Letter to the Editor: End of Clinton’s campaign does not end the fight for what is right

In her concession speech yesterday, Hillary Clinton said, “To all of us, and to the young people in particular … This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”

The first heartbreak I felt last night was for my country. A country founded upon freedom, liberty and equality, so reduced by division and hatred. The second heartbreak was for my family and for my friends.

I am heartbroken for my family: for my father’s late parents, both veterans, who met working for Adlai Stevenson and supported Democrats their entire lives; for my maternal grandmother, who grew up in a segregated South and knew for certain her vote for Shirley Chisholm was counted in 1972 because hers was the only Chisholm vote in her whole town; for her, and for my mother, who marched for the Equal Rights Amendment; for my mother, who took me to phone banks for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and helped me find my place in Clinton’s campaign this past summer.

I feel another kind of pain for the people I met working on this campaign. The students who gave everything they could, most of them never beginning to accept that losing was an option – myself included. Among my peers, I started to hear hypotheticals – a vote, a demographic, a different candidate, that could’ve changed this outcome – shades of embarrassment and regret.

Let there be no mistake. This election still made history. We still made history. Clinton was the first female major-party nominee for president of the United States. To dismiss this as unimportant in light of her opponent’s victory is to disrespect every woman who has come before her, who has made this even a possibility. Learn the names of the women who have come before her and know that so many glass ceilings have already been shattered. I supported Clinton; I voted for her; and I worked on her campaign. I will always take pride in that.

I am heartbroken, and I am terrified for the future. I fear for my rights as a gay woman, and I fear even more for the rights of people of color, of transgender adults and youth, of undocumented immigrants and of Muslim Americans. But I will never let the results of this election convince me that fighting for what is right is not worth it. I will pour everything I have left into organizing students to protect the most vulnerable and oppose the agenda of the current administration. The fight to take back the House and Senate in 2018 starts today.

Chase is a third-year political science student and the founder and president of Bruins for Hillary.