“Nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.” This sentence was tweeted in 2021 when the world was in the middle of a pandemic which was altering global politics, American culture and everyone’s lives. I was 14 when my school closed down in the middle of 8th grade, and my first year of high school was completely online for me. Despite that, I returned to school bright-eyed and hopeful, I did expect good things to happen.  

Now, over five years later, I am 19 and in the first quarter of my second year in college. I am not locked in my house, a pandemic isn’t killing people, and I am fully attending school in person. And yet, over the past 10 months, ever since Trump won the election a second time, that beginning quote rings more true to me than it ever did when it was originally written. I do not expect good things to happen ever again.  

I am wading through life without a future, I am so abysmally despaired about every headline and every bit of news that my eyes pass over. I have tried to ignore it but that makes my insides rot. I have never thought America was wonderful or exceptional or that its democracy was flawless and I have never been proud to be American specifically. But America is home, it is the only place I have ever really known. In only 10 months, a lot of things that have made me care about America have been destroyed. History has been rewritten or erased, the vast swath of cultures that live here are being tamped down and pushed out and our free speech is being restricted and punished. My father describes it as watching a car crash in slow motion, every day we wake up and hope to god there is not another story about someone being taken without trial, or a bill hasn’t been passed which erodes our governmental institutions and democracy falls again from its pedestal.  

America is the birthplace of revolution, and I mean many more than just the first one. I am referencing the Black Panthers, the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam Movement, the Stone Wall Rebellion, the Battle for Seattle, the Farmworker’s Movement and the Feminist Movement. All of these events are being erased; we are being watered down to an elementary school level of education. They are putting cloth over the children’s eyes so they can not move forward; how can you move forward when you don’t know the way you came? 

This might sound dramatic to you, and to be fair, it is. After all, I am not in the worst situation. I am a white cisgender woman but I am also queer and consider myself a leftist, two traits that are relatively easy to hide. Additionally, I have autistic traits but no formal diagnosis. I have citizenship in another country and it’s a three hour drive to the border of said country. I am also in a liberal state, and am a naturally born US citizen. I am not in immediate danger. But it is not the present I fear, but the future. So the poem goes, “first they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a communist…”  

The parallels between current Trump America and Nazi Germany are incredibly terrifying and so much matches up to the point that saying “history is repeating itself” is not a metaphor anymore. Germans stood next to signs pointing out concentration camps and took pictures, as Americans do now with Alligator Alcatraz. The government is considering giving an award to women who have 6 or more children, which the Third Reich also implemented. The only thing missing from Alligator Alcatraz, thankfully, is the gas chambers for mass killings. It is terrible that I am thankful that the concentration camp made within my country does not have a gas chamber which can easily kill hundreds.  

It took the Nazis six years to create a totalitarian state, and another six to kill 11 million people. Right now, America is the Nazis on speed. They have made a concentration camp for immigrants. They skipped the ghettos and went straight to the camps. They dismantled due process immediately and have started to turn ICE into SS soldiers. It has only been 10 months.  

I proposed to my girlfriend at the end of my senior year of high school, not because I wanted to start planning a wedding, but because I wanted an excuse to give her a pretty ring. We were not planning on getting married for another seven years, after all we were both just 18 and fresh out of high school. However, I have moved marriage plans to my girlfriend (technically fiancee) up by five years, she is trans and has a formal autism diagnosis. Rhetoric around autism has changed towards eugenics, and trans people have been casted as public enemy #2, after immigrants of course. If they come for her, she has a better chance of fleeing to Canada and staying there if she is married to a Canadian citizen. This is the only thing I can do to protect her.  

This hopelessness I feel makes me think of all the history I know, all the atrocities and life ending events that have transpired. Was Rome this aware of their own downfall? How did the Jewish people and Romani people and communists and radicals feel about Hitler’s election? Did they think it was the end of everything they loved? Or did that not hit them until their property was seized and they were sent to the ghettos and forced into labor? Did they think of a future? Did they hope?  

What was the point of life in the times when children were stolen from their beds and shipped across the ocean to become property? What hope was there when your bodily autonomy was stripped away from you, when you could not choose who to marry, when you could not choose when to have children or whose they may be? 

Our world is boiling, both figuratively and literally. It feels as if we are reaching the end of history. Can our technology go further? Should it go further? Is AI the beginning of the end? Did people feel that way about nukes? Did the Japanese feel that way when 110,000 to 220,000 of their countrymen were eviscerated within seconds? Will my life be fruitless? Will I toil and sweat trying to do something good just to die in a camp? Just to die from heatstroke due to the accelerated heat death of the world? Will I be remembered or just be put upon a list of hundreds who died due to fascism’s greed and the rich’s wars? How many names will be put upon a list of death before there is no one left to write the list?  

I have realized that I have been going through the stages of grief after this election. I was in denial, where I vehemently hoped our institutions and democracy could hold back a demiegorgon and his cronies for four years. I have reached depression, as this essay attests to. I would like to get to rage now. I would like to be pissed off, have the energy to scream and yell and fight. To spend hours writing, researching, creating wonderfully crafted arguments about social issues that matter to me. I used to do that. I used to love to do that. Now I feel as if there is no point. There is a bigger fish to fry.  

While I have been bemoaning about the hopelessness of the future, there are some facts that may bring comfort. America is not Germany. We are larger, with stronger federal protections, we have a much larger and diverse cultural makeup, our path may diverge from history. In environmentalism, America is falling behind but other countries are catching up and making leaps and bounds towards a healthier planet. We may not fall victim to full fascism, we may beat them before the camps are made and before our democracy is fully dismantled.  

I may not have to make that three hour drive across the border. Maybe in five years I will have a wedding, a real one, and it will not have to be because I am protecting someone I love. Maybe we will survive, and in 100 years, we are still here and all of this will be ink within a history book. Something for people to learn, something to ponder and imagine. In four years, we might get out of this and heal. Really heal. Maybe we’ll look at this disaster and look to see where we can change, where we need to change. Maybe something good might happen.