History Has Always Been Happening, And We Have Always Been Doing Laundry

Short and sweet this week.

My day job is in sales, and so every January I have to put together my projections for the year, my plans to sell more than I did the year prior, and a plan to make up any gaps that I anticipate. In January of 2020, I messaged a friend and said something like “I don’t know how to do this…we might not even have a democracy at the end of this year. How am I supposed to know how many books I’m going to sell??” 

Little did I know that in just a couple of months I’d leave my office, backpack stuffed with as many personal items from my cubicle as it could hold and no idea when I’d be back. A few years after that day, as we all tried to find our way in the world the pandemic created, an executive I know said that one of the things she learned was that she would never again have her team work on a five year strategic plan. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. 

We don’t know what’s going to happen. 

In the past few weeks there has been a lot of despair and a lot of absolute certainty swirling around in the discourse. This event absolutely lost Democrats the election. If Joe Biden or Donald Trump does this then they can’t lose. So-and-so can never win. The empire is in collapse. It’s the twilight of American democracy. Has anyone here thought about moving abroad to get away from all this? 

I understand the sentiment. The pace of news has been relentless, and so much of it has been abysmal. So much feels too huge and out of our control - the climate is changing, the wars are unstoppable, politicians aren’t listening and neither are our loved ones. We can’t control prices, and we can’t control bigotry, and we can’t get the stupid cardboard box into the stupid recycling bag and our entire apartment slopes down hill. 

Okay maybe those last two are just me. 

But we don’t know what’s going to happen. We never do. Trying to predict the future is just a way to absolve ourselves of the responsibility to take action. If we know what’s coming, if we’re sure of the outcome, then nothing we do matters. And if nothing we do matters, we don’t have to do anything. We can sit back and watch history play out and nod sagely at our own brilliance while the world crumbles around us. If we’re doomed, we don’t need to try. If Joe Biden just tries this one neat trick, the election is won, and we don’t need to try. If collapse is inevitable then the only thing to do is retreat to our homestead and grow our tomatoes. If we cannot change the world, we might as well remove ourselves from it. 

But we cannot remove ourselves from the world, and we cannot tell the future. Wherever we go, the world goes with us. There is nowhere free of the pain of living in an imperfect world, nowhere untouched by human violence, human greed, human suffering. And the more we pull away, the more we try to find that one idyllic, safe, untouched place, in the world or in our own minds, the harder we make it for those we leave behind, and ultimately, for ourselves. 

So often the future feels like a foreign country, some sort of fixed and distant point that is really someone else’s problem. But the future is not something that has already been created, something we must either change or surrender to. The future is something we build, together. The future does not end, and so the building is never done. No matter what is happening in the present, no matter what choices others have made, there are always ways of making things better. Every good thing we do, every good thing we fight for, is a building block in the future we dream about.  

Trump may very well win the election. If we had it this Tuesday, the odds favor him. And if he wins it’ll be really awful and scary. His first term was characterized by violence, chaos, and corruption. His second term will be all that and more, more organized, more shameless, more committed to cruelty. But the election is not tomorrow. And democracy means that we all have a part to play in what happens next. I can’t guarantee we’ll win. There is no formula, no surefire combination to unlock victory. But I can guarantee that if none of us fight back, we stand no chance at all.

Last week I saw a post from Tumblr that read, “When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks they can radically change the future by doing something small.” Perhaps one volunteer shift, one random act of kindness, one donation will not change the world. But the only way to ensure that it doesn’t is to give up. And the only way to see if it will is to try. 

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How to Save Democracy This Week 

Go outside. Look at some water. Talk to a friend. Buy some flowers. Invite someone to dinner. Hold the door open for a stranger. Give the guy on the subway a couple dollars. Donate to a food bank. Put a couple books in the free little library. Offer to babysit. Clean your room. Eat your leftovers. Put your phone down and stretch before bed. Read a book. Do your laundry.

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Use Your Voice to Fight for People in Gaza

Please keep calling your Representative and Senators in Congress, contacting the White House, and talking to your friends about pushing for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. You can also donate to help in Gaza here. Our government is enabling a humanitarian catastrophe and we need to use our power and our voice to stop it.