Hope Is Not A Mistake

OK, I’ll admit that even though it is my job to make sense of politics, to gather thoughts about our government and the problems it’s designed to solve, I have been avoiding the news as much as anyone else since last week. I haven’t dug deep into the election results; I haven’t been watching the concession or victory speeches; I haven’t been doing more than skimming headlines, and I haven’t been thinking about how bad a second Trump Administration is going to be because it simply hurts too much to process.

It would be bad enough on its own that the worst people in the world are celebrating, or that the narrow results were so clear, so early that it looked (and felt) like a blowout, or that none of the bajillion criminal charges against him are ever, ever going to stick, but it’s even worse that I — like many people — had hoped that we were going to be better.

From the moment Kamala Harris took over the campaign, a surge of energy and excitement swept through the Democratic base, and we could imagine a better, brighter follow up to what had been a struggling Biden Administration. We could protect abortion rights after the extreme Supreme Court swept them away. We could improve on the tremendous strides made to support the energy transition, which would leave the United States not only cleaner and climate-friendly, but would make us independent from the volatile petrostates and their political goals. We could see more gun safety legislation, or criminal justice reform, or protections for trans rights and bodily autonomy. We could see the possibilities of a world without Trump.

And then the results came in.

It is easy to give in to despair after the election we just went through. Fresh waves of anguish crash over me with every new headline about which irredeemable dipshit or corrupt fuckwad has been put in charge of some critical element of national infrastructure. I get mad all over again when I remember that Trump has a Republican Congress — with necessary margins in the House and Senate — to do his bidding. And it’s hard not to feel completely hollow at the early signs of compliance and submission from officials who we will rely upon to hold strong.

It’s not really funny to see news that people are regretting their votes, looking up how tariffs work, and doing their best surprised Pikachu faces at the revelation that Project 2025 was really Trump’s plan all along, but in a dark way it is tempting to laugh because this is exactly what many of us were trying to prevent, fruitlessly. We canvassed and called and texted (oh, we texted), and it all amounted to a heartbreaking defeat that put absolute monsters in charge of the country. Getting mad seems to be the best (and only) way of getting even.

Hope doesn’t seem like an answer at this moment; it feels like a dagger between our ribs. What is there to be hopeful about with Trumpism ascendant and unfettered? What optimism can we summon with the promise of a police state designed to purge anyone with the wrong paperwork or the wrong name or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Most of us can hardly handle a nightly news broadcast, let alone imagine something better. And wasn’t it the lie of hope that made all of this hurt so much to begin with?

But it is precisely when the darkness is closing in and the exits seem to disappear that holding on to even the smallest light makes a difference. Our hope does not have to be for the transformation of the country; it does not have to be for all of the policies and promises we wanted. We can simply look into the faces of the people we love and hope that we endure. We can hope that our small joys, our tiny gestures of kindness and support, our simple pleasures in the face of the worst our world has to offer can remind us of what it means to persevere.

Most of all, we can remember that hope is the one thing our opponents want us to abandon. They believe we will give up. They insist we will buckle and break and despair. They think we are not strong enough to hope, that we are not strong enough to resist their attempts to crush our joys and dreams and desires. They know if we concede, they won’t have to work; we’ll have done it all for them.

So even though it hurts worse than anything, even though it feels like we are at the edge of an abyss, hold fast to the hope that we are stronger together. Because when we still believe in the opportunity to change, we will be ready to seize it when it comes.