Hope is a Helluva Drug—And the Crash Hurts

When democracy kicks you in the teeth, do you stay down or get back up?

I haven’t really talked about what the 2024 Election was like as Eleven Films. I didn’t even realize I was still verklempt about it all until the voicemails from The People’s Hotline started to flood in. Americans calling from all around the country about what the fuck is going on since Inauguration Day,

scared about what’s to come,

what will happen to their retirement, social security or Medicare?

Their kids’ rights?

What are our reps doing?

We The People had been deeply affected by the actions of this administration in the short weeks that we’ve been on Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride and it was palpable.

I can’t possibly process all 5 stages of grief over something a lot of us knew was the death of Democracy as we knew it. America as we knew it. I can’t get over that we are once again back with the most abusive ex on the planet who has morphed into a Final Boss with a Mini Me who makes us beg for our dignity and worth. It’s like reverse Avengers. This one is going to take me a minute.

I don’t have faith in a lot of things. As a Gen X, we don’t have that luxury. Our own parents couldn’t be bothered to even make sure we ate or bathed. They never knew or even asked where we had been. Who we were with. Every unsupervised young girl in the early 70s and 80s knew a handsy uncle or a Dr. Diddles. We have been doing very adult things since we were kids. We are rarely surprised by anything and we can spot bullshit men a mile away. Especially men like Trump. We were hyperaware at a young age that there were predators in the water. He’s a marauder. An abuser. He’s never hidden it.

“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her”

“Grab them by the p-”

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had”

“They’re poisoning the blood of the country”

My faith wasn’t shaken by a snake oil salesman in a red tie or The Ketamine Kid. It wasn’t cracked by an entire group of Americans in red hats voting to erase the rights of other Americans. It wasn’t the absolute extremist propaganda responsible for wiping the humanity from behind their blue eyes that dismays me.

I am dismayed at the people who didn’t show up.

I am disfuckingmayed at myself for even having the audacity to believe We The People understood the assignment. That it was clear none of us could afford to be casually American anymore and therefore we must exercise our right to vote in every election. After all, a Republic requires, deserves, demands even, active participation. Not apathy. I just refused to believe the work we did as Eleven Films and Nick did with Demcast and every single other activist, creator, and group was done in vain. How dare we dream and hope as if those were our rights in Trump’s New America. Dreaming and Hoping had become privileges in 2025 and you only qualify for them if you shit gold bullion.

Was I that severely naive to think reversing Roe and criminalizing women’s healthcare was enough of a threat to our civil liberties that the least people would do is show up to vote? I know not everyone could volunteer or take time off from work and family to organize or protest, but they couldn’t be bothered to drop a fucking ballot in the fucking mail? They went through all the trouble of registering to vote, was it too much to fucking ask that they show the fuck up? I’m sorry, was it too boring to put shoes on to go stand in a line? Did it just give ick? Tell that to my father who was drafted into Vietnam and was lucky enough to come back a shell of a man. Or my mother’s father who fought in World War II. Or her favorite nurse at the cancer clinic who is scared she’s going to be deported? How about the kids getting shot up in their schools? Could they do it for them? How the fuck are you going to sit there, KNOWING who this man is, KNOWING what Project 2025 is and not rally to the polls like you did for Joe Biden? HOW DID 2024 FEEL ANY LESS DANGEROUS THAN 2020? I know we were screaming “THIS IS THE ELECTION OF YOUR LIVES” at every turn. I get it. Democratic messaging can be annoying like that. But we weren’t wrong. NEVER HAD YOUR VOTE EVER MATTERED SO MUCH. Now it may never matter again. Trump said it himself.

And what the fuck, Boomers? Jesus fucking Christ talk about Generation Sabotage. What the absolute fuck? Why? Is it the mercury fillings? The lead paint chips? What happened to you? YOU WERE THE ONES who burned your bras and sang about real shit and protested and gathered in the likes no one had ever seen! You went from Peace and Love to Fuck Them Kids real quick. Hoarding your wealth and gatekeeping every resource to the detriment of every generation after you is some real sociopathic shit. And I can’t even defend GenX. I’ve seen the TikToks. It’s always the 50something Karens and Kens starting shit for no fucking reason. I don’t know wtf happened to us, either. All I can say is we drank from the hose. All the time. And then microwaves were invented. The only nutrition we got was from the knock-off Flintstone vitamins. We also never had the numbers to equal any sort of power until we had the Millennials and the Genzies. And with Generation Alpha right behind all of us to help carry Democracy through to 2028 and beyond, I thought we finally had the numbers to do this shit.

Clearly, I’m still in the anger phase of grief.

The last time I had this much faith in Democrats, Obama won in 2008. It finally felt like a change was gonna come. It was a new dawn for Democracy. An era of inclusion, equality, and opportunities for all the kids who grew up with no opportunities. That maybe the next generation of daughters would have even more protections than their grandmothers. Maybe my daughter would have equal pay. Maybe she could even go to a real college and be more than a wage earner. Maybe she could buy her own house one day. Maybe our sons will learn about empathy and compassion without those deeply fundamental human traits being socialized as weak. It felt like the consciousness of America was leveling up. That we were finally evolving as a culture. We ended up getting hamstrung by none other than Mitch McConnell, but that’s another Substack.

I felt something building again in this country after 2016. The People knew and felt Trump’s first presidency fucked us up in ways that we will never full recover from. Just the stupidity and recklessness that stemmed from it was something so offensive to the office itself that we couldn’t even bring ourselves to collectively agree what a piece of shit buffoon of a Russian asset this man is. We couldn’t face what had been allowed into the sanctity of The Oval. Then we get Kavanaugh dropped on us in 2018. Like we don’t understand that the conservative long game is young bodies on The Forever Court. Then Covid in 2020. A million Americans dead. And millions more hurting themselves with bleach and aquarium cleaner. Then Coney Barrett. We knew what was going to happen to Roe. And we knew that was only the beginning. We took a stand in 2020. We The People said that’s it. Your bullshit ends with this next election. No matter how we felt about Joe’s age at the time, we all got behind him because we KNEW we could trust him to at least try to help us. The Little Guy. The grandparents who need medication and home health care. The students that need debt relief. The sandwich generation in between. We all needed his help and he didn’t take that lightly. We all knew the road was going to be hard, but we knew we had avoided the iceberg. Joe was a damn good President. We watched him cram so much good into so little time that it inspired me to never quit. Never give up on America. She’s worth the promise that she was written to be. That there is still a reason to be proud of the longest lasting written Constitution in the world. He showed that as the president, you use all the time you have left on Earth to make Her a better place even if you’ll never live to see the benefits of your efforts because America is just fucking worth it. That job sucked the life out of Joe, we saw it every single day. Our beloved guy out there just trying to right every wrong he could before they came in and gutted the place. It felt like all of us gave our all. From Joe Biden all the way down to Eleven Films. All the phone bankers. The door knockers. Even the shitposters. We all came together and decided that we were going to take the country into our own hands again. That we were finally going to make good on the work of Elijah Cummings and RBG and John Lewis. We were going to deliver on Martin Luther King’s promise and we were going to make whole the things that have been tearing America apart.

Which brings me to Kamala.

This is where it all went wrong for me. This is where my denial starts.

James and I poured our hearts and souls into the fight for Democracy. Since Eleven Films exploded in 2018, we lived and breathed political messaging. All we did was make digital content. For YEARS. We had two TVs running in our home office constantly. One was CNN and the other was MSNBC. We had to be able to snatch any clip of any breaking news at any breaking moment. 2020 was never a day off, sleep-when-we’re-dead, high-fiving-as-we-pass-in-the-hallway kind of year. There was just a constant noise of editing, cable talking heads, editing, never-ending chyrons, editing, endless social media scrolling, editing. And we did it all with fire in our hearts because NO FUCKING WAY was this guy going to win again. We knew Kamala would lead us to the promise land. We all knew it. Even Republicans. They were COOKED. There’s NO FUCKING WAY, after what Democrats had accomplished in one term with Joe, the excitement behind Kamala and the digital messaging platforms galvanizing and coming into lockstep, that it wasn’t going to be enough, right? Despite the reach Dems never had among the MAGA base, no matter the Republican turn out, our side wouldn’t let us down like that, right?! Everyone was going to show up and vote, RIGHT?!

This is obviously my bargaining phase.

I had never been more motivated to fuck shit up politically than I was in 2024. After everything we had done with Eleven Films, from Midnight in Washington to The Dangerous Ones to Awaken Dawn, we were ready. Our digital Molotovs were locked and loaded. James was holding the lighter and I was ready to throw. Democrats had a fresh candidate that was young, vibrant, exciting. Kamala just emitted American Hope. Her entire energy was exactly what this country needed. It was apparent in her effect on The People. Everywhere she went, there were asses in the seats. Everywhere. Every rally. Every campaign stop. The excitement online was palpable. We were in Chicago for the DNC and the entire city was alive with hope. Every bar we wandered into had that uniquely-Chicago ribbon of Fuck You We Won’t Do What You Tell Us swirled with We’re About To Fuck Your Shit Up. You could see in everyone’s eyes who was posting about her from little accounts to influencers how much love was there. How much we empowered one another. We LOVED her. And she loved us. You could feel it. I noticed it everywhere I went. At the grocery store, everyone was starting to meet each other’s gaze. Say hello. A little banter over the avocados and it not being about the price. Our shoulders started to come down. We had that dare-we-let-it-in feeling of relief. That this motherfucking rotten orange nightmare was about to be over. Finally. We can put grandpa in the home with the other racists and homophobes where they can cheat at golf and we can go back to building our communities and healing.

WE ALL FELT IT. I KNOW YOU FELT IT.

I have rarely seen genuine love and respect in politicians. It’s in the eyes. I can count on one hand with a lot of room left over how many politicians I have met with love and respect in their eyes. It’s almost always power and control. Greed. That sharklike way they never stop looking for an in to exploit you to their advantage. And I get it, man. I know how this shit gets done. But in my experience, they have a hard time putting that aside. They have a hard time being genuine and real. I never saw that in Kamala. She’s calculated, sure. Every smart woman who knows her damn self is. But she is authentic. The warmth she has. The compassion and pity that went with that giggle when she laughed at Trump is something so beautifully human and I will never forget it as a woman. She proved that you can keep your humanity when you step into your power. She showed what it looked like when you take your responsibility to The People seriously. She was fully invested. Heart, mind, soul. And so were we. We knew in our guts this was historic. We knew we were going to rip fascism out by the root and never look back. Democrats were excited. The level of excitement when there is a Bill Clinton. A Barack Obama. A once-in-a-generation candidate. We were out there spreading the Democratic Spirit like it was Christmas and we were fucking Carolers. We were on every doorstep. Every social media platform. The Zoom calls were going viral. The social media posts were trending all day every day. Taylor got millions of us to register. All of us out there singing our parts in the choir. Republicans barely lifted a digital finger. All they did was shitpost and have their boy show up at a McDonald’s and a podcast.

I THOUGHT IT WAS ENOUGH.

And then I saw the numbers. North Carolina. Georgia. Pennsylvania. Michigan. Wisconsin. Nevada. Arizona.

Election night and the following days started to feel like some weird, sick takeover of the purest form of Democracy (warts and all) on the entire planet. The only planet. The planet that is in danger right now because of this small group of total assholes who just want to reign over it’s ashes from the tallest pile of money. It’s disgusting. Kamala was a Not-On-My-Watch kind of leader. Not a While-On-My-Watch kind of leader. You absolute fucking traitors. I DIGRESS.

I tend to be a realist when it comes to joy and excitement. They’re just too good and rare of emotions in my life that I don’t allow myself to walk around in them too often. It’s just too far to fall when you find out that what you were excited over or joyous about was bullshit. It’s just too much of a slap in the face to find out that what you believed in and trusted was absolute bullshit. That once again, people are bullshit. The people who said they saw what was happening, they understood that it must be stopped and they were ready to move on from this bloated piece of shit who was hellbent on allowing our adversaries to peek under our dress and pick our pockets? They’re bullshit. All they had to do was fucking vote. One time. And it was just too much effort. I should have known it wasn’t going to work out. But I trusted that there were more of us than Them. I believed people when they said they were going to vote. I didn’t even consider that Americans would keep entertaining fascism.

That is a My Bad.

My depression era of grief was extremely short-lived. One, it’s winter and I have to be careful not to get pulled down into the depths of despair when there are only 8 hours and 46 minutes of cloudy daylight in the Pacific Northwest. That is a recipe for a depression that will last until the summer and two, no one has time for that shit. I just cry in the walk-in like everybody else and then suck it up and get back to work. I sit with it from time to time, but I can’t wallow. Even though our efforts were not enough in 2024, it doesn’t mean we can quit. Rosa Parks can see you. James Baldwin can see you. So can Harvey Milk. And Cecile Richards. While I sit here and bitch about the one’s who didn’t show, I’m going to entertain the idea of never showing up again? With those absolute legends as my activist ancestors? FOH

This is how I know I will never reach the Acceptance phase of this grief. There is too much work to still do. This place is still worth the fight to me. The Constitution is worth it. The People are worth it. That’s what I love about being American. We don’t give up. We let the wall hit our backs, the blood hit our tongue. But that unique little ribbon of Fuck You I Won’t Do What You Tell Me is always there.