Sometime midway through the pandemic I felt like if I had any hope or optimism for humanity prior, I had lost it all witnessing how we responded towards a disabling virus. If we couldn’t rally our selves against something that is so acutely damaging, I am not sure how we can rally against longer-term threats. These feelings permeated not only towards humanity as a whole, but towards people I loved and cared for. I am someone who has felt alone my entire lifetime due to being perpetually out of step with the mainstream, but this pandemic made me feel the loneliest. Thankfully I still have my partner with me or else I would be seriously thinking about how to leave, but love no matter how grand it is, cannot takeaway one’s sense of existential loneliness. My partner is even more covid cautious than me, and in some ways more of a doomer, but she doesn’t feel that existential loneliness that plagued me all my life.
So I was surprised to feel that sadness when it became clear that it was mathematically impossible for Kamala Harris to win. I thought I could not be more numb than I already was. Still, I frantically refreshed all the apps hoping for a miracle. Maybe some people may wonder why is a Singaporean so concerned about the US elections? I don’t know if I should spend the energy trying to explain systemic repercussions. It is very disturbing when people out of the US see it as a joke, or make some statement about “next time”. For some people, there is no “next time”.
I think people are focused on the individuals like Harris, Trump or even Musk – rightfully so, but what is so depressing for me isn’t the result itself, it is what the result is representative of. It is one thing to elect Trump in 2016, another thing to re-elect him now after what has transpired in the past few years. He isn’t even coherent. But people seem to point fingers at America as though they are the only weird country. To me it has been an ongoing trend worldwide, probably made worse by the pandemic.
I think we are heading for much darker ages because we have lost our capacity to think, if we even had it in the first place. There are so many systemic factors contributing to it. Our public education, inequality, use of technology, a brain-damaging virus, etc. Maybe this outcome is not unusual considering the factors. I think the peaceful years before the 2000s were the actual blip: it gave us the illusion that progress is to be expected, that the universe bends towards justice – a saying I have now come to resent.
The problem with the mentality that there is a “next time”, is that we are running out of time. As a tiny human I don’t have the capacity to think in centuries, I can only feel this sadness for people belonging to my era. It is not even hundred years ago that people lived through world wars and great famines, so to experience this disjointedness is perhaps a human condition.
Cherish and document the little beautiful things of life and of this world, perhaps witness and document the ugliness too. Throughout the ages no matter what has happened, nothing can take away our capacity to witness. On this earth we are probably the only beings who can take everything we have experienced, and transmute it into other forms. Even if they may not last, at least there was something instead of nothing.