Hey, Will! It’s me, Will from the future! Sorry that I look like such a mess, but I was press-ganged like all Liberal Arts majors into picking produce after the Mass Deportations of 2025, and I haven’t gotten this month’s bathwater ration from Nestle yet.
Things could be better, it’s true. They could also be worse. It turns out that dying Boomers are delicious when perfectly seared and coated with crushed peppercorns and Asiago cheese. That’s one of the Republican’s greatest policy achievements, the Waste Not Want Not Initiative.
Hey, I really have only a few minutes; I traded my last precious Ayn Rand Worker’s Scrip to the guy with the time machine for a chance to talk to you.
Yeah, that election you just emerged from could have gone a whole lot better, but really, it’s the few years afterward that everyone fucks up even worse.
Which is why I’m here with some advice.
There’s no question that Trump is the embodied id of America’s worst impulses: a gleefully ignorant, fame-desperate, shit-talking narcissist con artist who has confused the freedom to be a dick with the necessity of it.
And yeah, the world will change in a lot of terrifying ways over the first eleven years of Trump’s term, especially for people you care about who are LGTBQ+, minority, female, or science-minded. Your privilege helps you escape from some of the worst in your compound, at least in the short term, but things go to shit pretty quickly for everyone.
Unfortunately, we were all terrible at differentiating the real shit that was going wrong with the shit that idiots were saying was going on, and that’s how we lost Bigly War I.
If I had to do it all over again, I’d remind everyone in your time of a few important things:
- There are people who gain money and power by manipulating our fears toward all the wrong things, and while we’re earnestly arguing about what the world SHOULD be like, they’re busy making it what it WILL actually be.
- Those people are eager for us to sublimate our energy in spaces that don’t really matter like the Internet, where we confuse zingers and indignation with useful action.
- What power we have at the end of the day is whatever is within the immediate reach of our arms, our votes, and our wallets. The good we do has to start locally. We all want to save the world, but few want to pick up the trash.
Trump is a shit-talker who says deranged and bombastic things partly for attention, partly from senility, and partly as the start of an aggressive negotiation. You should by all means take seriously what he promises…but you should ACT upon what he and his people DO.
He wants you to freak out over what he says so you don’t notice what he does. He’s far from harmless, but he’s far from omnipotent, too. When we anticipated trouble that hadn’t happened yet, we missed the real trouble when it came, the trouble we could actually address.
That’s how they got us in the end.
Noted mythical character Winston Churchill once said on the hill of Golgotha that Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives. We write that in Latin on bathroom stalls when our overseers are too busy watching The Tonight Show with Gutfeld.
One of the few things left to hold onto is that yeah, we flail around a lot, but if we can keep ourselves in the game, we have opportunities to make good on the bullshit we spout about ourselves and our ideals.
Staying in the game is critical for all of you now, and I beg you to place your money and your efforts where it counts, not just screaming into the online void at bots and people who might as well be.
Uh, oh. They’re playing the noon inspirational homily from Marjorie Taylor Greene, so I guess it’s back to work for me.
It’s back to work for you, too.
