[Insert Total Eclipse Joke Here]
total eclipse of the election? is that something?
The last time I was in the path of a solar eclipse was 2017. I’d been living in New York City for a year and some change, only I was really living in New Jersey, in an apartment with one roommate who ignored me and one roommate who hated me. I spent that summer walking to the farmers market on Sundays for outdoor yoga and as much fresh produce as I could afford. I was making $35,500 a year and the leftovers of my grad school student loans, so it wasn’t all that much, but I loved it. Someone in my office bought a pile of the cheap paper eclipse glasses, like the 3-D glasses you used to get at the movie theater, with the red and blue lenses, and we all went outside to stare at the sky together.
Trump hadn’t been president for a year yet, but we had already seen how much damage we were vulnerable to. Trump issued Executive Order 13769, otherwise known as the Muslim ban, that January, and hundreds of people had been trapped in airports as implementation began. Lawyers and protesters rushed to their aid. Thousands of visas were rejected or rescinded while the executive order was implemented. The Trump administration would be in court fighting to ban people from this country on the basis of their religion for the rest of 2017.
Six months prior to the eclipse in 2017, Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, his first of three Supreme Court Justices. These Justices would reverse the balance of the court, making it possible to overturn Roe vs. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion in the United States. The Supreme Court that Trump remade in the image of the modern, reactionary Supreme Court is also now holding up the case against Donald Trump faces regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 election by taking their sweet time ruling on presidential immunity. All three of the Justices that Trump appointed are 55 years old or younger, guaranteeing their seats for another 20 years at least. Among the other Justices, two are in their seventies and three are in their sixties. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the liberal Justices is also in her 50s. The next president may have the opportunity to appoint at least two Justices to the Supreme Court, replacing the two most conservative Justices - Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito.
Less than a month before the eclipse in 2017, Republicans’ attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act failed when Senator John McCain voted against the wishes of his party in their attempts to repeal health care for millions of people. It took months and months of protesting, of calling Senators and showing up in their offices, meeting their flights, demanding town halls, and asking questions at their events. Millions of people waited on tenterhooks to find out whether or not they’d be able to afford life saving procedures or vital medication.
In 2017, Trump also withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords and declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, a gift to their autocratic regime that undermined the possibility of peace. Republicans also passed their signature tax bill, a gift to the super rich that raised taxes on the rest of us and ballooned the deficit, while also opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. In 2017 Trump also rolled back regulations on clean water and clean air, expanded the power of the CIA to make drone strikes, and ended the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces regulation.
It only got worse from there.
Tomorrow I’ll be in the path of a solar eclipse again. This time, I’m up in Maine at an airbnb in the middle of the woods with two of my best friends. We have fancier glasses this time around, and my salary has doubled. I was writing about politics back in 2017, but I didn’t have this newsletter. Since the last eclipse, I’ve canvassed and phone banked and written letters. I’ve gone to countless protests. I joined the Vote Save America community which is truly the greatest group of organizers and volunteers out there. I moved to Brooklyn and got back into knitting. I have, for some reason, watched the Disney show Girl Meets World three times all the way through. I started writing fiction again. I officiated a wedding, went to Vietnam and Portugal and Finland, made six Thanksgiving turkeys, and read more fanfiction than should be possible.
We’re still fighting so many of the fights from those early Trump years. As a country, we seem to have regressed on the issue of immigration, much more concerned with border security than we are with welcoming newcomers. Trump’s authoritarian impulses haunt us still, in his court cases, in plans for his next administration, in his campaign speeches. The Trump administration exacerbated the conflicts in the Middle East, empowering Israel to be more violent and more bullish against Palestine, and though we’ve made progress in remaking American foreign policy as a force for peace in the region, tens of thousands of people have still died and millions are still starving in Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the U.S. has not done enough to stop it.
But in the 6 years, 6 months, 6 weeks, and 6 days since the 2017 eclipse we’ve had some good changes too. In 2018 we took back Congress and in 2020 we took back the presidency. In 2022 we expanded our reach. We got the biggest investment in addressing climate change passed. We pushed the administration for critical action on student loans, forgiving debt for millions of borrowers. Insulin got cheaper, investment in infrastructure got stronger. The first over-the-counter birth control pill will hit shelves this year. We pushed for and got the biggest gun safety legislation in decades.
If I’ve learned anything in the last 6 years, it's that our voices do matter, that we can make change, and that when we come together, we have more power than we possibly could have imagined. Change never happens fast enough - if it did, it wouldn’t be change, it would just be policy. The world will not become better, more just, or more fair on its own. But if we keep ourselves open to possibility, if we listen to each other and show up, to vote, to protests and rallies, to volunteer shifts and big conversations, we can build the world we imagine.
The next solar eclipse in the United States isn’t for another 20 years. Where will we be then?
Another great read