Could Be Raining
Foolish Optimism in a Dark Age
It’s almost the end of 2020, and like many folks I am beyond ready for that magical moment when the radioactive ball will drop onto a silent Times Square and smash this cursed year into the rubble of history. Over the past few weeks, as COVID-19 vaccines have started to roll out and Donald Trump’s pending eviction from the White House has drawn nearer, I’ve rediscovered something I’d become accustomed to living without: cautious optimism about the future. I know it’s foolhardy. The anticipation I felt at the end of 2019 feels in retrospect like a cruel joke, and there are plenty of reasons to think 2021 could make 2020 look in hindsight (ha) like a prologue. Yet somehow I find my glass-half-full outlook holding steady, like Igor going grave-robbing in Young Frankenstein:
I must acknowledge that it takes all kinds of privilege for me to be able to express optimism (or at least non-despair) in this dark time. I’m a white male with a secure, well-paying white-collar job; I’ve stayed healthy, as have those closest to me; people like me have not been a target of President Trump’s vicious policies, nor victims of his catastrophic incompetence.
For too many people this year, the glass wasn’t just half-empty, it was shattered. The toll of the pandemic long ago reached proportions that were hard for our brains to comprehend, and we are still right in the thick of it. Add to that the economic effects of the pandemic, the ongoing outrages of America’s racist caste system, (one-third of all American COVID deaths have been Black Americans), our toxic partisan divisions, and the accelerating effects of climate change, and it’s fair to say that for untold millions of people, in large ways and small, things will be bad or worse for a long while before they get better.
Knowing all of this is true, it’s easy and in some sense rational to feel pummeled into hopelessness. The way we’re living now doesn’t help matters. At a time when we desperately need to be getting out into the world and making contact with other people, especially people who are different from ourselves, we are stuck in stasis, bunkered in our homes, forced to put up physical barriers between each other to keep the virus at bay. Trump wanted to build a “beautiful wall”; what we got were a hundred million mini-walls that make us feel, tangibly, our separateness. (That’s not to say I’m an anti-masker. For the sake of everything you love, wear a fricking mask!)
At the same time, needing connection, we’ve deepened our dependence on the Internet. But for many people, being online exacerbates the feeling of being overwhelmed and alone. We find ourselves in this woebegone state partly by ill fortune and historical circumstance, partly by consequences of our own design. We can see what’s wrong — it’s thrown into our faces every day, in what Jia Tolentino in Trick Mirror calls “an unlimited supply of terrible information” — but we feel paralyzed to do anything about it. The mechanisms we’ve adopted to cope have failed to make things much better while sometimes making new things wrong in new and unbearable ways. It’s enough to make a person go, in the words of Lana Del Rey, “24/7 Sylvia Plath.”
I can’t live like that, not for long. In the face of all this misery and stress and bone-deep weariness, hope may feel like a dangerous thing for me or anyone to have right now. But like Lana Del Ray, I have it; I have to have it; and because it is in short supply right now, I feel duty bound to share it.
Here, then, in the last week of 2020, are three reasons I’ve found for thinking the future may not be so bleak.
Reason #1: We are getting a broader, deeper, and better understanding of American racism, which is the necessary first step toward real change.
When police officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in the back and killed him in August 2014, it sparked fury in the town of Ferguson, MO and became a civic call to arms for a new generation of civil rights organizers who created the Black Lives Matter movement. In subsequent years, there have been countless protests, a Trump-fueled controversy about football players kneeling for the National Anthem, the counter-movement Blue Lives Matter, and the public emergence of white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys. Throughout that time, dozens more Black Americans have continued to die at the hands of police.
It might seem as if nothing has gotten better. But there was something different about the way Americans responded to the sickening police murder by asphyxiation of George Floyd in May 2020. Six years ago, there was a lot of talk in media and policy circles about reform, about individual “bad apples” in police departments who needed to be held to account. All the evidence since then shows that our justice system refuses to hold individual officers to account, and that police departments are hostile to the notion of reform. The real problem, as BLM activists articulated from the start, is not bad apples, it is the systematic and endemic devaluation of Black lives.
Over the summer, the BLM message landed in a way it never had before. Reporters writing about Floyd’s death, and the protesters who defied the pandemic and took to the streets, initially focused on the individual officers involved. But very soon, protesters and commentators alike began to talk more about the broader problem of how policing is carried out in America, and what to do about it. The “Eight Can’t Wait” reforms intended to curb police violence were boosted by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and received mainstream support across the country. Many progressive activists, noting that such reforms are often little more than fig leaves, went further, with calls to “Defund the Police” and invest the dollars into mental health and addiction care, social work, and communities that need support.
Meanwhile, companies like the one I work for devoted time and space for employees to have what one executive called “honest and uncomfortable dialogue” about the effects of racism in our culture and in the workplace. Books on anti-racism by Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X. Kendi shot to the top of bestseller lists. Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, published in August, was a powerful reframing that likened the status of Black people in America to that of the “untouchable” Dalit caste in India and Jewish people in Nazi Germany, a permanent underclass who have been chronically and explicitly dehumanized and disallowed full participation in society. For Wilkerson, the violence done by police officers to Black people is one of countless symptoms of this foundational violence, which has corrupted America for 400 years.
It’s too early to tell, but it may be that, as a country, we have come to a tipping point where an electorally significant number of people grasp that our problem goes far beyond the scope of police brutality. Wilkerson writes about the ways in which the dominant (white) caste has continually reasserted itself — she points to the 2016 election as an example — and there is no doubt it will do so again. Racism in America did not end with Brown v. Board of Eduction, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, or the election of Barack Obama, so of course we will not find a remedy for four centuries of oppression in a handful of police reforms (though we should make those reforms happen). But we are finally talking about the right problem, and that means we have the chance to finally reckon with it, to go beyond playing whack-a-mole with the outward manifestations of our caste system, and move toward solutions that will make a real difference.
Reason #2: Young people are figuring out how to live constructively online.
I’ve been watching our two Gen Z kids and their friends and peers attempt to navigate both remote learning and remote living. One of those things is going well; the other, to put it mildly, is not.
Remote learning has been a hot mess. Even our kids’ most tech-savvy teachers have struggled to make Zoom classes compelling. Our elder child is a high school senior, and they have enough experience and college-oriented motivation to get by and make it work. Our younger child, an 8th grader, has struggled more. She’s enrolled in an Internet-only option program offered by the school district, which we had expected would have teachers well-versed in effectively using the technology and a curriculum tailored to online learning; four months in, she hasn’t yet had a one-on-one conversation with most of her teachers, spends close to zero time interacting with other students, and does a fair amount of her schoolwork on printed worksheets.
I suspect a big part of the problem is that online schools are virtual spaces designed by adults who grew up in a non-virtual world. As such, they are oriented toward making the online experience more like real life — for the adults. This is why they fail. For students, school in the real world is an intensely physical experience, loud, hormone-charged, smelly. It’s a place where kids laugh with their friends, make eye contact with their crushes, strut in the halls, fidget in their seats, and try to make an impression. Far from being the distractions they’re often made out to be, those physical and social dimensions are a large part of what keeps students’ brains stimulated and engaged and receptive to learning, and they are almost completely absent from the remote classroom experience.
When left to themselves to create remote life experiences, young people, who have grown up online, take a very different approach, leaning into the possibilities of virtual personas and using technology to build communities unbound by geography. We have two living examples of this trend in our house. Our elder child uses Tik Tok and Discord to create streaming, interactive cosplay and role playing sessions based on their current obsession, the anime Death Note. A small but fiercely engaged community of Gen Zers from as far away as Italy has built itself around these streams, where people can freely indulge in the kinds of social interactions they might have otherwise found at school. Our younger child has found a similar outlet in online sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, which are half game-play and half socializing. As she says, it’s not the same as being with her friends in real life. But it is an experience that makes her feel connected, seen, and liked by other people her age, a basic necessity for a 14-year-old’s well-being.
I realize I’m talking about a sample size of two here, but the Gen Z predilection for creating engaging, inclusive, positive, and beloved online social spaces already was apparent to marketers and other trend-watchers before COVID-19 hit, and in 2020 it has gone into overdrive. Given the likelihood that some form of online schooling will likely stick around after the pandemic passes, educators might want to take a close look at how their students construct the virtual places where they live so much of their lives. Remote learning will never be like in-person learning, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work just as well in its own right by letting kids shape their own learning environment.
Reason #3: Radical anti-government conservatism is moving back to the fringe where it belongs.
In his inaugural address in 1981, Ronald Reagan famously spoke a bumper sticker-ready line which has been celebrated by American conservatives ever since: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Those who quote it nearly always forget the first part of the sentence — “In this present crisis” — in the interest of making all-purpose anti-government posturing seem like a principled point of view on the part of those who, in fact, have been elected to govern. The specific crisis Reagan was talking about was the state of the economy, which had been locked in stagflation, a toxic combination of anemic growth or recession, high unemployment, and high inflation, for several years. As it turned out, the rest of his sentence, the part everyone remembers, was completely wrong. Stagflation was caused largely by poor monetary policy, and it was government intervention that ended the crisis, most importantly the Federal Reserve’s efforts to bring inflation (which in 1980 was 13.5%) sharply under control.
Nevertheless, among the conservatives who followed in the wake of Reagan, there was broad acceptance of the notion that “government is the problem,” and that a key objective of government should be to ungovern, in the sense of removing regulations, eliminating taxes on wealthy people, and dismantling the social safety net. Their message found a receptive audience among certain blocs of voters, especially white men. Some Democrats, desperate to win elections in the ‘90s, jumped on the bandwagon. Bill Clinton’s victory was built on a campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” (and later, he did, with devastating consequences in the Great Recession of 2008–2009). In 2010, when the Obama administration and a bare majority of the Democratic Congress flew in the face of small-government orthodoxy and adopted a Republican policy idea as the core of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans were able to paint it as massive government overreach, and Democrats lost control of Congress that year by convincing margins.
But a political ideology founded on anti-governance, in a nation with as many large-scale problems as the United States, was never going to succeed in the long term. In 2018, a Republican-controlled Congress, working with the Trump administration, failed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, having no functional ideas on how it could be replaced without violating their own creed. Running on a policy platform hostile to actual policies had left the party intellectually bankrupt; all they were able to accomplish before losing the House in November was a tax cut for millionaires.
Trump has spent the past four years fulfilling many anti-government zealots’ wishes by taking a sledgehammer to various departments, gutting industry regulatory bodies, pushing scientists out of the EPA, firing inspectors general, undermining the US Postal Service, and anything else he could do to cripple the reach and effectiveness of the federal government. Most fatefully and tragically, he ended a pandemic early warning program a few months before COVID-19 emerged in China. Maybe such a program would have made little difference given Trump’s stubborn unwillingness to take the virus seriously long after it had reached the United States. But that doesn’t change the fact that conservative hostility to a functioning federal government has left the United States flailing and failing to cope with the pandemic or provide meaningful relief to struggling Americans.
In this present crisis, there can be no doubt non-government is the problem.
Increasingly, voters are recognizing that the United States needs robust and active government. There is evidence that views of the role of government are shifting drastically along generational lines. In a survey published January 2019, 70% of Gen Zers and 64% of Millennials agreed with the statement, “Government should do more to solve problems.” While these views may not stay fixed over time, it’s a good bet that the experience of 2020 will make a deep and lasting impression on all who live through it — one that could be cemented in 2021 by a Biden administration that acts with competence to accelerate vaccinations, provide relief to Americans, and eventually bring the virus under control.
There is still plenty of vocal antipathy to activist government, as we’ve seen in states like Michigan, Ohio, and California, where anti-mask and anti-closure protests turned ugly earlier in the year. In October, the FBI arrested 13 men for plotting to kidnap and execute Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the Michigan government. This escalation, while alarming, underscores the fact that anti-government sentiment is slipping out of the center and making a beeline for the further reaches of the right wing. In 2010, it was enough for self-styled Tea Partiers to stand up in town halls and berate elected officials about Obamacare to knock the legs out from under Democrats. In 2020, Gov. Whitmer’s active approach to combating the virus sent her approval ratings higher, protests notwithstanding. The kidnapping plot was a desperation move. What worked for Ronald Reagan forty years ago and for the Tea Party ten years ago isn’t working anymore, and that in itself is reason for encouragement.
I’m posting this essay very early in the morning of the last day of 2020, aware that much of it may not age well. For instance, as of this moment, Mitch McConnell still believes it is in his and his party’s best interest to block action on a bill that would provide $2,000 payments to Americans. The zombie of Reaganism lives on a while longer.
Still, even if the reasons for optimism I’ve laid out here prove misguided, we can take heart that so many people care enough to work on these difficult, worthy problems and 99 others. Some things won’t get better, but some will, and not everything is as bleak as it seems.
As I said to the dog as we walked in a soaking, soul-chilling Oregon winter rain earlier today, it could be worse.
Could be sleeting.