Thoughts on the party before the end

I got norovirus two days before Trumps’s second inauguration. In between the bouts of bone breaking gut expulsion that had me just repeating “no, no” in the weakest of whispers, hoping that maybe at some point my body would just faint and do all of this without me being conscious, I picked up my phone and held my face to the screen to unlock it. The first thing I saw was a message from a colleague saying that the mass deportations were expected to begin as soon as Tuesday. Another colleague said, should we start planning a mobilization to Chicago? I crawled back to the bathroom, over the towels I had strung along the cold floor and hovered over the toilet, begging my body to release whatever poison was inside of me, wondering if it was germs that did this or just the existential dread of the unimaginable reality that faced us in a matter of hours.

When I was a senior in high school there was a quote that was passed around, written in each other’s yearbooks, one that I’m sure the Altamont graduating class of 2001 wasn’t the first to claim as speaking for them and them alone - “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” When Winston Churchill said this in November 1942 he was marking a decisive moment of victory for England and the allies in World War II - not the end of the war, but a turning point, and a good one.

At every major milestone in my life I’ve questioned this - what was the beginning? When did the beginning end? It makes sense that we, a bunch of 18 year olds who were leaving their parents’ homes for the first time ever, most of us leaving not just Birmingham but Alabama and the South altogether, would think that marked the end of the beginning. But a couple of months later, into the great phase after the beginning, we watched as planes flew into the World Trade Centers and I thought nope, this is the end of beginning. Not, as in Churchill’s case, a positive turn. But the difference between before and after laid out so clearly and unequivocally, the idea that anything else could be the line in the sand felt silly. And then America re-elected George W Bush, and the clock reset again.

And then I moved to New York, got married, had a baby. At each time the idea that the beginning was over at just 18 years old seemed both sadder and sweeter. Yes, that milestone was, up until that point, the biggest and most monumental you had navigated yet. But it pales in comparison to this one. You hold a baby in your arms, one that you made and grew and pushed out of you? There is no more beginning after that. But then you do it again, have another baby, you’ve completed your family and now, surely, we can all agree that the beginning has come and gone. A few years after that you recognize that your marriage is over and you move upstairs to the guest room and that, for sure, now you know, is the end of the beginning.

No one I know can quite situate this moment. We had a clear narrative to hold on to in 2016 - this was the margin of error, we saw where we went wrong, everyone with any shred of sanity or compassion agrees. But this time is different. There isn’t one thread. Of course we all have our hot takes and our theories. We can see how the richest man on earth bought the disinformation machine and used it to startlingly effective success. We know how Democrats failed us, on Israel and TikTok and the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill. We can talk and talk about it but most of us are tired of talking. The people I know and have been working with for the past eight years and the past sixteen and the past twenty are tired. We can see where things went wrong this time and yet we also understand it’s entirely messier than any one theory can explain. We can read “Prequel” and understand that this has happened before, and yet also recognize that even Hitler wasn’t given an unlimited bank account and unfettered access to influence the minds of basically every human on earth. Reckoning with the truth of how bad this will be renders a lot of the conversation irrelevant. We don’t want to talk anymore; we just don’t want polio to come back, we don’t want more babies in Palestine to die, we don’t want our colleague’s mother to be deported, we don’t want the nonprofits that have held up the social fabric of this country to be shut down, we don’t want the constitution to be rewritten to invalidate elections, we don’t want a 12 year old to have to carry her rapist’s baby to term, we don’t want a trans kid to kill themselves, we don’t want Elon Musk to fund fascist candidates in every single House district in the country in 2026, we don’t want the promise of America to die.

Maybe this great and flawed beginning, this national beginning, is really ending. And maybe it needs to. We can see that so much needs to die but also recognize that the killing of it in order to make something better will have unutterably sad consequences. Because even if we can all agree this great American experiment is too flawed to continue as it is, the unmaking and remaking of it will increase human suffering in the meantime. What choice can we make?

A good friend turned 40 and had a birthday party the weekend after the election. Still reeling and in various stages of grief, but wanting something to distract us, we got dressed up and got babysitters and went to dance. When we walked in to the party the birthday hostess wrapped her arms around us and drunkenly, ebulliently said, “In here, Kamala won.” It was a titillating thought, a gift she so desperately wanted to offer us. Could we pretend for just a couple of hours, or was the pretending even sadder? There is nowhere Kamala won. Not in any alternate reality. This wasn’t a cosmic mistake. Trump was elected and he was going to be our president, again, this time with compliance from every corporate leader and talking head and Republican congressperson. We were done with resistance but no one had decided what we were supposed to do now. Refuse? Disobey? Defy?

I saw a friend near the DJ booth who is an active leader in the gun reform space. In between raising twins and working a full time job she goes to Trenton to advocate for common sense gun laws, works to pass a national assault weapons ban, organizes actions within our community, regularly shows up to protest and helps elect gun sense candidates. I walked up to her and shook my head, unsure, as we all were, of what to say.

“I know,” she said. “I just keep wondering, is this the party before the end?”

I’m not sure when in my life the beginning actually ended. And I’m not sure when America’s beginning ended either. But I know now that they are both over.

I haven’t heard much about what comes between the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. I wonder what Churchill would say happens then. But no matter where we are on that spectrum, one thing is for certain. This party - this mobilization to Chicago, this disinfecting my bathroom, this hugging my friend and dancing - is before the end.

It might not be the last party. We might not ever know when that one is.

But if we’re still here, it’s not over yet.