therapy and signed a bill in Indiana forcing women to have funerals for their miscarriages. I am not alone when I say the President-elect does not respect me, words I never thought I would utter. As citizens we should look up to our President-Elect, not fear him.
On January 20, 2017, my 18th birthday, Trump and Pence will be inaugurated. A president that intends to strip me of my dignity will define the first four years of my adult life. The man who I could not even vote for will control the start of my adult life. Your 18th birthday is supposed to be a day of celebration, a day when you gain respect throughout your community and the world. Yet my adult years will be filled with degradation. No, I will not be celebrating my entry into adulthood. I will be mourning it.
These past few days I felt my community bind together expressing empathy, compassion and love for one another in a way I have never seen. We are all grieving, as we should; yet our family has never been stronger. We have set aside our differences and come together as one community to help each other. Do not settle for the next four years. When you gather your strength, harness your anger. We have the power to change the system and ensure that neither Trump nor anyone like him will be elected again. Write to newspapers, rant on social media, speak in front of groups, protest, attend rallies, write to politicians, and disrupt the system. We all have power, but we are stronger together.
Isabel Fields is a 17-year-old girl living in Los Angeles, CA. She is the Co-Founder and Co-President of Feminine Every Month, an organization that aims to change the stigma around the period while providing menstrual supplies to homeless women in LA.
