Under Einstein's theory of relativity, space and time are parts of the same universal fabric. Every object travels at the speed of light; while some travel only through space, others travel also through time. Like how stationary objects don't experience changes in space, objects at the speed of light don't experience changes in time.

Gravity is simply the curvature of spacetime. Although objects may appear like they are curving as they move past a particularly massive object, they can really be thought of as traveling in a straight line through a curved spacetime. Beyond the event horizon of a black hole, gravity is so strong that space and time can be thought of as switching places. At this point, traveling to the center of a black hole is as inevitable as traveling through time.

I imagine that falling in a black hole is like how I've been feeling about politics recently. Because of my excellent education, I am aware of all the forces that would push America away from turning a fascist hellscape. I am also aware of how these forces appear to be insufficient at the moment. And I can't do much about it myself. It all appears so inevitable.

I've been frustrated by how people don't seem to see this. I think Martin Luther King Jr. really failed when he said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T!!!!!!!! There is no arc, at least not one we know of. The future is humanity's to transform. I've tried convincing a few people that religion shouldn't play a role in politics, and they always seem to bring up religion's role in civil rights movements. And I acknowledge the power that religion can channel for good, but religion also brings a lot of baggage. Specifically here, there is no inscription in the fabric of the universe that the future will be good. And notice how there is no rationale behind this statement. It is based on simple blind faith, which was carried over from religion.

So many adults have tried telling me that everything will be ok. And yes, we're not necessarily all going to die (though let's not pretend that nuclear war isn't still a possibility). But Trump is going to cause a lot of damage. It remains to be seen how successful he will be, but I think it's very easy to fuck shit up. People don't realize that politics and laws are just conventions we all follow. There is no concrete thing that we can call “the United States”. It exists because it is an idea we all are sort of in agreement about. The courts only have power because we let them. What happens if the president doesn't let them? Who stops him — the military? Do we have faith that the generals that Trump will appoint are going to disobey him? I think Trump knows that these rules don't exist because he has experience as a billionaire (at least theoretically): the rules really haven't existed for him.

There are ways to fix this. There are steps we can take to stop this. But they won't happen because we have the Democratic Party as the only real opposition. And they are stupid. The lesson they seem to be taking is that we shouldn't mention trans rights or pronouns, even though Kamala Harris didn't mention those things and she still lost. And the people on the Left who are in power don't have the spines to do anything about this.

In the outro of “That Funny Feeling”, Bo Burnham repeats “Hey, what can you say? We were overdue / But it'll be over soon, you wait”. There is no inevitable march of progress. I don't think we were “overdue” per se, but we certainly overestimated the strength of this march. We are heading backwards in a really scary way. There are conservative swings, and there is now. We have a real potential for an authoritarian government.

People forget that Hitler was put in power through a democratic process. After seeing Palestinian civilians being indiscriminately bombed and put into concentration camps over the past year, I have very little confidence in popular opposition to atrocities. People are uneducated, or they don't care about other people, or they're simply just stupid, or a combination of all of that, or something else. I don't exactly know why, but it's at least clear to me (and to Michael Moore) that we are not good people.

It's hard to have hope in times like this. Hope isn't the same thing as optimism, by the way. In his influential work on hope theory (yes that's a real thing), Charles R. Snyder identified three components of hope: the construction of goals (preferably, specific goals), the belief in pathways to achieve these goals, and the perceived ability to use those pathways. We only have a vague goal, it's hard to find how they would even be achieved, and it's debatable whether such methods would even be possible anyway. So yeah, I'm sorry that I don't feel much hope, but I don't have much to give myself hope.

This should be the part where I give you something to feel better, dear reader, but honestly I don't have much. Unless nuclear war breaks out, you're probably not going to die. We might enter a recession or a depression, we might have a non-functioning government, we might … a whole bunch of things. But I think the best way to work through this is to take care of yourself, your loved ones, and your close community. It's certainly not enough for any sort of real resistance, but it's all we reliably can do.

And I'm not counting out anything either. Honestly I am optimistic that the Democratic Party will collapse in the next few years. It has basically turned into a pyramid scheme and I think people are fed up. When even the “normies” (god I hate that word but I can't think of anything else) that I talk to are releasing that this ship is rotten, we might not have that much time on it.

A new party system would be pretty fun for this polisci major. To give you an idea of how rare this is, let me go over the recent shifts. There was a shift in 1932 with FDR transforming the Democratic Party into a party for social welfare that also appealed to Black voters. The Republican Party shifted into a pro-business party that began to alienate Black voters, which really solidified in 1964. But these transformations didn't come out of nowhere: Democrats had long been more populist, and Republicans had been pro-business; Republicans just happened to be more socially liberal due to their locus of support in the North.

Another shift was completed in 1992 with Bill Clinton redefining the Democratic Party away from populism and towards a neoliberal centrism, in reaction to the popularity of Ronald Reagan and more broad appeal to American conservative propaganda. Again, this didn't come out of nowhere, Democrats kept their social policies while changing their economic ones to be Republican-lite. The only time Democrats were really excited about their presidential candidate was in 2008, and they learned that their hope was a mirage.

I imagine that 2028 will be another 1992 moment, where Democrats are forced to reckon with the success of a new kind of conservative. But opposed to Reagan marketing Republican neoliberalism with social messaging that was more palatable to cultural moderates, Trump brought back economic populism into the American political arena, marketing Republican bigotry with economic(?) messaging more appealing to economic(?) moderates.

The question is, will Democrats respond to the moment? No. Of course they won't. But maybe a third party will.

My area has been in a drought recently. We aren't supposed to set fires because the dryness is fertile ground for wildfires. Despite how impossible it might seem, perhaps this moment is making seemingly impossible political shifts possible. Who knows, maybe Bernie Sanders & co will start a political party. “Stay tuned" can't mean nothing.