“Truth is, game was rigged from the start.”
Before we get started, I want to say what is maybe the most important thing first: I do not hate you for voting for Donald Trump. I do not believe in disengaging from you because of it, or cutting you off. In fact, more than ever, I think we need more communication. Yes, I may think less of you for voting for him, and yes, your vote makes me furious, but I don’t think you’re (automatically) stupid, racist, a bad person, etc. Even if you later demonstrate to me you are stupid, racist, a bad person, etc, you are still a person, and therefore you still matter, you can get better and grow, and I hope you understand that I am still fighting this fight for you and everyone else. More now than ever, the words I write and the actions I take are calculated in the best way I can to build a more meaningful world for everyone, even those who voted for Trump. You may not believe that, but I do. There are ways around this. If you know, I hope you trust me and you’ll hear me out. It just might take a while for me to get there (especially this being my first blog back). For now, I have to set the stage.
So. We’re finally here, huh? Donald J. Trump is the 47th president of the United States of America. Winning the electoral vote by a markedly unexpected margin, bagging every swing state, and securing the 2024 popular vote by, when the dust settled, a little more than 2 million votes. Not a landslide, but certainly not close enough to be questionable. Congress certified it. No one’s denying it. He did win, and as far as anyone can tell, he did it fair and square (or as fair as the ruling class can be, anyway. More on that later.) He will go down in history for many reasons, the least interesting of which is that he now joins Grover Cleveland as only the second ever non-consecutive two-term president. Hurray.
I remember when Trump was first elected, back in 2016. I remember the day after the election results were finalized, and it was clear that he had clinched enough electoral votes to win. While I’ll stand by the position that the electoral college is a shitty system based on slavery and we would be better off without it, it was clear then and it’s clear now that there is little anyone could have done to stop it. So November 2016 rolls around, and there is a palpable air of despair in my high school. Many of my friends and I were voting for the first time. Many of my friends and I voted for Clinton, despite wishing Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic option. And many of my friends and I were deeply, deeply disappointed to see that this abominable man-child of a candidate had instead secured victory. We didn’t yet know that he’d eventually be a convicted felon, though we did all know he was a criminal anyway. In 2016, I vividly recall that there was one, one singular girl in my grade who, very proudly and very loudly, wore a “WOMEN FOR TRUMP” t-shirt to class. She was bright, giddy, and proud to be an American. Some of my classmates didn’t come to school at all that day.
But things were different back then. The Republicans had the House and the Senate, but people seemed fired up on the tail of Obama’s history-making presidency, there was the sense that Trump had stolen the election by not winning the popular vote, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was still alive (whatever that counts for), and the Supreme Court wasn’t the total right-wing shitshow it’s devolved into now. There was this idea that, if we can just eke out four years without too much disaster, things would be ok. This would blow over. And for a while, it looked that way. Then COVID hit, and things fell apart. Biden won, and vaccines came out, so there was that.
But then January 6th’s coup happened. And then there was the new wave of right-wing nationalism in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, frankly, worldwide. And then Russia invaded Ukraine. And then Hamas’s attack prompted Israel to begin its new stage of all-out genocide against Palestinians in its decades-long occupation of Gaza. Two separate people tried to assassinate Trump. There were, as always, more school shootings and domestic terrorist attacks in the US. And inflation got worse, and homelessness in America reached new levels, and unemployment soared, and the Democrats, who at least for part of the time did have both a House and Senate majority, did nothing. They buddied up with corporate sponsors and expensive donors, and tip-toed around any sort of positions that seemed “too radical.” And then there was the whole fiasco with Biden stepping down and the Democrats appointing Harris as the crown princess of the DNC. And then Trump won. Again. And this whole time, the world has gotten hotter, and hotter, and weather has gotten worse, and worse, and now Los Angeles is on fire while the Midwest sees temperatures colder than cities in the Arctic Circle. Minnesota is as cold as Antarctica.
As you may know, I live in Sweden, so when poll results started rolling in back in November, I was already asleep. I woke up the next morning to my partner relaying me the news that “Georgia certified Trump’s victory.” “Please,” I replied. “I can’t start my day like this.” I waited until around 3pm Swedish time before finally breaking down and checking the live results. And I looked on in horror as everything seemed, once again, to collapse into despair. For a moment, it was like 2016 again, watching a slow-motion train wreck and being unable to stop it. But eight years have changed me, have changed the world, and have changed America. For one, Trump won the popular vote, so it felt like a more “legitimate” win. Frighteningly, he’s more experienced, and knows what he’s doing now. This is exceptionally worrying. Two, Elon Musk, a man I genuinely once idolized, was now openly backing the big orange baby, along with the vast majority of corporate America. Three, people I love and respect voted for him. Still, even after everything that has happened, people I care about and whose opinions I value voted for a man who’s blatantly turning America into a nationalist oligarchy at the expense of everyone and everything.
Seeing the results, I did what I have a tendency to do: I wrote. Not a lot, mind you, nothing more than outlines for some poems and stories that might get the rage across, but I did write. It was, admittedly, the first time I’ve voluntarily written in a while (busy with classwork and such, living live, etc. We’ll get to that another day). I might someday share some of those poems and essays and thoughts and stories that I outlined on that first day. I did want to share them here. In several cases, I very nearly did. They had such exceptional, nuanced titles as “Land that I Loathe” and “God Bless America. God Help Us All.” But I didn’t share them. I don’t have a good reason for that, but after a good deal of thinking, and processing, I’ve decided to share something, just in time for the inauguration. These aren’t new thoughts, or particularly surprising to anyone, I am sure, but they are mine, and I do feel it important that you, my audience of primarily friends and family, know that I think America has reached a new level of unacceptable. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you exactly why.
Seeing the results, I felt such a sense of horror and misery that, unlike in 2016, I did take the next day off. There was no way I was going to be able to focus with the specter of that man looming over everything in my subconscious. So I stayed home, and I thought, and I wrote a little bit, but mostly I thought, and I seethed, and I raged, and I cried, and I felt, above all else, that this is not good. If you know me, if you’re reading this, if you trust me and you love you, and if you haven’t tuned this all out yet, I hope that you’ll take what I have to say and at least consider it. Because, as it always seems to be with this damned country, America is at an inflection point. This country is at a point where we all need to consider who we are as a nation, what matters to us, and where we want not just America but the world to go.
Sure, yes, just in time for Martin Luther King Jr. day, I do ultimately believe the maxim that “The moral arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice.” I do think that, yes, enough people in power will do the right thing and resist Trump in ways they can that maybe things won’t be as dire as everyone is predicting them to be. They weren’t so bad before, they might not be so bad this time either. This is still, ostensibly, America, a constitutional democracy, and that rule of law and the values of justice and peace will triumph. Sure. Maybe. Hopefully. But things feel like they’re snowballing now. It feels like something it building up to a big shift. It’ll probably happen slowly, over months and years, not at once, but it feels like it’s coming. And maybe things will get better after. Maybe this change will be good. Under Trump, people will wake up and see what a disaster things are, and demand change. Things can come back around from this. They’ve come back around from worse.
But still. Seeing the results, I knew, suddenly and with an intense fury I’ve rarely ever felt before, that this is not like 2016. Things are different now. The world is different. We are different. The US Government is different. And worst of all, Trump is different. He seems to know what he’s doing this time around. He’s more dangerous than before. Perhaps the most horrifying part of my personal revelations post-election: things are bad. They are going to get worse. But above all else, on an existential level, we are running out of time. Can the moral arc of the universe still bend towards justice if there are no people left to bend it?
If you know me, I’m sure you probably know what I’m going to say here. Human-caused climate change is getting worse and it is going to IS causing heightened disasters worldwide that will, over time, compound to a point where we start seeing the chance for total ecological and societal collapse. And we’ve now reached a point that scientists have been trying to avoid for decades. We’re at a point of no return. I’m talking about mass ecological extinction. Mass exodus, starvation, wars over water. Millions of species going extinct. Birds, insects, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, everything. Entire branches of the tree of life gone, because of us. Forests and grasslands reduced to wastes, wind-swept plains of hot, hot death. And the destruction of coastal cities from floods, massive inflows of water every year from now on until forever. Fires that rage out of control, winters that break electrical grids and crack a country’s resolve. Droughts that destroy a nation’s crops, and everyone else is too strapped for resources to even think about helping out. Millions, if not billions of people, dying over the next century. And all of this happening soon, slowly, over time, now and forever, and we can’t go back.
Sure, whatever, doom-saying is overrated and people gloss over the idea of the “end of the world” because every generation has felt like it’s the end of the world. It is true that there will not be one big apocalypse. There won’t be any singular event that tips the scales. Maybe things won’t be as bad as models predict them to be. People and culture are resilient. Native Americans are already living in their own post-apocalypse, and they are surviving and, slowly, reclaiming their own. Modern Rome is, for a historical Roman, a post-apocalyptic city (post-post if you count the black plague); almost every major city across the entirety of the planet sits on top of the ruins of civilizations that have been so thoroughly eradicated as to be unrecognizable. So I could be blowing things out of proportion. But there will be many small, personal apocalypses. Nations will crumble, and people will die. And if you have to watch your entire family starve to death, or get bombed in the water wars, or drowned in a flood, how is that different from an apocalypse to you?
Climate change, today, feels different to me than other past apocalypse scares (see: influenza, nuclear warfare, overpopulation, etc.) because, frankly, it is different. The science supports this. The things we’re seeing now are utterly unprecedented in the entire 200,000 years of human evolutionary history. Sure, you can say against all odds, something huge hasn’t happened yet, so it statistically won’t happen in the future. Allow me to introduce you to the survivorship bias airplane. Yes, nuclear warfare did/does have the potential for the same level of destruction, if not more. Calling it a less “legitimate” apocalyptic fear is perhaps misleading, because one little mistake could have (or still could) ended life as we know it. As a species, we have survived countless disasters on grand scales. But climate change is the grandest of the all, encompassing every inch of the planet, now until thousands of years in the future. Despite that, at the end of the day, humanity will probably survive this one too. Some significant number of us will learn to live in a climate change world, and maybe thrive in it or, gods willing, fix it. Civilization will go on, and in three hundred years, perhaps this will all be a blip in a history book. Maybe things won’t be so bad. Like I said, as a species, we’ve come back around from pretty grim situations.
Here’s the big difference: nuclear warfare, influenza, etc. all have an “end date.” Someday, the radiation settles. Someday, the disease can’t spread any further, or we get a vaccine (heh. Been there. Still there.). Climate change isn’t like that. There’s no silver bullet solution, no warfare machine on-off switch that rests in the hands of a small few. It is slow, multi-generational in a way that we are literally not evolutionarily prepared to think about. It’s been building for centuries, and the slow end will be around for centuries. We don’t just have to make it past one big storm. We have to make it past every future big storm.
“Come on, now, Andy, be realistic,” I surely hear you saying. “Billions? That seems a bit dramatic.” And yes, perhaps it is overdramatic, and a bit pessimistic and expecting the worst possible outcomes. The climate models do have wiggle room for variability, human adaptation, unexpected successes and breakthroughs and such. There are legitimate cases for climate optimism. People and cultures and societies are always more resilient than we give them credit for. But still, I’m a little tired of acting like I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I do, and what I know scares the shit out of me. As an almost-sort-of* expert on this (*I’m not some shmuck with a breadboard and an “end of the world” doomsday cult; I did write a (children’s) book on this subject, and am 75% of the way through a master’s degree in ecology, a highly-adjacent subject matter), I am telling you that I am being realistic. I don’t like being this way, but be honest with me and with yourself for a moment: have you looked at the studies? Do you know how the models work, and what their limitations are? Have you seen the numbers? I do, and I have, and I know, at least enough to get a grip on it and listen to the 97% fucking percent of scientists who agree, and believe me when I tell you: things are bad. They can get so much worse.
Even as I swing back and forth on how likely I think the end of the world is, I don’t want to take the chances that I’m wrong, and nothing happens, because the alternative is literally the end of the world. I would rather take action now, and find out decades later that the worst-case scenarios would never have come to pass. Because I can’t just wait and see until it’s too late. We can’t afford to do that. Again, if we work hard on this and we’re wrong, we’ve still made the world a better place. But if we do nothing and we’re right, well… The last thing I want to do is be right about this stuff. I would love to be wrong and everything turns out great and everyone is happy. I really, really hope I’m wrong about this. But I don’t think I am, and I suspect it will be a very hollow “I told you so” moment at the end.
At the bare minimum, we can see right now that we’re driving ecosystems and species extinct, and I will/I am actively taking part in preventing more of that. As for the end of civilization, well… We’re not there yet. But we’re getting there. And if the newest studies are anything to go by, I’d wager a good 80% of the people reading this will live to see it. And in the here and now, I am once again pointing and screaming at the fact that some very serious and very possible scientific models are predicting billions of people dying. Big things are coming, and they are coming both too slow and too fast, and frankly, four more years of environmental destruction may genuinely be four too many. And I know these next four years are going to be environmental hell because on his first day, Trump’s already pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. This happened already. It’s been one day. 1459 more days to go. Four more years of this may be too much. We may already be too late. As a modern world, we genuinely may not have the time to wait for the moral arc of the universe to come to us. And I, for one, will not sit by idly and watch global genocide happen, if there is anything I can do about it.
Here’s the upside to this: there are still things we can do about it. We’ve got a foot in the grave but we don’t have to step into it yet. We can turn this around. And that is where you, specifically reading this, can play a role too.
This is a lot to take in all at once, and it is certainly a lot for me to write down in one blog post. For my sake as much as for yours (if you’re still reading), I think for today I’ll leave it here. Here’s the setup. You’ve got the idea. You know why I think things are different, and why now, we don’t have much time left. This is a bit of doom and gloom, I know, but I do think I’ve got some answers to this that aren’t just “give up.” I hope you’ll bear with me through them, because now more than ever, what we need is community and communication. And so I’ll leave you with the tagline as a little teaser for next article’s big ideas, when we come back to how Trump fits into all of this: “Where will you draw the line?”
