WATCH GRID: Everything is epilogue
Now
Here’s one thing I am telling myself, and there’s a reason why I’m doing this:
In hindsight, there wasn’t much of a way around this, given the situations we’d already put ourselves in from 2016-2021. That’s stupid, I agree.
All around the world, incumbents have been punished for the economic conditions resulting from COVID. Comparing America’s current economy to its peers suggests Joe Biden could’ve avoided that, but when he had already inspired mountains’ worth of FUCK THIS GUY merch (mostly for the crime of being the guy who’d defeated Donald Trump) and adorned himself in the stench of genocide and made weird debate faces, the only question was whether a hail mary would work.
Now, I think the hail mary went about as well as could’ve been expected. Yesterday, as always happens after an election, I saw arguments that Kamala Harris should’ve ran more to the right, to the left, and toward directions undiscovered. Sure, if she’s really distinct from Biden on Palestine, she should’ve far more clearly communicated that. Sure, Tim Walz should’ve been unleashed to make Joe Rogan laugh at Republicans.
I wish a lot of things, and many would’ve been the right thing whether they would’ve changed the outcome or not, but it’s unlikely that they would’ve.
As noted, most voters tend to use an election as a magic Somebody Somehow Put The Gas Prices Back Where They Were When I Was In High School button. There were people cramming the absolute basics on the day of the election.
One reason nostalgia is an incredible drug: It’s a liar. “Make America great again” is brilliant because it never specifies when it was that America was great. Maybe it was some decade when you think America’s policies or economy or pop culture probably aligned with some belief of yours, or maybe it was a time when you remember being happier, whether you actually were happier at the time or not. For most people, it was the time when you had a driver’s license but didn’t yet have to pay rent.
It’s fair to say “MAGA” means the 1850s to many Trump supporters, but for some 2024 voters, it refers to what they think they remember about the late-2010s. Of course first-time voters remember their childhoods before COVID as being better than the time after, for instance.
Tens of millions of people voted for Trump, and many of them have now done so three times. They’re all accountable for what happens next, and what happens next will be terrible for many people and possibly bad for almost everyone. But I am telling myself that many of those 2024 voters are people who made up their minds on this election as soon as they saw a $7 bag of Ruffles, thought back to a time when Ruffles were probably like $3, remembered who the president happened to have been at that time, and then went back to never thinking about the infinite coincidences, contradictions, and complexities in the gap between those two prices.
Trump got to botch a pandemic response while also botching everything else, pass the cleanup off to other people, and reap all the benefits of that cleanup. He’s been the world’s luckiest person for decades now, and I hope his luck runs out at some point ever.
Every moment was a product of other moments, and it makes sense that none of it makes sense. Stupid causes have logically produced stupid effects, always and forever.
This doesn’t absolve those voters, and it is no excuse for those who’d voted for Trump previously or stayed engaged enough to know about any of the world’s most famous man’s endless crimes against the world and its marginalized people.
It doesn’t make it right, good, or smart.
It’s just what happened.
I’m telling myself that for several reasons:
It means there’s a way out, politically. For thousands of years, the winning message — “bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly” — has been the winning message. So whether via the wreckage of the national Democratic Party or otherwise, rescue that message from the latest version of The Powerful to have contorted it into a Throne. Harris even ran some ads on this, which actually boosted voters’ impression of her economic aptitude. It works! No shit!
As Ken “Popehat” White wrote (great post), I am “under no obligation to like, respect, or associate with people who countenance this.” I’m not going to be nice to the many Trump voters who should’ve known better, because they have not been nice to humanity, and they’ve been especially brutal to people who were already vulnerable. I’m good with initiating disagreement, I’m great with awkward, and I don’t give a shit about giving you more than what you’ve given. But! Some people who voted alongside you didn’t know better, no matter how unbelievable/inexcusable that feels. Those people will continue to land in surprising places every single day.
Since we’re being honest, here’s the biggest reason: Reminding myself that people change their minds in chaotic ways, and that not every Trump voter is a Trumpist cultist (which I say with personal awareness of both Trumpists and cults), is the only way for me to remain a sunshine-pumping anti-doomer of a feel-good pushover. (I don’t think I’m that, but somebody does. Fuck off. I forgive you.)
One of the more frequent FAQs I’ve gotten about my coming-of-age novel (and I promise this is relevant): Why include an epilogue set 20 years after adolescence?
If someone asks about it, they usually mention that they liked it (thanks!), though we can always agree that it was a Choice on my part, one that didn’t have to happen.
There were lots of reasons to write it, but here’s what clinched it as a keeper: when early readers of the near-final version kept telling me how much they appreciated the book’s relentlessly hopeful empathy. And, spoiler alert, the highest concentration of that is in the epilogue, which is set in a year called “now” that can be read as 2024, if you like. (In some too-early printings, it’s even specifically set in 2024.) The book’s publication date is also listed as 2024.1
In 2023, months before we finished the book, I remember thinking something like, “Do I really want there to be a record of me doing all this hope and empathy stuff during a year that risks forever being synonymous with an even worse Trump catastrophe?”
What a naive fool I’d look like, if somebody were to one day find this book in a smoking crater, seeing I’d written my narrator as saying shit like this even while the fuse was already burning:
Those of us who made it out owe something to captives still ensnared, don’t we? Love always protects, doesn’t it?
So we’ll relentlessly oppose hypocrisy, no matter how pointless it feels. Nope, our facts and logic won’t fix whoever the current Rush Limbaugh is. So fucking what? The point is planting seeds in the minds of onlookers who are only 99% indoctrinated.
In fact, we’re the religion-industrial complex’s worst nightmare. By grooming us to dread everything that’d de-groom us, it revealed its deepest fear: its nail-scarred star pupils realizing we hold not only a hammer but also the blueprints. By age six, we mastered their lingo. Humbling them at Bible trivia? Child’s play, literally. Our machine created its own monsters, ones armed with this superpower: We cannot be fooled by charismatic men pantomiming certainty.
But that’s only worth a damn if it benefits someone else. What men meant for evil, may God use for good. Leaving captivity would’ve been easier, if we’d had refugee elders loudly telling us deconstruction — the modern term for facing rejection in order to feel less insane — is worth it. So let’s become those elders.
Nobody chooses to be indoctrinated, and nobody’s entirely free of it. Maybe you’ve been drafted into a battle against a different machine of bigotry or poverty or injustice. Still, in our common war, each liberation leads to another. (Sorry for making all this sound like The Matrix. I was raised by Y2K youth pastors and Zack de la Rocha.)
The point:
People can change. Need proof?
Hi. :)
And then the hopium ramps up even more.
Actually, one correction:
After Isaac first said an earlier version of those words, I thought about how dumb they’d look in the aftermath of Christian Nationalists theoretically seizing control of everything. So I pushed him to say them differently — not to be cooler or to aim lower, but instead to leave even more on the field, to channel the same dipshit euphoria he’d felt during an adolescent epiphany, when a different shade of me (one I named Kori) had just found a piece of the Gospel:
To love each other, we first have to learn how to love ourselves in spite of the world.
I chose to quadruple down on the cringiest hope those kids ever mustered, because if hope is cringe, then we are doomed without cringe. I now find hope in having textual evidence that I knew what hope felt like, which is basically how I suspected this Choice might turn out.
“In my experience having spent much of my life surrounded by people bent on my political destruction,” said my friend Jane, “the most irritating thing you can do to them is have an inner life and protect whatever peace you can have.”
And that’s not a retreat into nihilism, but an advance past it and into action, any kind of action.
Every moment is a product of other moments.
A long time ago, I stopped believing in America.
But in this shitty moment, I choose this all over again:
You can never make me stop believing in people.
It’s impossible to change everything.
But it’s really simple to change one thing.
Business: Sunday, November 24 at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) event about my book and stuff. I will not care which religious status you leave with afterward. Q&A, signing, panel, etc., and then we’re going to the bar selected by Pastor B.J.
Additionally, we’re passing the plate in order to help erase over a million dollars’ worth of medical debt — you can also pitch in now, if you like.
And yeah, I’m not sure if I’ve said this publicly, but one reason that I refused to wait for this book to fit into The Publishing Industry’s calendar: I wanted its early proceeds in the Trevor Project’s hands before this election, not after.