I had some friends visit us this weekend. It was really rejuvenating, and it gave me an opportunity to share how meaningful my family is with people that I don’t often see, but feel very close to. I felt very lucky for that.
As tends to happen we stayed up a bit just to kind of catch up. Time flows just as quick when you’re older as it does when you’re younger. But the intervals between periods of actual free time get much longer. Incidentally, there’s a lot to catch up on.
And after getting through some of the basics and talking about the good old days we got to the same subject I find myself returning to over and over these past few weeks. Things feel utterly hopeless.
It’s a combination of the SCOTUS kingmaking, the awkward collapse of the Democratic party, the impending plan to turn our country into a Christian theocracy and just a general feeling like it’s harder to get by day to day, despite everyone telling us that everything is ok.
Also, it’s so much more. It’s everything else. It’s the climate crisis we are literally pouring gasoline on with AI. It’s the hostile posture of our own government against transgender folks, people of color, and women in general. It’s the folks at the top clinging to power at any cost even as they suck every last resource from the country and from my entire generation. It’s a layer cake of epic failures that have been following me around my entire life.
I’m hearing from lots of people, mostly from the generations before me, that we should have greater faith in our institutions. That things often aren’t as bad as we think they are going to be. But I don’t have any empirical evidence to back that up. Every time I’ve been told that things were going to be fine, that’s been wrong.
As I’ve been talking to people from my generation, the dreaded millennials, the big common theme is that it’s just time to fucking give up. We came of age with promises of the end of history and unfettered progress. And since then it’s been nothing but decline and desiccation of every major value and institution we were taught to trust.
It all continues to descend. I don’t see how Trump doesn’t win, this time more prepared than ever. But it’s more than one man, it’s a general collapse of everything that I care about. And I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it but simply wait it out. In the meantime a lot of bad shit is going to happen and our norms of what’s allowable in this country will shift. Tim Kreider wrote about that recently.
It’s a failure of imagination, an admission of defeat in the face of the hopeless mess of the present; the author can’t see any way to get there from here. But, although there will certainly be cataclysms as climate change accelerates in the decades to come, the worst thing about a fascist coup in America wouldn’t be that the world will come to an end, but that it won’t. There’ll be the nightmare of election night, and the horror of waking up the next day and realizing it’s actually real, but then we’ll also have to wake up the day after that—just another Thursday—and that day after that one, and get through them all, still going to work and running errands and deciding what to have for dinner. As my girlfriend reminded me, people endured Franco, and Pinochet, and life was unbearable under those monstrous regimes—a lot of people were abducted and tortured and murdered—and yet they bore it. And opposed and undermined it in what ways they could. And eventually those regimes ended.
I’m so angry. Angry at this country for sleepwalking into our own descent. At our collective lack of imagination. At our abandonment of our values as an entire nation. About our stubborn insistence on the status quo and refusal to shake things up.
When I get to conversations like the one I shared with my friends this past weekend, it keeps coming to the same place. The walls feel like they’re closing in. Our lives are not better. We all have different ideas about how it happened and what should be done. But mostly, we can’t do anything but shrug our shoulders. It’s just hopeless, inevitable, and enraging.
Albert Camus on what it means to fight for the future.
This insane generosity is the generosity of rebellion, which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment’s delay refuses injustice. Its merit lies in making no calculations, distributing everything it possesses to life and to living men. It is thus that it is prodigal in its gifts to men to come. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Notes
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