When one spends evenings in the ER with survivors of sexual assault, as I did on election night, to come home and discover that a man who openly brags about assaulting women has been elected to the highest office in the land can put you in a very dark place.

It’s a special kind of powerlessness to attempt to provide comfort to a victim of assault when their country chooses to place the predator in the White House and undermine the credibility of his accusers.

Effectively advocating for people who have had their power ripped away in such a traumatic fashion means you are hyper aware of anything that can trigger them, as I have been this entire election cycle. And I’m also aware of other vulnerable populations who have been similarly wringing their hands and wiping sweat from their brows.

Today I woke up to accounts of fear, disgust, and sheer devastation because women, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ folks and their allies feel the very literal sting of this election. That a bully, a confessed sexual predator, a xenophobe, and all of his ugly words and actions could be legitimized by the voting populace seems like the greatest flaw of our nation.

Yet, there are those people who are saying “Oh well. It will be fine.”

I’m not talking about the actual Trump supporters. I have no energy for that today.

I’m talking to the well-intentioned people who may have helped usher in a scary new era. If you feel untouched by this election, you have been behind a smoke screen of privilege that has blinded you to the monstrosity of your fellow citizens.

If you launched a protest vote because you actually believed that both candidates were alike in disagreeableness, that one of the most qualified people to run for president was just as bad as a man who has never worked in public service, that the most honest politician lies just as much as a man who rarely tells the truth, let’s talk briefly about the doom you’ve helped usher in.

On the first day after his election, a swastika was painted on a softball field dugout with the words “Make America White Again.”

The National Organisation for Marriage has sent out flyers celebrating the removal of rights from LGBTQ citizens. At Wellesley college supporters yelling “Make America Great Again” drove a truck flying a Trump flag through the campus to taunt students. They parked in front of the house for students of African descent and jeered at them, spitting on a student who asked them to leave.

The SPLC reports that in Colorado, “”Death to Diversity” was written on a banner displayed on our library for people to see, as well as written on posters across campus. As well as white males going up to women saying that it was now “legal to grab them by the pussy”.

At a high school in Florida someone wrote a warning on a wall in a high school bathroom about “picking your slave numbers” now that Trump has won, and at a middle school in Michigan a group of students chanted “Build a Wall” to their classmates.

Elon University

A woman in Florida had someone yell “Trump won Ni***r! You lose bitch” while she was driving down the street. Students walked into a classroom at Elon University this morning to read “Bye Bye Latinos” scrawled on the whiteboard.

Outside of Philadelphia, a school official says they are in “crisis mode” due to a series of racist attacks on fellow students.

If you type the word “hijab” into the Twitter search bar, you will be inundated with stories of Muslim women being grabbed, verbally assaulted, threatened, and intimidated.

Other Muslim women have actually contemplating removing their hijabs because they don’t want to get hurt:

I could go on for days, and this is just Day 1 of a Trump presidency y’all.

If you’re feeling good, it’s because you’re untouched by the dark underbelly of this great nation. You’ve never been the victim of the hate and rage that has stained any effort to provide equal opportunity for all of our citizens. You’ve maybe experienced poverty and felt ignored by the establishment, rightly so (I’m looking at you rural America), but you’ve never been physically attacked by a fellow American that felt you were not part of the fabric of this country. And you’re likely unaware of the joke we’ve turned our country into.

For those of us who work with marginalized populations, or are ourselves about to face a plethora of uncertainties due to this new administration, there is fear at what the future will hold as we’re all about to become a lot more vulnerable.

Laci Green’s latest video ends with a call to action that I vow to consider once the anxiety dies down:

“I want to ask you guys to think about one question. What can we do to channel anger, and pain, and resentment, into something positive and good for the world, for each other, and for our future.”

If you decide to watch the video, do not, under any circumstances, read the comments below. They are a preview of what most of us will be battling for years to come, and maybe today you just need to take a break.