The day we have all been waiting for is finally upon us. The one voice that America has so desperately needed throughout the turmoil of the 2016 election season has finally spoken. Leslie Knope, an employee of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Midwest Branch, has finally broken her silence.
In a letter published on Yahoo!, Knope (the main character in NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” that wrapped in 2015) discusses how she is handling—or rather, not handling—the results of the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump is now our president-elect and it should come as no surprise to fans of “Parks and Rec” that Knope is not happy about it. The letter begins:
“Amidst the confusion, and despair, and disbelief, it was suggested to me by a very close friend of mine (I won’t say her name, to protect her identity) (Ann. It was Ann) that perhaps a few people would enjoy hearing my thoughts on this election. So I sat down at my computer, cleared my head, and opened a document. Then I started crying. So I had some hot chocolate, and my close friend (Ann) rubbed my back for a while, and I got myself together, and sat down. And started crying.”
Knope details the story of a fourth-grade school president election in which her candidate, Greenie the “smart if slightly bookish-looking cartoon tortoise,” ran against Speedy, a “cool-looking jaguar.” When the time comes to vote Greenie is defeated, not by Speedy, but by a last-minute race entrant, Dr. Farts the T. rex. For the purpose of the letter, Donald Trump is Dr. Farts.
“The point is: people making their own decisions is, on balance, better than an autocrat making decisions for them. It’s just that sometimes those decisions are bad, or self-defeating, or maddening, and a day where you get dressed up in your best victory pantsuit and spend an ungodly amount of money decorating your house with American flags and custom-made cardboard-cutouts of suffragettes in anticipation of a glass-ceiling-shattering historical milestone ends with you getting (metaphorically) eaten by a giant farting T. rex.”
Knope then goes on to detail her five stages of grief. From her denial to her “significant” anger, her bargaining stint offering “[her] soul and the souls of all of [her] friends in exchange for 60,000 more votes in Milwaukee,” her hot chocolate-fueled depression. When it comes time to hit “acceptance,” however, Knope refuses.
“I acknowledge that Donald Trump is the President. I understand, intellectually, that he won the election. But I do not accept that our country has descended into the hatred-swirled slop pile that he lives in. I reject out of hand the notion that we have thrown up our hands and succumbed to racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and crypto-fascism. I do not accept that. I reject that. I fight that. Today, and tomorrow, and every day until the next election, I reject and fight that story. I work hard and I form ideas and I meet and talk to other people who feel like me, and we sit down and drink hot chocolate (I have plenty) and we plan. We plan like mofos. We figure out how to fight back, and do good in this infuriating world that constantly wants to bend toward the bad. And we will be kind to each other, and supportive of each other’s ideas, and we will do literally anything but accept this as our fate.”
And, in Leslie fashion, the letter ends with a call-out to young girls everywhere who may be feeling discouraged with the election of “a giant farting T. rex who does not like you, or care about you, or think about you, unless he is scanning your bodies with his creepy T. rex eyes, or trying to physically grab you like a toy his daddy got him.”
“You are going to run this country, and this world, very soon. So you will not listen to this man, or the 75-year-old, doughy-faced, gray-haired nightmare men like him, when they try to tell you where to stand or how to behave or what you can and cannot do with your own bodies, or what you should or should not think with your own minds. You will not be cowed or discouraged by his stream of retrogressive babble. You won’t have time to be cowed, because you will be too busy working and learning and communing with other girls and women like you, and when the time comes you will effortlessly flick away his miserable, petty misogynistic worldview like a fly on your picnic potato salad.”
You can read the rest of the letter here.
@shelbielbostedt | sbostedt@redeyechicago.com
