For most of my life, I have been passively suicidal. It’s like this little voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me that being dead would be much better than whatever fresh hell is going on right now. Some days it’s louder, some days it’s almost quiet enough to forget that it is even there. And then there are those days when I don’t trust myself around a kitchen knife. Today is one of those days.

You might ask why, when it is not even my country that’s going to hell right now. And I’ll ask you: WHY NOT, when millions of people would rather pick a convicted rapist over a qualified woman. When millions of people believe that a woman’s right to NOT FUCKING DIE from pregnancy complications, not to mention a woman’s right to choose what happens TO HER OWN FUCKING BODY, is less important than their warped sense of what’s better for the economy. When millions of people will shit all over the rights of the LGBTQ+ community because they’re so scared of their own fucked up idea of the “woke agenda”. When millions of people will believe the unhinged fear-mongering of a demented narcissist and his cronies and willingly accept the deportation of those undocumented immigrants who are doing the work that no one else wants to do for shitty pay and under even worse conditions and are unmoved by the fact that, along with those undocumented immigrants, thousands of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens will be harassed, locked up, subjected to police brutality, and potentially deported. When the welfare-, health-, and education systems will be dismantled, when decades’ worth of environmental and consumer protections will be trashed in favor of tax cuts for those who can afford to buy a government.

This is not just a U.S. American problem. When the U.S. government decides that it no longer believes in the human influence on climate change, that has global implications. If the U.S. government decides that it no longer believes in vaccinating its children against polio, measles, and countless other diseases, that has devastating global implications. When the U.S. government decides to kick aside any notion of global markets by imposing tariffs on all imported goods, that has global implications. When the U.S. government decides to withdraw from NATO and to turn away from its Western allies, that has global implications—the kind that could lead to another major war. When the U.S. government decides that women are nothing more than walking, talking incubators and that their lives are worthless, that encourages governments and people around the world to treat them in the same way. When the U.S. government decides that it is perfectly acceptable to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights and to prohibit educators, authors, artists and librarians from providing any kind of educational or artistic material on the topic, that encourages governments and people around the world to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community, to roll back any kind of progress that has been made for queer rights, and to force queer people around the world back into the closet in order to protect their financial and personal security.

You might say that it doesn’t affect me if the war in the Middle East or Russia’s war in Ukraine ends in the annihilation of entire nations. But you do not look into the eyes of children traumatized by these wars every day. Children, who had to flee their homes, past the dead bodies of family, friends, and neighbors, who know that there is nothing left of the place where they grew up, who have to live in a strange country and learn a strange language while trying not to fall behind, not to fail, not to become another number in someone’s statistic of failed existences.

He may not be my president, but he has the power and the intent to destroy my country right along his own. His ideology and moronic policies will inspire right-wing politicians and would-be dictators around the world—as if they needed encouragement. Racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments and politicians are already on the rise, and a second presidency of the orange menace will only fuel that fire. It will encourage these people and their supporters to become even louder, even more extreme. We are already seeing that in the way formerly mainstream parties are drifting further and further to the right, adopting the rhetoric of right-wing lunatics in a vain attempt to steal voters from the extremist parties. They will not succeed, and next year, when it is our turn to elect a new government to replace one that is infinitely less productive and successful than the one the orange menace will replace, the one remaining mainstream party with a small chance of winning will likely get to choose between two extremist parties to form a coalition government. And the only thing they will be able to agree on will be to deport migrants back to countries that are ravaged by war, where women and minorities have no rights and face persecution and possibly death. They will ignore the fact that we need immigrants in order to fill all the vacant jobs we have and to replace all the children we do not have, because they cannot stand the idea of having a society that does not look like them. They will blame the broken education system on children who don’t speak the language instead of decades of no investment and lack of useful innovation. They will be one more voice in the ever-growing choir of fascist governments, and I—along with countless women, queer people, immigrants, and their descendants—will try to do my best to hang on, not to lose hope, not to get hurt.

And I cannot help but wonder if this is how my great-grandmother felt one hundred years ago and if I will be able to find the same strength that got her through those terrible years with her head held high and her morals intact when I need it.