It Is Not Going to Feel How You Want It to Feel⁠↗

It doesn’t feel like shock, like 2016. It doesn’t really feel like rage. It feels like exhaustion soaked in national and personal grief, which is also a fitting description for the last eight months. “My head knew it would go like this,” the writer Seyward Darby tweeted this morning. “My heart—apparently—wanted something different. I am trying today to bridge the gap between those parts of myself.”

The sadness, to me, is that people looked around them in this moment, and said, this, I want more of this. Not wanting substantive change in this moment — whether in regards to the climate, racial and social injustice, widening inequality, or this fucking pandemic — feels incomprehensible. But there are millions out there who are scared of or outright hostile towards change, protective of what little they have, and resent the change scenario set forth by the left. If change means masks, if change means regulations, if change means giving up their place in the class and racial hierarchy, if change means less of something for them and theirs, they don’t want it.