Election-Induced Existential Dread

November 3, 2020

I finally read On the Beach, the 1957 novel by Nevil Shute about the last people on earth waiting for the nuclear cloud to descend upon them. The novel was on my pandemic reading list, which consists or books that shouldn’t be relevant in 2020, but somehow are, like The Stand, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale. When I was in 7th grade, I was intrigued by On the Beach when it was offered in a book catalogue I was given at school, but it didn’t make my cut then—presumably I had maxed out my book allowance on Judy Blume books and other pre-teen fare.

Now having read the book decades later, I’m not sure why a book that evokes existential dread—the story of those last people in Australia biding their time waiting for the imminent nuclear cloud to kill them—interested me so much, or why it was even on a 7th grader’s book list in the first place. But unfortunately, the novel corresponds well with how I feel today, as the United States is faced with the prospect of fully becoming a fascist dictatorship.

Throughout most of On the Beach, the main characters pass their days going through their usual routines—going to work, planting flowers they won’t live to see, buying gifts for people who have already died—until death and sickness is imminent and they take the suicide pill that will end their misery. Because, what else could they really do?

I’m not a person who is prone to depression at all, and I’m not suicidal—neither were the characters in On the Beach. Should the bankrupt casino owner steal a second, democracy-killing term as President, I imagine my life will be more or less the same for a while. As a middle-aged, working white woman, the cloud won’t impact me as quickly as other groups—minorities, gays, people who are worse off than I am financially. I may get to live out another decade or two before things get too dire. But I can easily picture a future in which I need to decide whether to die with dignity by my own hand, or die penniless in a ditch, being kicked in the teeth and called a loser by an angry white thug in a red hat who has been brainwashed by the wealthy oligarchs who dictate Fox’s programming into believing that poorer people are the ones to blame for his own dismal economic situation.

Will it really get that bad? Hopefully not. After all, there are millions of people living in Russia and other dictatorships whose votes don’t mean anything, but who still get by. Presumably, they still have moments of happiness and joy as they live out their day-to-day lives, despite not having a say in how their government treats them. Throughout history, most successful dictators have had a knack for keeping people just under the brink of revolt—just fed and housed well enough not to want to risk giving up their relative comfort to fight for something more. No doubt the U.S. will be the same under a dictatorship. Until it’s not.

I wonder how many years will it take before the newly appointed handmaid on the Supreme Court—presumably then joined on the court by likeminded religious zealots—comes to take my house away, based on the deeply held religious belief that is an affront to god that I, a single woman, should own a house on my own. Maybe that sounds far-fetched and overblown. Hopefully it is. But I imagine that well-educated women in 1960s Afghanistan and in 1970s Iran likewise felt secure in their western clothing and lifestyles until the Taliban and the Iranian Revolution upended things for them.

Or will my descent into hopelessness begin with a medical condition? I’ve paid into work healthcare plans for nearly three decades at this point. Throughout my life, I’ve been fortunate enough to not have to need to use healthcare, but as I get older it becomes more and more inevitable. And, if the current regime cannot be cast out with today’s election, it’s likely that I won’t have healthcare when I desperately need it. In a purely capitalist system in which basic healthcare services are contingent upon current employment, I’m likely to be deprived of any benefits at a time when I’m not able to find work, despite decades and decades of paying into the system.

And how long will it take before all the money I’ve put into social security since I started working at 16 will be redistributed to the Koch family and similar oligarchs? In fairness to the serial sexual assaulter who is threatening to force himself onto an unwilling American population for a second term, I know that dismantling social security isn’t really HIS idea. I realize it’s a longstanding goal of the Republican Party. But until now, Republicans have been stopped from carrying out this goal by the popularity of Social Security, knowing that going after it would mean certain electoral defeat. But once there are no longer free and fair elections, what’s to stop them from taking social security away?

If this should happen, it’s not going to be any consolation to me that my relatives and former high-school classmates who supported the tax-cheating, serially bankrupt, draft-dodging, POW-insulting reality TV blowhard didn’t expect this fate to befall someone like me…that they only thought this would happen to those “lazy” others, or people who they thought somehow “deserved” it.

But today, at least for now, I’m still holding out a fearful kind of hope that democracy will prevail. I keep thinking of the scene in Game of Thrones when the Hound is about to take Arya to be reunited with her family. “You’re almost there,” he says. “And you’re afraid you won’t make it. The closer you get, the worse the fear gets.” I feel that fear now, and I expect that fear to intensify throughout the day and into the night..

In that season of Game of Thrones, Arya’s fear was tragically justified—she never got to see her family members who were slaughtered at the Red Wedding. But we’ve already gone through the Red Wedding here in the U.S.—that was election night 2016, back when our belief in common decency was used against us and led to our complacency and our shocking defeat. I hope that after four years of abuse and seeing just how corrupt and criminal and cruel this regime can be, we’re more like Arya at the end of the series. I hope that tonight and in the coming days, when the gods of fascism come for us, we’re able to say, “Not Today.”

This morning I took a walk on the beach. It seemed like a good way to pass the time. The existential dread was there, but also hope for a better future.