You Should Know I'm A Big Deal In The Resistance

There are voices out there that will tell you we shouldn't be celebrating the fact that an openly racist, professionally inept dim bulb horse-confusing child molester was a candidate in a political contest in 2017 America against another breathing person who was none of those things and only lost by 1.5 percentage points. My only response can be: a) fair point and b) Alabama.

Alabama, of course, is the exception to all the rules. I can say I've been to Alabama. I've partaken of your cultural distinctiveness and stood atop your grand archaeological treasures that literally nobody ever talks about. I've witnessed your wide, rolling beauty, made all the more starkly lovely by the fact that basically nobody lives there. Seriously, it's like less than 5 million people. Less than half of Los Angeles County alone. If it weren't for the occasional appearance of a Cracker Barrel along the interstate, I started to wonder if the idea of people actually living in the South wasn't a pure fiction invented to scare African-American children. But no, I've seen it, driven across the width of it, met its people and I can tell you, it was both very real and invented to scare African-American children. These things are not mutually exclusive

I'm proud I was able to venture out of my blue bubble and I'm happy I'm able to report to you that Alabama is not the worst place in the world, despite what you might have heard/assumed/intuited. I know this for a fact. On the same trip, I also drove across Mississippi.

It's true that Doug Jones, a seemingly actually decent human person, only won the special election to replace Jeff Sessions in Alabama by something like 22,000 votes total. But focusing on the numbers alone misses one crucial point: you have to let me fucking have this.

If 2017 has taught us anything, it's that nobody anywhere ever, on any subject, wants to be "well, actually..."-ed at. Yes, the pushback on pedantic shitbaggery is mostly brought up in the context of women talking to men, but I think by now the concept of the "mansplain" is ingrained enough as an idea in our culture that it will survive OK as a weapon against misogyny if we all also agree to fight political and intellectual sanctimony as a whole. Hopefully with actual weapons.

The margin was narrow, yes. But depressingly so? I say no. And do you know why? Because it wasn't until after I checked my phone for results* and the Doug Jones in the little info bar had the teeny-tiny checkmark next to it confirming the projection of his win that I really realized--really, fully, for the first time--that I don't think I've been allowing myself to feel actual hope since... I'm not even sure how long. Certainly before November 2016. I shudder to think it may have actually been since November 2012, but I guess it's not out of the question.

I obviously don't mean I haven't felt any joy or hope in five-plus years; I'm talking about political hope, social hope, aspirational and collective hope. The kind of hope that flavors the air your breathe. The kind of hope that tends to the fragile flowers of young ideas that need time and sunshine to really take root. The kind of hope that makes you not regret procreating.

One extra vote in the senate sure as fuck doesn't undo the last 11 months of forced national hotboxing of all the fumes rising from the curiously still un-drained swamp in Washington. But that's not really the point. The point is that disappointment--especially on the scale of the Trump election--can curdle hope. Hope is a position of vulnerability, allowing oneself to accept the openness of the future, the existential dread of which is made bearable by the possibility of predicting a non-awful outcome in at least some of your projections. To be (metaphorically!) stabbed to death for your efforts tends to make one less likely to open yourself up again to the same kind of exposure to pain. Repeat the same assault over and over again, across any notable period of time, and hope becomes pain, which becomes cynicism, which becomes despair which becomes, at last, nihilism. There's freedom in despair, but it's the same kind of freedom that exists in psychopathy: there's no guilt so long as you negate or lack the ability to summon up human empathy. Nihilism is the political and social expression of that personal handicap. Nihilism defeats voter enthusiasm, which frustrates voter turnout, which is something Republicans always, always want.

Yes, we've been kicked down a bunch. But all is not lost. Trust can be rebuilt. Look at me today: 18 years ago, Star Wars Episode I came out and it... OK, it wasn't the Trump of movies, but it hurt me that it was terrible. And now I've got tickets in my wallet for Episode VIII and I don't know if I'm going to be able to sleep tonight. I've gotten it back, folks. And we can all get it back. We just need a little FN-2187 in our lives. Doug Jones can be that. And two years from now, who can say where we'll all be?


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*for like the eightieth time that night, through squinted eyes, braced for the face-punch of continued disappointment