I am disheartened. Since last November, I’ve been harboring this sense of pessimism and hopelessness that I’ve been unsuccessful at staving off. This year, although not terrible for me individually, has been hard to watch collectively. Everything around me is looking to collapse in on itself and I find very little amounts of actual resistance from almost anyone with the means to soften the blow. Trump is a known quantity. Him and his Legion of Doom are obvious in their machinations to benefit themselves at the cost of everyone else. It’s bad, no doubt about it. The thing that adds to the heartbreak is the lack of real resistance amongst the populace. The finger pointing. Who’s to blame for all this. Who isn't to blame. Who is and isn’t going to stand up and fight. Fights to see who can say “I told you so!” the loudest. People willing to throw potential allies/coalitions under the bus for a crumb of recognition and temporary stability. A stability that was never coming. A stability that would only prolong this very moment from happening.
I have concluded that this very moment was always bound to happen. This backlash we’re currently seeing has been brewing since Roe v Wade and the numerous successful progressive wins that preceded/proceeded it. It has been waiting for all its pieces to come together to get to this moment. A moment where women’s bodies aren’t theirs. A moment where Immigrants and their families are blamed unfairly for all our woes and rounded up and caged in the process. A moment where racial progress that took a century to get in place are now gone in mere weeks with more to come on the docket. A moment where “sexual deviants” are pushed back into the shadows to suffer and die in utter isolation. A moment where genocides can happen in the name of self-determination and anti-bigotry. Everything we see today has been plotted and planned in our faces for years. And because of ego, hubris, misunderstandings, and the wear and tear of everyday life, it succeeded.
I try to think with a large degree of understanding and empathy. A love ethic. An ethic that is defined by making sure I’m being considerate of people’s feelings, experiences, and views regardless of how I feel about those feelings, experiences, and views. I love people. I love humanity. I love myself. Because of that, it’s hard for my criticism of people to go to a place of ad hominem. I try to challenge systems not people coerced to exist in those systems. I try to challenge the state and not the people that live there. I try to challenge ideas and not the people that have them. My ethical process has a top-down approach to looking at issues. Often people’s individual issues are born from something that’s happening to them rather than something core to their being. That does not mean I excuse an individual person’s behavior or people’s potential to act in bad faith but My understanding of the people around me is based on an idea that we all are selfish, inconsistent, fearful creatures whose best moments come when we understand that and work against those base instincts together. That despite those base instincts and the negative systems that were built from those base instincts, we do want and strive for better.
I would like to think that my love ethic has a place. I don’t think it or by extension I belong in this current space, however. People are angry. Resentful. Scared. Misanthropy and distrust for the person next to you has taken over people in ways that I don’t think they recognize. This current environment is ripe with selfishness, inconsistency, and fear. People choose themselves on a day-to-day willingly and any attempt to point that out is met with furious refutation and isolation. My need to try to “hold water” for people is often met with incredulities and outright rejection, even if the nuance I’m trying to introduce makes sense if not outright correct. It’s almost as though people want to feel the worst humanity has to offer, not understanding that it’s making an already bad situation worse.
I presume that you, readers, think I’m making this entirely too much about myself. I don’t think you’re wrong. I do have an issue with trying to get people to see my point of view and feel immense rejection when I fail. My stoic disposition means that I chafe against some emotional responses where a bit of extra thought can go a long way to dispel the reactionary conclusions the emotional state sometimes brings. I want so badly for people to just see what I see that it breaks my heart when folks think I’m somehow aligned with things I don’t believe because I give pushback on an incomplete thought. There’s a lot of room for error on my part. I’m still learning and growing myself. I haven’t always had my exact beliefs worded in this specific way. I too have been polarized, zealous, and reactionary about the world around me. In ways I still am, but the goal is to create space for empathy and understanding with regards to my deep sense of morality. Yet when I try to use this ethic in real time, my good faith approach is assumed to be bad faith.
I do see the good around me. My sense of displacement hasn’t blinded me to any of the people who see what I see and feel how I feel. Zorhan Mamdani and other progressives like him running for political office with explicit leftist politics give me hope. Protestors of the current and previous administrations mean that there are people willing to resist the current politics of this administration and/or call out the bad politics of the last administration that led to the current situation. My displacement comes from people not wanting to see the good in these things. Cynicism if not outright pessimism rules the day. Mamdani gets criticized from both sides of his closest political flanks for attempting to thread the needle of New York politics even when his approach is winning the sought after youth vote. The same youth vote that didn’t vote in large numbers in the last election. Protestors are seen as performative and useless regardless of what they’re protesting or outright jeered. Even If I side eye the more meme like tendencies these protests have, I also understand that if that’s what gets people to do direct action, there’s room to grow. What shakes me from my optimism is how both of these ultimately positive things aren’t really given the nuance to exist as a means of moving forward. And if that isn’t given the room to exist, where do I belong in all this?