Some Thoughts On Hope

My feelings are raw, but I can't say they're hurt... yet.

Recently, somebody asked me what I thought a present-day version of the Lena Dunham’s Girls would look like. For any reader who spent the last twenty years trapped in a very deep well — Girls, a dramedy that ran from 2012-2017, was about how four young women (old girls?) navigated their burgeoning adulthood as 20-something artistic types in Brooklyn, NY. (Note: if you did spend the last twenty years in a well, you may be offended by how cushy these bitches had it. They definitely weren’t collecting rain water in leaves and bottle caps just to stay alive, that’s for damn sure). When the show originally aired, I was five years older than its main characters, also living in Brooklyn and trying to be artistic (took guitar lessons, wore dresses over jeans), and frankly, I found their extended adolescence a little irritating. While I’d been tiptoeing up the professional ladder as I was raised to believe one should — get a job as a receptionist, get promoted to PA, then writers assistant, then… — these girls were hurdling themselves in the general direction of greatness with a blind faith akin to my two-year-old when he throws himself off his brother’s top bunk assuming I will catch him.

The micro-generational difference I failed to account for was that while I’d entered the workforce in 2005 during a time of economic abundance, these pretend ladies did the same in 2010, when the economy and the job market looked a lot different. For the well-dwelling readers, I’m talkin’ about a little something called The Great Recession, and it SUCKED! Turns out if you’re incredibly irresponsible with a SHIT TON of money, instead of just the wee little amount most of us can accumulate in a lifetime, the government’s totally got your back! In retrospect, it makes sense that these gals were striving to be writers, musicians, etc. with no eye toward incrementalism. According to Bob Dylan, who seems to be right about a lot of this stuff, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

Obviously, the women in Girls are fake people, but there happen to be real people who graduated in 2010, people that I actually know! And the shadow cast by The Great Recession has definitely left their worldview a little bit colder. (Cough cough MY HUSBAND cough cough). Many don’t trust institutions, some don’t expect to ever derive meaning from whatever work they do to survive, and while I’m obviously making a gross generalization, even their sense of humor seems a bit more ironic. It’s as if they don’t want to be caught hoping, like hope is a bruise that won’t heal. Still, they’re a pretty good time. In my marriage, for instance, every day is like a party at the end of world.

So back to the question at hand, what would a group of Girls look like now, and by now I mean literally, today? Like the micro-generation that came after me, these 20-something Zoomers were catapulted into adulthood at a real global low point. For the well-heads out there, I’m referring to the Covid 19 pandemic, and for about two years, you were better off in the well, so put that in your gratitude journal! This is probably the second election in which those crossing into adulthood in 2020 are eligible to vote, and everyone knows it doesn’t really count until your second time, (where my Nader 2000 bitches at?!). According to the internet — or as Zoomers might call it, home — while the 2020 pandemic isolated them, the George Floyd protests reawakened the young, and “pushed participation among 18-29 year-old Americans to record levels in 2020, with fifty percent voting in the presidential election, compared to 39 percent in 2016.” The article goes on to point out that the hopeful enthusiasm that propelled them to the polls didn’t pay off, in this particularly chilling paragraph:

The passion for social change that inspired so many to protest and vote was nearly rewarded with policies that promised to transform the lives of twenty-somethings, from student debt relief to climate change mitigation. But conservatives in Washington, from Senator Joe Manchin, who killed Biden’s signature social and environmental bill, Build Back Better, to the Supreme Court, which deemed Biden’s student debt forgiveness program illegal, largely blocked the president’s plans.

The pandemic robbed young people that brief, incredible time in life where you’re still young enough to be cared for, but old enough to be free. But they found the resilience to vote, to trust that the system that was failing them could be fixed if put in more capable hands. It seems like over the last four years, they’ve been robbed of that too.

I’m deeply worried that we haven’t given young people a good reason to be hopeful, that even when their youthful buoyancy transcends the manmade obstacles telling them to be cynical, we pummel them again with more greed, more corruption, more feckless administrations and empty political agendas. I’m worried that young people despair, because of all the ugliness they’ve been raised on. And here I am — like a fucking idiot! — plagued by an incurable sense of optimism despite the world constantly proving me wrong, mostly because of the year I was born. If that’s not proof enough that astrology is real, well folks, I just don’t know what to tell you.

As we all await the results of today’s election, I feel scared. But I don’t feel as scared as I did in 2016. Back then, the day after Trump won, I rode the train to work in the sweatpants I’d slept in, because nothing mattered anymore anyway, right? At the time, I wrote for The Daily Show. Trevor Noah had been hosting for a little over a year, and it must have felt strange for a young South African man, born during apartheid to a Black mother and a white father, to be tasked that day with consoling a bunch of mostly white, well-paid liberal writers that the world wasn’t ending because Donald Trump had been elected president. But that’s what he did. He assured us, trust me, I’ve seen worse. And he was right. It went as badly as expected, but we endured, through a pandemic, a political insurrection, like people do every day all over the world against all sorts of devastating odds. Regardless of today’s outcome, maybe the sheer fact that humans endure is enough to give people hope, no matter what year they were born. Here’s what I keep telling myself: whatever happens, I’m grateful to be alive. A lot of people aren’t, after all.