Falling

 I dropped off to sleep around midnight with a glow of last-minute hope in my belly. I thought: "Harris is still going to win this. They just haven't counted all the absentee ballots in the Blue Wall states yet. Once they do, the numbers will shift in her favor." And I was chanting to myself "don't believe the red mirage... don't believe the red mirage..." as my eyes closed for the night. 

Then my eyes flew open again around three in the morning. And I made the mistake of checking the news. I couldn't help myself. I refreshed the New York Times homepage—to discover that Trump is now just one vote away from taking the electoral college. J.D. Vance is already on stage kissing the ass of the man he once called "America's Hitler," calling it the "political comeback" of the century. 

I felt a moment of intense physical revulsion, like I was going to be sick. But at the same time, strangely, the panic I had been feeling all week (month, more like) ebbed away. I no longer had the knot of frantic terror in my stomach. Here I was thinking all week: "if I feel this anxious now, what's going to happen to me if Trump wins? Will it be instant psychological collapse?" 

But no—I have not collapsed. Instead, I feel a strange calm. 

I guess it's because: we don't have to wonder anymore. We don't have to ask ourselves whether there is something else we should be doing to avert our doom. It's sealed now. As a character says in Cormac McCarthy's novel Stella Maris: "climbers who have fallen to what they believed to be their deaths universally report calm and acceptance [...] because there's no decision to be made." 

All week, as I was driving to Wisconsin and back for last minute volunteer canvassing, or making those final small-dollar donations to Democratic candidates across the country, I kept thinking: have I done enough? Is there anything else to do? Now, no matter the answer—"you did all in your power," or "you didn't do nearly enough"—it's now too late to change the outcome. The die is cast.

America's feet have already left the cliff side. Too late to do anything about that now. We are in free-fall. Trump will return to the White House. He will have all-but unilateral authority over the world's most powerful military. He will have the reins of the world's largest economy. And he will wield them both with the interests of Vladimir Putin foremost in mind. 

He will carry out his mass deportation atrocities. He will sap the independence of the Justice Department and use it to "go after" his political "enemies." Ukraine will be stripped for parts, with Trump's encouragement, by the Russian military juggernaut. Taiwan will be handed over to Xi. The light of freedom will be extinguished, and all will be shrouded in the shadows of the "now done darkness" (Hopkins). 

We are falling. Nothing to be done about that now. The voters have returned their verdict. Our fate is sealed. And with that realization, the panic—which is so much a product of the desperate seeking for an exit—disappeared. There is no exit. 

That is one reason for the strange calm. But there is another too. It's not something I could describe by such a pleasant-sounding word as "hope." In this moment, I have none of that. But it is a certain determination not to give Trump the pleasure of my own despair. People like Trump and J.D. Vance would like nothing more than to see people like you and me crack up. They would like us to destroy ourselves. 

We won't give them that. We will not do their filthy work for them by counting ourselves out of the fight before they have even had a chance to defeat us. 

There comes a moment in Henri Alleg's memoir of torture, The Question, when he sets his teeth against his captors. He realizes that the worse they do to him, the more it steels his resolve never, never to give them the least victory over his will. That is what we must say to Vance and Trump: my spirit stands against you, and you will never break it. It is not yours to break. 

When that phrase from Hopkins—quoted above—came into my mind, I felt compelled to re-read the source poem in which it appears. And I found its opening three lines, which I had all but forgotten, to be precisely the counsel I needed in this moment of darkest sorrow ("pitched past pitch of grief," as Hopkins writes in another poem). Those lines run:

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can[.]

Indeed. I can. We all can. To despair would be to hand Trump and Vance a victory they did not earn. If we give up and admit defeat, they win. If we lie in bed in anguish and depression, they win. If we dissolve into bickering and infighting and useless recriminations against each other, they win. And so—we must not—not feast on that carrion comfort, despair.