At my big, fat, gay wedding in May of last year, my sister gave a toast at the reception pointing out, among other things, my eternal sense of optimism. “He always believes that things will work out in the end,” she said. Indeed, my wedding itself was an exercise in optimism. My relationship with my husband has had its fair share of problems - we even came very close to calling the whole thing off after a particularly dark, rough patch. Our decision to go into counseling rather than call it quits was an expression of optimism, and the decision to tie the knot was based on the belief that things were moving in the right direction. Similarly, throughout my mother’s ultimately terminal battle with a particularly nasty, aggressive strain of cancer, I believed the new miracle immunotherapy drug would work if we could just hang in there. When my sister called me crying one night, telling me how scared she was that Mom wasn’t going to make it, I told her to trust that the drugs would work, and that there was no need to panic until we actually needed to panic. My optimism kept me afloat, even when everything was clearly going south so quickly.
They call me a cock-eyed optimist...I guess?
Leading up to November, we were all occupying a similarly optimistic space. Hillary had it in the bag, according to all sources. The Republican Clown Car had debased itself into nominating Donald J. Trump, who embarrassed himself daily on the national stage. Even in the face of the rumblings about Hillary’s likability problem and the fact that people had a lot of baggage about the Clintons, I believed it would be a landslide. Surely no one could look at this lying, slick, bigoted ignoramus and think he would make a better President than Hillary Clinton. It didn’t seem like optimism at the time; it just seemed like sanity. Others remarked to me that against a more qualified candidate, Hillary would have had more of an uphill climb. I even had a hard time believing that. I always thought the vitriol against Hillary was overstated, a very vocal minority screaming conspiracy theories about Benghazi and e-mail servers. Her detractors may have had legitimate issues with her policies or her voting record or her corporate interests, but I was sure that none of that would matter in the end. Trump was such a ridiculous choice that everyone would vote to save the Republic.
Oh, how wrong I was.
In the dark, anxiety ridden days between November 9th and January 20th, optimism was a scarce resource. It took the form of hoping the electoral collage would vote against him. It took the form that his many conflicts of interest would be exposed and render him ineligible. Counterintuitively, optimism also became a dirty word, an expression of privilege in its worst sense. Optimism in the face of Trump’s election meant that you didn’t have to worry about you or your relatives getting deported or denied entry to the United States. It meant that you didn’t have to worry about your health insurance evaporating with the stroke of a pen. It meant that you didn’t have anxiety over whether your marriage would still be legal in this country after four years. Those who said “Maybe he won’t be so bad,” were forced to face the fact that the only people for whom it won’t be so bad are white, straight, Christian men.
This election took its toll on even the most stalwart polticos. My father, for example, a man who worked in Carter’s White House, on two Democratic Presidential Campaigns, and was the president of the Florida Chapter of the ACLU, shared Neil Gabler’s article Farewell, America, on Facebook, effectively announcing his withdrawal from politics. Even after a lifetime of fighting on the right side of history, my father seemed to have come to the conclusion that any country that could elect this man wasn’t one worth fighting for. Like many of us on the left, I felt buoyed by the surges in protests, activism, political engagement and the birth of the #resistance, yet my father’s descent into downright nihilism was sobering.
Trump’s election and the ensuing chaos forced me to examine what it means to be an optimist. While I belong to two historically marginalized minorities - I am Jewish and gay - at the end of the day, I am a white, educated, able-bodied man who grew up with many privileges. My sense of optimism about the world must stem directly from the fact that things have, fundamentally, always worked out for well for me. Yet, after the election, like all 65 million of us who voted against this abomination, I felt real fear. Anyone who’s read a history book in the last 50 years saw that Trump’s campaign ran the Fascism playbook to get elected. History also tells us that if you are a gay, Jewish intellectual, you don’t survive regimes like this one is shaping up to be. And as the deportation forces form, the wall gets built, and anti-Semitic - and I very much include Muslims in that category - hate crimes continue to rise, where does optimism live in these terrifying times?
Well, right now, if you must know my optimism lives in the power of the press and the power of the courts. Fascists know they have to bypass, demonize, and destroy the press in order to keep control over the masses. Anything negative about the administration is “fake news;” certain organizations are denied questions and barred from press briefings; the New York Times is “failing” when subscriptions have increased ten-fold since the election. They do this because journalists are currently working very hard to expose what they need to remove Trump and his power-hungry, Russia-colluding hoards from office, just like they did with Nixon so many years ago. It’s already happening: first Flynn and now Sessions.The judiciary did its job blocking the completely ridiculous and unconstitutional travel ban. We must continue to support a judicial system that holds our executives and legislators accountable. Finally, all the activism and engagement are equally important. Calling your representatives works. Showing up at town halls works. Most importantly, voting works. Republicans in Congress have no reason to listen to the demands of their constituents unless they think they’re going to lose their jobs. Let’s mobilize and make sure that happens. It may be too soon to tell, but from this optimist’s point of view, things are looking up.