Seeing France: Ripple Effect of U.S. Election Results in a French Village

The baker has returned from vacation today, which brings relieved renewal of morning rhythms. So, I took my blue notebook and pen to do what I like to do at the beginning of a day – hand write, accompanied by a coffee and pastry. This notebook is reserved only for positive commentary, to-do lists, forward thinking, and the like. No whining here.

A local friend had texted in the morning “ I’m sorry for America.” Looking quickly at election results on my phone, I was stunned to see Trump’s decisive electoral win.

A huge implosion seemed to have taken place across the sea. Even the ground under my feet rippled. I wondered how people feel when they can sense the tremor of a volcano eruption in a faraway place, and know the ash will fill their nostrils soon. I wondered how people feel when they see a cyclone spinning across the plain towards them. I wondered how the Germans who didn’t support Hitler felt as the anger, strength, numbers, and volume of his tribe grew in power.

How I feel- nauseated and afraid for the whole world. The mania of Trump's ignorance, bullyism, and his ego will rile up his supporters and the rest of us. The measured growth we have experienced the last eight years will be smashed – just because he can. An angry, sociopathic child has been put in a position of enormous responsibility and power. It isn’t just the unpredictability of him, it is the force he has tapped into that scares me.

Like others, I see a correlation between this vote and the Brexit vote, in which isolationists were rallied to leave the European Union. These outcomes make me think of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 –– control the message, and you control the people.

I look out the bakery window. The wind is stripping the scarlet Virginia creeper off the houses, revealing the arthritic old dames underneath. November has arrived and the shutters are closed. Only a few of us emerge now and then to shuffle from bakery to mini mart and back into our nests.

French and Dutch friends come in the bakery for their daily bread, see me, and want to talk about what has happened. They are worried not only about what a Trump presidency might mean to their countries, and to exchange rates, but whether it will give impetus to right wing nationalist factions in their own countries.

Despite the grim view, my uncertainties in romance, residence, and revenue shrink today, like some sea creature poked by a beachcomber. Like the characters in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, there seemed no path out of my troubles. Trouble ruled.

It is exactly this moment, however, as dark winds howl through our villages, that people who crave peace must dig out. There is no guaranteed outcome, only work, our work, working for good, contributing what is best in us, to make the world safer. It is safer when everyone is safer, not just the people inside the walls.

It is this turn of events, and the potential for dire consequences that convinces me to work harder to draw attention to the joy, magic, and poetry that is sitting in plain sight, through writing and images. Nothing to do with politics, only with the eyes and heart, which, to me, is where it all starts.

Personal action that comes from joy and love, of others and self, makes the world a better place for these few moments we are allotted above ground. I close the notebook and put the pen in my pocket, thinking I have stayed true to the notebook rules- all forward. Do what you do best, no matter what happens.