HOPING IS COOL BUT HAVE YOU TRIED SCREAMING?

In December 2016, roughly a month after Trump snatched power for the first time, I traveled to London to visit one of my very best friends. While there, almost every UK resident I met asked me a version of the question: How could you let this happen?

At the time, I found this question pretty goshdarned insensitive. Surely I was not personally at fault for my nation’s election of the world’s least fashionable nepo baby? In the months leading up to that election, I’d severed connection with my MAGA parents, I’d finally begun to quietly publicize my queerness, I’d reluctantly voted for Hillary’s corporate globalist agenda, and in the aftermath of the terrible outcome, I’d even spent several nights blocking highway traffic to protest Big Donald’s rise to power.

To be clear, I realize how pathetically insignificant most of these things seem now. But the point is, from my perspective, I certainly hadn’t let this happen. I was a good person with good beliefs, gradually preparing to vote with renewed intensity during the next midterm election. America had shown its true colors, yes, but the Big Blue Wave was coming, and I had a plan. First, I’d write an incisive political thriller. Then, my powerful new book would inspire my liberal compatriots to wrest the White House golf clubs from the Tangerine Toddler’s tiny orange hands, and together, united under the flag of literature, we would do everything in our power to make sure a treasonous dictator never again… well… you know… in America…

And yet, here we are. Eight years later, eight years wiser, and fully in the midst of a fascist takeover that tends to make my international friends ask the much more pressing question: why are you STILL letting this happen?

And you know what? This time, it is my fault. I’m the only person I can actually control, after all, and what have I really done? I mean, yeah, I did write that aforementioned book grappling with Trumpism and truth decay and America’s most recent descent into madness, but unfortunately, my book wasn’t even published until four months after the MAGA terrorists used a trebuchet of liberal incompetence to fling themselves back into power.

Better late than never, I suppose, and judging by my various social media inboxes, my writing has helped a lot of very lovely people understand, cope, and contend with the political horror show unfolding across my nation and the world. But while I was sitting and writing and hoping and crying and, yeah, often panicking, Evil was working. It was grinding, day after day, to lie and cheat and murder its way back to the top.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the forces of Good aren’t hip to the grindset as well. Being chronically under-resourced and over-lawful, the truly good people in this world are always at a disadvantage. As Evil gets rich scorching the Earth, Good gets poor tending the wounded. Or teaching the children. Or I guess, if you’re relatively useless like me, writing the well-meaning literature. We all try to help in our way, but our do-gooder efforts often feel too little and too late and too invisible to keep the monsters from the door.

Perhaps this will always be the fate of the forces of good. Like so many Social-Darwinist, pro-capital jerk-nozzles continually point out, nice folks finish last. The cruelest survive to procreate and the kindest go the way of the Twitter bird. And the wheel turns.

Except no, no, no – it doesn’t. Because at the end of the day, we good people are the ones who turn the fucking wheel. There are more of us, and less of them, and, well, you’ve heard this one before, so I won’t waste your time screaming POWER TO THE PEOPLE, but please allow me to cite a real example of something that is currently happening in the small, cold, and globally invisible city of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In America, in 2026, my government calls its extrajudicial Gestapo ‘ICE’, and right now, ICE is going door-to-door, snatching Americans from their homes, and making them disappear without just cause or due process. This is, obviously, terrifying, but the good people of Minneapolis are fighting back. Many of my friends and family members are out in the streets, risking their lives, waging wintry guerrilla non-compliance in the face of rapidly escalating violence. They’re filming ICE abductions. They’re making human chains. They’re slashing tires, and sounding alarms, and escorting horrified children to school to keep them from being kidnapped off the streets. These are normal Americans, and I assure you that they are not letting this happen. And this time, neither am I.

It’s a terrifying thing, fighting for what you believe in, but it’s much less terrifying when millions of your global neighbors are fighting by your side. I think I was supposed to write this essay to sell you my book, but to be honest, that felt pretty self-interested. So instead, I wrote this odd little rant to tell you that I’ve personally decided that writing, for me, isn’t enough. I need to do more. Not on the internet, but in the world. On the streets. Helping my neighbors. Defending the voiceless. Using all the time-tested tools of non-violent resistance at my disposal.

A deeply conservative, awfully ethnocentric, and remarkably craven writer named T.S. Eliot once wrote that this, our world, will likely end with a whimper, but since we’re here, I’d like to politely suggest an alternative: Fight. Raise your voice. Grab your neighbors by the hand and remind them they aren’t alone. Because they aren’t, and neither are you. I know it seems like Evil has every weapon, every dollar, and all the time in the world, but they can’t kill us all, and I’d much rather die screaming than continue to let this happen.