If only I'd voted

I woke up on that Wednesday in November a couple of years ago on my parents couch in the basement, depressed as usual by my $200,000 student loan obligations, and did my nails. My next job interview wasn't for weeks but it makes me feel better.

I checked my I-Phone to see if I had any new texts but what I saw was that DJT was the next president of the United States. What? Hillary was a lock to win, so I figured yesterday why go to vote when I was watching seasons two and three of Games of Thorns. Why bother? Oh well, it doesn't matter, I've got a good, long life in front of me with future children down the road, daughters, and I can't wait to meet my granddaughters who will have a perfect life as the country marches forward as always.

Two years later! What, my granddaughter, and her daughter and her daughter might be denied personal rights such as controlling her own body, like, if she was raped and couldn't abort the result, or have an abortion if her life was at risk from the pregnancy? My working class progeny can't have the protection of unions and its collective bargaining ability to break through the 25-year wage stagnation for workers because of 2018 Supreme Court rulings? And if a child has a pre-existing condition she can't get health care ever? She should just die? 

And what will happen to me in a year when I'm cycled off my parents' policy if I get into a bad accident or get sick?  I've never lived anywhere all my life where I couldn't choose to do what I wished to with my own body if I was in an abusive relationship or something.  Babies torn from their mother's breasts and separated from their parents by thousands of miles by the authorities, children put into in cages, Moslems banned from the country, our president throwing our allies away that my grandad fought alongside of, and fought against but then we won the peace and the cold war and made them our lifelong friends, or so it seemed for all my life till now, so that our dear leader could make a fool of himself and coddle and praise murderous dictators and have cabinet members swear fealty to him on national TV with the treasury emptied out so that the rich could get richer and corporations could pay far less than their fair share, I really wish I'd have voted that day