I Think About Tomorrow

Only the very beginning of my thoughts and feelings.

from the protests the first time around.

I think about doing laundry, about whether or not we have enough quarters and if that stain will come out of the new sweatshirt I’ve only worn once. It’s a play on a Taylor Swift song that says “to vote for the hope of it all” and I dripped olive oil from my sandwich on it while canvassing in Pennsylvania the Saturday before Election Day. Perhaps I should have known then. 

I think about the novel I’m working on, the one I haven’t touched in weeks, placed gently to the side to make room for phone banking shifts. I think about the book I was reading, about a war in a far away made up place, about necessarily ruthlessness, about love and death and who makes the decisions we have to live with. 

I think about my job in publishing, about all the books we print overseas, about the libraries I work with. I think about whether or not my job will last. I think about how it’s already hard enough without spending an extra $4,000 a year on Trump tariffs. I think about wanting to travel, about how I hate all my clothes and whether or not it really makes financial sense to get a new tattoo. 

I think about mass deportations, about friends and neighbors and families torn apart. I think about a culture of hate, about the violence that comes from it and the people who enact it. I think about fear, about who can hold hands as they walk down the street, whose kids are safe, whose homes are safe, whose gatherings are safe. I think about throwing up. 

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I hate to admit but I’m a little embarrassed. It’s easy to believe in possibility before you know what’s going to happen. It’s easy to say that no matter what, what we did mattered before you find out it didn’t matter enough. And it’s easy to believe in democracy when you’re winning. 

There’s been a lot of talk about what went wrong in this election - about the role of inflation and economic anxiety versus misogyny and racism. But there’s no reason it can’t be both. Some number of people in this country decided that the racism and misogyny and transphobia of the right was at best not a dealbreaker and at worst a key feature of their preferred political and economic outcomes. And as always there are Democrats who suggest that if only we too were willing to sacrifice our most vulnerable, we could have won. And as always there are some Democrats who suggest that it’s not really about hatred, that as long as we solve the economic anxiety part we don’t have to solve for the blame and the fear. 

But as long as there is someone willing to build their politics out of hatred, there will be people who find that an easier and/or more compelling solution, who will only ever see their own success in comparison to someone else’s lack. When we’re trying to figure out how to reach people, we can’t just be trying to figure out what they want and how to give it to them. Because a lot of what they want is for things to stay the same, for gender roles to stay the same, and for their neighborhood to stay the same and for their own power and privilege to stay the same. And we couldn’t give that to them, even if we wanted to. How do we show people how much better it can be if they are willing to help build a world where we can all thrive, where we can all live joyful and open and full lives? 

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I think about doing this all over again - the marches and the protests and the next most important election of our lives. I think about calling strangers and knocking on doors and calling Congress. I think about visible and invisible resistance. 

I think about how if we want politics to be different how can we make it different this time? What am I going to do differently the second time around? I signed up for a volunteer shift with my local food pantry/mutual aid organization. I want to finish writing my book. I want to settle in for the long haul. Maybe it was just me and my naivete but I think there was this unconscious sense in the past few years that if we could just get through the next election, we could move past this. No matter how many times I said there was no such thing as the fucked/not fucked binary, its possible I still believed that there was a version of this that wasn’t fucked, that there would be a moment where we fixed it. But people are always people, and nothing gold can stay. 

I’m older now, more scared and less rocked by this election. I think I’m more ready, but I also think this time around it’s going to be worse. The people in this new administration will be less competent, but they’ll also be more committed and mercenary in gutting the American government to shape the world in their own image - venal and power hungry and intolerant. I want to be ready without getting ahead of myself. I want to fight back, but I also want to live. 

I think about tomorrow, about waking up everyday knowing that the world hasn’t changed, but become more visible; knowing that the future has changed, and that we can change it again; knowing that it’ll be harder than we hoped, and that our changes may not go as far as we wanted. But I also think about what Rebecca Solnit said on twitter: “They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.” 

The beauty of democracy is that our work does matter, even when we lose. Talking to each other, changing each other’s minds, finding ways to talk to each other, to live together - it all matters. Even if right now it feels like it doesn’t. Even if right now, the pit in my stomach is telling me to hide, telling me that I was wrong, telling me it's pointless and naïve and that there is nothing here worth saving. And maybe you can’t really believe in a country or a system. But I can believe in possibility. I can believe that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that we can make change. I can believe that there is no fucked/not fucked binary. Everything we can do to push the world in the less fucked direction matters. Every person we can help is important. 

Everything we can save is worth saving.