The art of eavesdropping is never more fun than in the watering hole that is the public restroom.
This weekend I traveled to Rome, and mid-Colosseum visit I made a pit stop in a cafe bathroom. While minding my business in my stall, my friend struck up a conversation with a girl our age from Portugal.
“Where are you from,” the girl asked my friend.
“America,” she answered.
I could hear the girl chuckle to herself a little bit and shift her voice to a knowing tone.
“Ah, how are you feeling about your situation?” she asked.
My friend laughed right back and said she was not happy at all. She told the girl she hated President Trump.
“You’re a good person,” she said, and they parted ways.
A woman halfway across the world knew that something is off about what’s happening here.
Leaving to study in Europe, I expected to escape the soap opera that is our government. I expected to have some conversations like my friend had. However, her response strikes me.
The outcry about Trump’s behavior is not just an American response. Countries all over the world are concerned about what’s happening just in the first week of his presidency.
On the day Trump was sworn in people in many different countries gathered to protest his inauguration. People stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. One sign, captured by the Houston Chronicle, reads, “We in Berlin know that walls are wrong.”
London; Madrid; Bristol, United Kingdom ; and Brussels were all other cities standing against Trump on his big day. Conversations were had, stances were taken, chants were sung.
Our choices inspired this outcome.
There are all kinds of implications in history that reflect a fear of repeating the past. I don’t think it is ridiculous to be worried we, as a society, are in danger of targeting a whole group of people out of fear and misinformation. This alone is one of the reasons Trump won.
When I first heard the girl in the bathroom, I felt embarrassed. To some, we are the laughingstock of the Western world.
This reality star and business mogul became the most powerful man in the free world, which seems funny, but what’s happening in the U.S. is no joke. No matter where you go, when you make it known you’re American, you’ll most likely get a chuckle or sigh of pity.
You could view that as simply embarrassing, but there is some unity in this. Yes, people are standing together because of how angry they are about Trump, about a fear of our government becoming everything we have fought against for years.
That said, they are standing together. What I heard in that bathroom was two people, of two completely different cultures, uniting.
There is a lot of drama in that statement of course, but the art of complaint and protest truly does bring people together. We sit in our own countries and rarely think about how others affect us and how we affect them, but once we leave that bubble we realize how connected we all are.
A telling sign of how people on the outside looking in feel about our new president is our Portuguese friend’s last statement to my friend as she made it clear she was no fan of Trump.
“You are a good person.”
haask@umail.iu.edu
@khaas96
