I Can’t Be A Pessimist Because I Am Alive

Besides anger and hatred and sadness and overwhelming respect, the feeling that hits me hardest when I watch documentaries or read books about Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement is thankfulness. 

I am of course thankful for those who have fought injustice wherever it stood (and still do today), enduring pain and torment and death. They are unquestionably the protagonists in the dark story of America. I'm also thankful (and relieved) the heroes who led the various iterations of the movement for human rights in America – along with their behind-the-scenes lieutenants and everyone who risked their lives to fight for themselves and each other – did not have a sufficiently stable WiFi connection and access to social media algorithms controlled by those who hate them.

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They would have been told constantly by the magic machines in their pockets to believe their righteous cause was lost, over, done, that their efforts would amount to nothing, that they could not overcome the Leviathan of white supremacy in a nation founded on the subjugation of anyone who was not satisfactorily white. 

Those who fought a seemingly hopeless fight against entrenched racist interests in government, in academia, in business, and everywhere else might have believed that insidious little message being pumped into their brains six or eight or twelve hours a day, every day, and they might have given up. They might have heard the siren song of their social media timelines and listened closely to what their enemies had to say. Ingesting that online toxin, they may have conceded to those who needed them to believe there was no point in fighting anymore, and the United States would be a far less free and fair place because of it (this isn't to say Civil Rights activists did not hear from their haters – they certainly did – just that there was no mechanized internet-based brainwashing weapon against their cause).

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Thank God America’s Civil Rights icons could not get online. They may have seen the Kalshi odds that the Civil Rights Act would pass, closed their laptop, and gotten on with their everyday lives. They might have seen the New York Times’ analytics guys analyzing polls showing white Americans were just not into the Voting Rights Act, and would rather the government focus on lowering the price of eggs. Make eggs a little more affordable, NYT polling says, and universal voting rights might be bumped up white folks’ list of priorities. The analytics of popularism demands it.

I was watching the 2016 James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, when – near the very end – Baldwin offered a line that burrowed in my brain, like so many of his prose. Baldwin’s words need to be heard by a contemporary audience being told every day – by politicians, by media outlets, by grifty influencers left and right, by each other – that Better Things Aren’t Possible. 

"I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive," Baldwin said when asked about whether Black Americans had seen their cause progress, and whether he was optimistic about the future for Black people in the United States. "To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I'm forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."

What would have happened if Civil Rights organizers and leaders had given into the idea that Better Things Aren't Possible? How much worse would the world be today? They seemed to understand in their marrow that life was not, in fact, academic, and that they had agency the same way their tormenters had agency.

As someone who spends entirely too much time online telling my dopamine receptors to pick themselves off the floor and keep producing the Good Stuff, I immediately thought of all the well-meaning folks I've encountered on social media during the Trump era who witness the horrors of competitive authoritarianism in their hourly doomscroll and say with grating confidence that there is nothing to be done, and that nothing will ever be done to address this or that injustice, this or that constitutional or human rights violation. Only the bad guys have agency, they say. We do not.

These folks have already conceded the future to a fascist project that cannot exist – that cannot stand up beneath the weight of its lies – without its opponents giving in and believing it is inevitable. It is a kind of learned helplessness that breeds nihilism within those whose strongest instinct is to preserve themselves against the potential letdown of hope.

That nihilism seeps into every part of your life: What, you might ask, is the point of any of this? How, you ask, can I possibly be optimistic? And Baldwin has your answer: Because you are alive. You are fucking alive right here, right the fuck now with those you love and those you hate and with me and those I love and hate, and with everyone reading this little blog. You are me and I am you, whether you like it or not, and we are in this thing – whatever it is – together, today, now.

When you log on and say there's simply nothing that can be done about any of these crimes against humanity and the tearing apart of the United States, you are (mostly) protecting yourself because you believe you can't live through another disappointment. You can't endure another letdown in the fight against fascism or tyranny or authoritarianism or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes you think back to election night 2016 and that godforsaken New York Times election needle and your stomach lurches and you want to throw up. Your overactive mind drifts back to election night 2024 and you remember sitting alone, overcome by disbelief that an actual, real-life insurrectionist had easily swept back into power. Maybe you're there all the time, trapped in that moment of darkness.

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Believing you can't take this anymore, you don the armor of nihilism, which feels good because you no longer have to care. Human life, you have decided, is an academic matter. Everything has already been decided. There's no point in opposing the bad guys because Nothing Matters. What a relief this is, you think, ignoring the emptiness that grows within you every time you put on a new piece of nihilist armor.

You're ignoring what's happening around you. If you, like me, are of a certain age, you have grown up with an utterly feckless Democratic Party beholden to the moral blackhole of capital unlike any party on earth besides our other major political party. So you have written off the Democrats completely. In your mind they are the same today as they were twenty or thirty years ago. You have decided there is no hope for whatever comes after Trump.

There is truth to that, of course. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are still operating as if it's 1999. Tim Walz and Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith are posting online like political bloggers while their state is occupied by the president's personal military. Someone should do something about all this fascism, the useless Minnesota leadership said in one voice during the occupation.

There are seeds of increasing feistiness among elected Democrats and those running for office in 2026. There's Juliana Stratton, running for Senate in Illinois, saying she is "not scared of a wannabe dictator" and pledging to "hold Trump accountable for the crimes he's committed" while abolishing his private paramilitary. Stratton's campaign ad ("Fuck Trump") is a nice departure from the Tim Walzes of the world. There's Bad Faith Times favorite Alex Rikleen, running for Senate in Massachusetts with a clear-eyed vision of reforming the corrupted, anti-democracy Supreme Court.

Then there's House Representative Delia Ramirez, who recently did a barnburner of an interview with The Handbasket's Marisa Cabas and laid into regime officials during last week's congressional hearing on the invasion and occupation of Minnesota.

Ramirez pulled exactly zero punches during the hearing. She (accurately) drew historical parallels between the Ku Klux Klan and ICE – "I have no respect for the inheritors of the Klan hood and the slave patrol" – and promised to one day – soon – prosecute those who have committed crimes against the American people.

Oh, you say, placing another piece of armor across your chest, you are mistaken. All of these criminals will be pardoned and there's nothing anyone can do about it. It's already done, in fact. It's an academic matter. Oh, you say, Democrats will simply move on the way they did after the crimes of the George W. Bush administration. Better things, you inform Ramirez, are not possible.

On a basic level you are doing the fascists' jobs for them.

Along with other (mostly young folks) running for office to deliver justice in a time of rampant injustice, Ramirez won't hear any of that. Because for someone like Ramirez or Stratton, human life is not an academic matter.

"The day of accountability will come," Ramirez said, alive and optimistic. "The power of the people is stronger than the weapons they would yield against us."

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.