We are all Donald Trump
BLOG: Climate Confessions
November 6. The morning after polls close in America: When I woke up this morning and read the news on my phone, my body felt like America: emptied of hope. A dead weight. Have I caught another cold, or is it the weight of the world holding me down? How can this keep happening?
— by Timothy Stacey
As I dragged myself down to the kitchen, holding my infant son in one arm and my toddler daughter in the other, my loathing of the world turned inward. How did we get here again? How could I subject them to this? I look into their eyes, trying to remember what hope feels like.
“Why are you sad, Daddy?”, asks my toddler. “You remember Scar from The Lion King?”, I ask. “Well he just became king of a very important country.”
“No!”, she chuckles with incredulity.
is Trump just the unspoken desires of a Global North elite that never really wanted to give up power?
After dropping them off at daycare, I consume my usual flu antidote of four coffees, before picking up the phone to a friend: “are you really surprised?”, he asks quizzically. I simply hang there in silence. I’m cheered by his voice, though he wouldn’t know it. “Anyway, would Kamala have really been so different? America is already funding a genocide in Gaza”
“Perhaps”, I respond, “hypocrisy feels better than outright vitriol”.
But it’s then that I come to ask myself a disquieting question: is Trump just the unspoken desires of a Global North elite that never really wanted to give up power? Very few of us are truly ready for the societal transformations required to achieve climate justice on a global scale.
What if the greatest myth of all is the one that many on the left tell themselves about being substantively different from their right-wing counterparts? Sure, we believe in abortion rights and climate change. But are we really ready to sacrifice the prospective luxuries of our children in the name of lifting people in the Global South out of poverty without destroying the planet? What is the substantive difference between open disregard for others’ deaths and pretending to ourselves that there is no alternative?
Miserable, I drift off. In the interstitial space between dreams and wakefulness, I think of how dismal our prospects are. Where are the myths and rituals of the world to come? Where are the rocks on which to build our future churches? Without them, is it really any wonder that people latch onto the last symbols that made sense? Let men be men. Let America be America. Let the rest be damned.
I wake determined to overcome this malaise. “One more coffee”, I tell myself, “and I’ll shed the Trump in me like I shed fat in the new year”. I need to think bigger, bolder, longer. I need to reach out to friends. We need to get creative. We need to start dreaming up futures that now seem impossible and electrify people with their possibility.
We need to get back to work.
Climate Confessions is a blog series in which Timothy Stacey reveals the “religious repertoires” associated with sustainability in various sectors. From the myths of great floods that dominate in Dutch politics to the rituals of reconnecting with other humans and the other-than-human found among activists, each month, Tim invites you into the repertoires that lurk beneath the surface, shaping sustainability in an otherwise secular world. For more formal reflections, see Tim’s peer-reviewed research: www.uu.nl/staff/TJStacey/Publications. To discuss how repertoires might transform your practice, get in touch t.j.stacey@uu.nl