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American Horror Story. Very dark, sad day for America and the whole world. Brexit made 100 times worse.

20 years ago I won a scholarship as an exchange student in a New England high school where, coming from a small little village, for the first time I felt it didn't matter what gender or race I was. Yes, this was a liberal school. I, as the other foreign students back then, were welcomed and accepted by our American host families and schools like we've never experienced before elsewhere. I never had the feeling that my US hosts and friends felt like we would be taking something away from them, quite the contrary. Over the course of the last twenty years with all the ups and downs of American politics I've always reminded myself of how extrordinary that was, and despite all the ambivalent turns taken since then (which, of course, happend and are happening everywhere around the globe), this openness and friendlienss was a distinct American quality to me. This, in a very very small nutshell, was something that to me made "America great", not whatever hateful propaganda this Trump-character is blaring out.

So what is happening now, is beyond my understanding and I am deeply saddened that America has gone down this road. I hope that everybody who is not happy with this outcome will not resignate but stand up against whatever racist, sexist and discriminating politics are about to come.

Trump was able to flip 7 counties in NC mostly east of I-95 and the most rural in the state. It's also the part where I grew up so it comes as no surprise.

2016 North Carolina Presidential Election Results

She won the popular vote 59,814,018 to 59,611,678 but lost the Electoral College. So close. This is the end of America as we've known it, as we hoped it would be.

Updated On: 11/9/16 at 06:08 AM

I just keep shaking my head and thinking, "I'm sorry." I had no idea this was going to happen. I thought she was going to win a popular landslide. I don't understand how this happened. I am so heartbroken. I do not recognize America anymore. This is my first Presidential election, I've never lost or won before, this is all new to me, but this feels big. Like something has ended, and something else begun and I don't think that's a good thing. I'm worried. I'm worried and heartbroken. I don't understand how this happened. How do we pick ourselves up from this? Can we? What's our next step: impeaching Trump. Then we're stuck with Pence. We've messed up. We've messed up so much. Oh my God. Is this really as bad as I think it is? Good God. I'm so sorry for us all.

I did not sleep at all last night. The TV went off at 11:30. I haven't turned the TV back on or looked at a newspaper online. I can't, I just can't. I have never felt this despondent over an election before. To think I have (or is it had now) numerous relatives who voted for him. I can not wrap my head around that.

"58,728,926 to 58,638,252. So close. This is the end of America as we've known it, as we hoped it would be."

I know it is hard for someone like yourself who has been so smug about this race to understand but over 58 million people were so disgusted with politicians that habitually lie to them and are corrupt that they were willing to take a "flyer" on somebody who was not a politician. This election also showed that maybe these pollsters need to examine how they conduct polls because they were not even close. BTW - my wife and I voted 3rd party for the first time in our lives.

Yes the world keeps turning but

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Substitute America for Bethlehem and this is now.

Half the country is holding it's breath waiting for the other shoe to fell.

Remember the scene in Evita after the Peron victory? I fear it comes.

yankeefan - a lot - and I would say most - of those 58 million voted for Trump because they were all in with everything he said. Not because they were disgusted with politicians and the system. If that were true, most of the incumbent senators and representatives would have been voted out too - and that did not happen.

And I think the thought that all those people are all in for Trump is what is depressing for many.

I have to hand it to you, America - you surprised me. Every time I think you've reached rock bottom of stupidity, you dig a little deeper.

This truly is a confederacy of dunces.

Flog me all you like, if it makes you feel better. But this is a tragedy for all of us.

I found wisdom, if not comfort, in these words from a great lesbian activist, Urvashi Vaid:



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Well my immediate thoughts were

1) this is rigged - HOUSE of CARDS style. Russian intelligence dirty tricks - the fact that everyone is surprised... even trump people. Weird. I don't believe the veracity of these results - but that's just denial .

2) we have been up against this forever. Reaction. Right wing reaction. Anti-elite reaction. White backlash reaction, religious right wing, racists of all kinds, woman haters, gospel of prosperity, corporatists, people who feel left out of and hated having a black presidency and a multiracial country. This is Goldwater and a Nixon. This is the "lost cause" legacy of the civil war.

3) This is the Impact of years of Bashing women and men staying silent and complicit. This is the consequence of a reactionary union movement that coexists with a progressive one. This is about class. This is about social movements that did not become political movements.

4) This is a vote by white men and women who feel estranged by a system voting for their perpetrators. By educated white voters -- whose real loyalty is -- to preserving their privilege and wealth, to their resentments, to piggish masculinity.

They are voting for the party and embodiment of a person who have kept them down, screwed the working man, groped and assaulted the working woman.

5) And our side did not unite behind her. We believed in their swift boat tactics. The questions I have are why we underestimated their Numbers?

Why we don't take our sworn self declared enemies seriously? Why we don't participate in elections in real numbers, why the Democratic Party is so weak, why is the media so awful, when do we actually decide we want to win?



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And I take comfort, as I always do, from this finale from Bernstein's Candide, which reminds us that ultimately, our individual responsibility is to make our own gardens grow.

ErikJ972 said: "If you vote for someone who can't win you don't care who wins. So thanks for doing your part to elect Donald Trump. Please don't complain for the next 4 years. If he lasts that long."

I disagree with your outlook on this. I voted for Clinton rather than for the candidate who best represents my values. Never again.

It's a candidate's job to appeal to voters' values; it's not the voters' job to twist themselves, as I did, by settling for a bad choice. To take one policy example: if Clinton had promised to end the program that sent a drone to murder an American teenager (followed, incidentally, by blaming the victim for having a bad father, who had already been killed by a drone) - if she had promised that, as any normal, sane person could easily promise, she would have gotten a lot of those Johnson votes. The fact that she didn't say that, and didn't get those votes, is her fault, not the voters' fault.

The reaction of some of my Democratic friends seems to be anger at people who refused to vote for people who will continue to commit atrocities. But we need many more such voters, not fewer, and in the future I will surely be one of them.

ErikJ972 said: "Listen, it's no secret I was not a fan of Hillary Clinton or our two party system. But if you want that to change you have to stay active and involved in making a thrid party candidate viable. Too many people do nothing for four years and then show up at the polls to cast a protest vote. And when one of the candidates is someone as awful as Donald Trump it is stupid and selfish to cast a vote for a candidate who can not possibly win one single state."

Well, people on both sides have been saying that to me every four years. This year I bought into it, but it'll be the first and last time.

Johnson voters actually did achieve something. He got more than three times as many votes as any previous LP candidate. This will mean automatic ballot access in many states, giving future candidates a chance to build on that success without having to waste resources just to have their name appear on the ballot.

Oh dear God...Gary Johnson. A moron. Who is almost as bad as Trump.

Maybe it is time to move.