In November 2024 I lost the ability to hope for the future (and so should you)
Blog Post
I’m an American living in Canada. In late 2024 one of my office coworkers was a young Mexican man who took an interest in the US election cycle. Our conversations intrigued but frustrated me. He presented himself as a fan of diversity, art, freedom, someone you can agree with. Yet, when it came to Donald Trump, he was fascinated.
‘Why don’t you trust him?’ he would ask. ‘Do you think he is actually as bad as they say?’
Which struck me as odd. Trump already won an election, he wasn’t a mystery. But when I would explain, ‘Trump has shown what kind of man he is. A racist, a misogynist, why would I want someone as president that doesn’t respect me?’ It meant nothing, it would bounce off of him.
‘But have you considered what he says he will do?’ he would ask. ‘If he could fix the economy, if he can stop the crime. What if you considered what he wants to do, not just what kind of man he is.’
I’m paraphrasing. My anger would make it impossible to accurately remember the conversations. The point is there though. Don’t consider what you know about Trump, consider what he could be. Ignore the man, ignore the personality he has presented, instead view him as what he could potentially be. View him through the economy he could create, the crime-less utopia he could foster.
When early results were coming in, my coworker asked if I was worried Trump would win. I said no. ‘Trump has shown us what kind of man he is. A liar, a cheat, a bigot. I have to believe he won’t win again.’
In the middle of the night, when results from key swing states came in, he sent me a text. ‘Worried now?’
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The results should have been so obvious, I was so stupid to hold out some small hope that America had learned a lesson. For a brief moment I was lead by a vision of what the future might hold. Never again.
So very stupid.
Is it okay to say I cried? It isn’t that a man shouldn’t cry or anything, it just feels childish that I ever expected anything better. I wrote a poem that night, as one does when you have an English degree and are overwhelmed with existential sadness.
2024
By Marshall CainI want to be angry
I want to be violent
This moment calls for the righteous
But I can’t,
I know this world wants an activist,
It deserves a terrorist,
I am neither.
I’m just sad, numb, tearful
They can have it.
Then I gave up. I’ve stopped holding out hope that the world will get better. It seems like the quitters choice, and it may sound like the easy way out, but I promise you it is neither. Our world is built on hope. We believe that those around us will do good, that the world ‘arcs toward justice’, we believe in the good man with a gun to stop the danger, the legend of the hero that smites evil. In the darkness, we are taught to be the candle flickering in the black of night. It is our default mode, it is what you turn to when all else fails.
Fighting against training that is more difficult than you can imagine. When I see young politicians like Mamdani being vocal about issues that matter, I want to hope that more will follow in his footsteps. I hear about people marching in the streets to resist ICE raids, and I want to think that Americans have finally had enough of tyranny. I see world leaders like Canada’s PM Mark Carney calling out the United States for bullying their allies, and maybe there will be a change in the political landscape that will punish the powerful regimes in America, Russia, and China. But I’ve seen how this goes.
The Mamdani’s of the world will be resisted at every step, by their own party even. ICE will move on, and the deaths of two protesters will be forgotten by the voting public when the next crisis comes along. Carney will fold, and other middle power leaders will follow in his footsteps. It isn’t that their actions are meaningless, far from it, but they will not conjure a miracle. They have made plays on the chess board of life, and the part we never see in the stories about legendary heroes is… the bad guys get a turn too, and chess can come down to the last couple pieces.
We live in a world where the cruelest government acts you can imagine can be explained away by calling someone a terrorist, illegal, or an obstruction. The mask has been ripped off of our politicians, and they call their constituents slurs while considering any foreigners they don’t like to be threats against a way of life they refuse to admit was never real. Humans are dying to realize the dream of turning the West into a Norman Rockwell painting. But if we got there, no one can explain what would happen then. We must hope that the leathered White people in the paintings suffer no crime, no prejudice, no poverty, that all of this now will make them happy and complete.
But I just can’t. I can’t join in the dream of a hundred thousand bots on twitter who want us to RETVRN, or the hopeful financebros who think a healthy US economy somehow makes it all worthwhile. I can’t believe that one good election will set us back on course, or that we were on the best course to begin with. That feels like the same delusion, set to a different year. We are in the muck, and this is where we will stay.
My advice, since it would be cruel to end this without saying anything, is to live to maintain. I will not hope, I have to look at my world and make the changes that will keep me going, keep my family going, keep my new son going. I know tomorrow will be muck, and the day after will be muck, and one day that muck will suck us all below and choke us of the air in our lungs. But I can delay that, day after day with little actions, until one day I will falter and fail. I just hope I can give my son some joy in this life before that muck gets me.
There I go again, so stupid.