Hanging on the Edge of Tomorrow
Scattered thoughts about suicide, Power Rangers, and fighting forward into a not-so-brave new world.
NB: No, this one isn’t a note, either.
It is Sunday, November 20th, 2022.
It’s been just under a year since you publicly revealed, at great length and in some detail, your struggles with depression and suicidal ideation.
You are still, to use a euphemism so vague that it is virtually meaningless, not in a good place.
There’s a lot that’s gotten better on paper, starting with a staggered quartet of Fauci ouchies into your left bicep. You’re living in a new spot with an old friend, and you’ve settled into a good groove with going to work and working out. Writing is the odd ‘W’ out, but you suppose that’s the price to be paid for gainful full-time employment and a steady running regimen that’s only slightly undercut by your reliance on the occasional two-pack of emotional support peanut butter cups. Your consistently updated calendar of future nerdy miscellanea to look forward to has consistently borne particularly juicy fruit so far this year. And wahey — you passed the bar exam! First try, too! Barely, sure, but it still counts! Now all you’ve got to do is get around to figuring out who you’re going to ask to fill out all those pesky forms on your behalf to attest to your good moral character, and then you can finally call yourself a proper lawyer.
(You think back to how long it took you to work up the nerve to ask for letters of recommendation to apply to law school in the first place.)
(You begin to suspect you will never be able to call yourself a proper lawyer.)
But even if you aren’t really writing that much these days, you are still, at your core, a writer. And as a writer, you know as well as anyone that the things that are completely true on paper can be the setup to some of the most insidious falsehoods imaginable, because of the implication that they are telling the full story.
The truer words never get spoken.
And the truer words are that you’re still unsteady — maybe not as unsteady as you’ve ever been, but more than you expected to be by this point.
Somehow, that feels worse.
But on this morning, none of that really matters. Because a new Pokémon game just dropped two days ago, and even at your shakiest, there has never been a time when a new Pokémon game can’t bring a smile to your face. Just as X managed to stitch together the wounds of a recently ruptured relationship, just as Sun shone a light after the 2016 election, just as Sword sliced through the malaise of your second year of law school, so does Violet chase away the blues that have nipping at your heels for as long as you can remember. For a few blissful moments, you’re just a kid on an adventure with six new friends at your side, taking on all comers and beating them down on your way to becoming the very best, like no one ever was.
The illusion breaks when someone texts you. Yet far from being annoyed, you’re happy to see it. The texter isn’t just one of your best friends; the relationship you have with him is one of the very few that not only survived the pandemic, but actually strengthened over the course of it. For him, you’ll happily step back into the real world for a second…
…until you see what he’s texted you.
You love this man like a brother. And you have not been shy about saying so, publicly or privately — if anything, the pandemic has reinforced the importance of letting him know just how much his continued presence in your life means to you.
But man, these are the moments — the only real ones, frankly, as you’ve since learned to accept that your boy just takes better selfies than you — that you genuinely dread about talking to him. And you haven’t been shy about telling him that either. Because the dude’s become something of a celebrity psychopomp; if someone famous dies, especially someone whose fame held special meaning to the two of you in any one of the million nerdy ways that bind your friendship together, odds are that you’re going to learn about it through him. And all he typically needs to do is just text their name.
So when he asks if you’ve heard about Jason David Frank — and you haven’t — you are already fairly certain that you know exactly what it is that you haven’t heard. You hope that you’re wrong, but a quick doom-Google confirms it. Whether you liked him best in green or white, in red or black, the reality is the same. Just shy of his fiftieth birthday, the greatest Power Ranger of all time has fallen.
Or at least, his actor has. To someone like you, there really isn’t much of a difference.
As much his death hurts, the losses of recent years have primed you to put it into perspective fairly quickly. Death is often untimely, unexpected, and unfair, but it’s also unavoidable. So as the sting fades to an ache, you’ll default to your usual fallback of black comedy, joking that on the heels of a movie memorializing Chadwick Boseman’s most iconic role and the passing of Kevin Conroy, learning that Jason David Frank has died feels like the cold open to a dark crossover story, in which some nefarious fiend begins hunting down the greatest heroes in fiction. First the Black Panther, then the Batman, and now that most Powerful of Rangers — you don’t know who’s next, but you don’t want to find out.
In the coming days, you’ll find yourself wishing that the joke was true.
Because learning that Jason David Frank is dead is one thing. Finding out that all your favorite fictional worlds were real, and that a homicidal villain could traverse their boundaries to eliminate their champions would be another — and terrifying, to be certain! But that would still leave Buttercup Utonium, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Garrus Vakarian with a fully upgraded M-90 Indra sniper rifle on the table to lead an unlikely alliance of side characters to strike back. Shoot, Garrus could probably solo that one.
Learning that Jason David Frank is dead because he ended his own life? That’s something else entirely.
When those final terrible details come to light, you can feel a chill icier than anything you’ve ever felt settle over your soul. It is the apotheosis of everything your personal demon has ever hissed in your mind since you were nine, the final form of every doubt and fear that has ever plagued your psyche. It is a mic drop delivered through a megaphone, a finishing move beyond a losing Mortal Kombatant’s worst nightmare. For the first time ever, your own self-inflicted demise doesn’t feel like a possibility.
It feels like a certainty.
Not today, of course. It can’t be today; you’ve got a new Pokémon game after all, and it’s not gonna just beat itself. And not tomorrow or the days after that, there’s other serious business to address. Like the postgame content of that new Pokémon game, for instance.
But you’re no longer worried if the day might come. You’re just wondering when it will.
In the months ahead, you’ll keep kicking the day down the road, with all the inartful force of the left-back you’ve defaulted to playing on the pitch since you were a kid. You’ll start doing meditations and breathing exercises. You’ll find a new therapist. You’ll dabble in yoga. You’ll go on long walks where you allow yourself to get lost. You’ll throw yourself headlong into new hobbies that you never would’ve dreamed of trying prior to the Airborne Toxic Event of 2020–21. You’ll journal. You’ll start playing soccer again. You’ll hoop more, too. You’ll run farther, if not necessarily faster. You’ll keep tabs on the people from your past who you know have battled the same demons, so that you’re ready to jump in and make a save if the warning signs start flashing. You’ll try (a little) to make new friends, you’ll try (a fair amount) to reconnect with old friends, you’ll try (as though your life depends on it, because it’s lowkey looking like it just might at this point) to hold on to the friends you already have.
Your results vary. Wildly. Some of them outright backfire.
But even on your best days, sometimes you’ll still hear your demon whispering a question into your ear, a question that leaves you in a position you so rarely find yourself — indeed, a position that your reputation would suggest that you simply cannot be found.
Because when it asks you, “Yo, if Tommy Oliver couldn’t make it, do you really think you stand a chance?” — you are speechless.
And to properly explain why those fifteen words are so effective at shutting you down, your explanation can’t just be true; it has to be honest. And you will have to drop the emotional crutch you’ve been leaning on since 2018, the gimmick you’ve thrown into your writing where you only let yourself be vulnerable if you write in the second person. To do it justice, you can’t continue to hide behind the word ‘you,’ to put the onus on the reader to shoulder your burdens because you don’t want to own them.
So, I’m going to stop now.
And I’m going to tell you two things that you need to know to really understand me.
Or, at the very least, to begin to understand me. Multitudes, and all that.
The first is that I’m a dork. I always have been, I always will be, and the amount of minutiae I’ve squirreled away about various fictional universes at this point is frankly ludicrous.
I’m the kind of person who can rattle off over a hundred playable characters from the Fire Emblem games without losing a breath, who can recite specific lines from Avatar: The Last Airbender verbatim without misquoting a single word. There are hip-hop icons that I’m more familiar with as fighters from Def Jam: Vendetta than I’ve ever been with as rappers — assuming, of course, that I’m not even more familiar with their stoner comedy stylings. Even when it comes to the things I get into only because they’re part of the broader cultural conversation, I’m the person who throws himself headfirst into the lore and then gets way too invested — ask the poor souls who had to put up with my fevered rants about the tactical idiocy of the defenders’ gameplan during the Battle of Winterfell opening up with a light cavalry charge away from a fortified defensive position into the darkness against A NUMERICALLY SUPERIOR FORCE *THAT IS LITERALLY INCAPABLE OF FEELING FEAR.*
*breathes deeply*
The second thing you need to know is that while I am an all-encompassing dork, my first realm is still Power Rangers. That kickass opening theme, the sleekness of the Rangers’ suits juxtaposed against the rubbery hilarity of the monsters’, the hyper-stylized poses and choreography, the overwrought dialogue and dubbing, the unnecessary pyrotechnics, Rita Repulsa’s legendary work ethic, my prepubescent realization that the Pink Ranger was beauty incarnate, cooties be damned— all of it. My choices in wristwear are directly inspired by the Rangers’ communicators from the show, as is the text notification tone I’ve been using for over a dozen years. And to this day, I’ve made a point of watching at least one episode of every new season since the first, just in case.
(Shoutout to RPM. Damn.)
And as a Power Rangers fan, there was no hero greater than Dr. Thomas Oliver. None.
To be clear, Tommy wasn’t my favorite ranger — I’ll save that discussion for a future essay. But he was unquestionably the best ranger. He was a walking dub, the one who showed up and could save the day with his presence alone. The one that, much like Oddjob in Goldeneye or the KD-era Golden State Warriors in 2K, that you weren’t allowed to pretend to be when playing with your friends, because it was universally understood to be a wildly unfair advantage (and also you didn’t want it to be misinterpreted as an admission of feelings for whatever girl was pretending to be the Pink Ranger, heaven forbid). Even when I fancied myself beyond the franchise’s appeal at the ripe old age of eleven, it sucked me right back in during the Dino Thunder season for the simple reason that Tommy was returning as a main character that year. He was Michael Jordan, Jesus, Goku, Goldberg, Charizard, Superman, and Neo all wrapped in one ponytailed package. Tommy Oliver wasn’t a hero. He was the hero.
Inevitable. Inimitable.
Invulnerable.
I know this may be silly to read. I assure you, on the starboard side of thirty, it’s even sillier to write. Actors, no matter how well they play a role, are not their characters — and the dangers that can arise when more rabid fans fail to draw the line between the two are well-documented. Jason David Frank was a lot of things: an actor, a producer, a genuinely talented martial artist. A friend, a fanboy, a fixture, an icon. A husband, a son, a father, a brother. But he wasn’t Tommy Oliver, not really. Because Tommy Oliver wasn’t a real person to be.
…but wasn’t he?
Isn’t there a reason why Potterheads, no matter how they may feel about J.K. Rowling these days, still gather to raise their wands in tribute every time a veteran actor from the movies passes beyond the veil — after all this time, always? Isn’t there a reason why fully-grown adults will still throw out their voices cheering the faces of professional wrestling, even when they fully know that most of what they see in the ring and hear on the mic has been scripted and rehearsed? Isn’t there a reason why, umpteen paragraphs ago, I referred to the late Kevin Conroy as *the* Batman, out of all the other actors who could’ve laid claim to that title? Why we reread our favorite books, rewatch our favorite movies, replay our favorite games in the exact same way each time? Why what we dress up as for Halloween often says as much about us as whether we do it at all? Look, heartbreak doesn’t feel good anywhere — fight me, Nicole, I defy you — but when that pre-show AMC ad says that our heroes “feel like the best part of us,” isn’t that true? Would the Thursday night theater crowds have popped as hard as they did when Steve lifted Mjölnir or when Rey summoned Anakin’s lightsaber, when Diana walked across No Man’s Land or when Andrew and Tobey crossed into the MCU if it wasn’t? As old as I am and as mature as I have to pretend to be as a result, is it really so silly to cling to the memory of the Green/White/Red/Red II: Electric Boogaloo/Black Ranger?
Well, yes.
Yes, it is! It’s very silly.
But in a world where it seems like all of my real-life heroes seem intent on disappointing me in increasingly worse ways, maybe that’s as good as I can hope for anymore. Maybe you need to believe in something, in someone, that you know is fake to deal with the things that are all too real. Maybe the only way to do anything even slightly decent, let alone heroic, is to accept the truth that heroes don’t really exist, which is what makes their paradoxical emergences and timely arrivals so impactful. And if you’re going to be holding out for a hero anyway, then hey, why not hold out for the one who was as fresh from the fight as anyone else?
Because where anyone else might fall or fail, Tommy Oliver didn’t. When every other battlefront might get pushed back, Tommy was there to hold the line. No matter how Big or Bad a Big Bad might believe themselves to be, to step up to a battlefield where Dr. O was on the other side was to court death — no matter what color he was rocking. I’m never going to be able to duel Lord Zedd to a standstill or lead an alliance of former Red Rangers to prevent the return of the Machine Empire. And even if I’d tried, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to take on an MIT dissertation committee to get a doctorate in paleontology only seven years after graduating high school — at least, not without a sword.
(…huh. Is that how he did it? Lot of non-combat utility for an enchanted talking sword, now that I think about it.)
Point being — demonic overlords, planet-busting battleships, Cambridge academia: I could leave all of that to the real hero, even if the hero wasn’t real. And if he could handle those threats, then I could handle the small-scale stuff. Things like employment, shifting social dynamics, and speaking out against protofascist movements in the United States that barely anybody seems to take seriously until the bodies start dropping. Maybe the occasional Putty Patroller if one slipped through the cracks.
Oh, and that trivial little matter of wanting to stay alive.
I know that this isn’t just a potentially inappropriate way to talk about suicide in general, it’s also an incredibly unfair way to talk about the specifically suicidal, especially after they’re gone. I might’ve known a lot about Tommy Oliver, but I didn’t and don’t know a damn thing about Jason David Frank beyond his public persona. However much or little overlap that there might’ve been, his demons were not mine, and my demons aren’t his. It wasn’t his job to stick around for the sake of inspiring a bespectacled dork who watched him on TV in the ‘90s, and then again for one year in the 2000s, and whatever does or doesn’t happen to me isn’t on him. Tommy Oliver might’ve been my hero, but it wasn’t Jason David Frank’s responsibility to save me. If there’s one thing I’ve really learned to despise about being publicly suicidal — other than myself, amirite — it’s the way that my life is constantly measured by the invisible effects it had, has, or might one day have on the people I’d leave behind if I decided to go. It’s almost as though you feel like it doesn’t have any intrinsic value of its own, and by describing it in terms of its impact on others, those well-intentioned people are indirectly proving the point your brain has been making all al —
…I’m doing the second person thing again, huh? Sorry.
But the thing about having my existence be a walking contradiction, about continuing to live a life in which I spend more days than not unsure if I want to keep living, is that I’ve become weirdly attuned to the other absurdities in the world around me when it comes to the big S-bomb. And just as some of those absurdities only serve to destabilize me further, like the way that it’s almost always the people who’ve most loudly encouraged emotional vulnerability that inevitably end up targeting my weak spots, it’s also the supposedly inappropriate ways that We Are Not Supposed to Talk About Suicide that have kept me the steadiest.
Maybe it is something we need to joke about. Maybe it is something we need to see the aftermath of in the unfiltered anger of those left behind. Maybe it is something we need to see acknowledged more openly and honestly on screens both silver and small.
Or maybe it’s none of those things. Maybe the things that keep each of us tethered are as unpredictable as the things that make us want to leave, and as unique as the people struggling to stick around. Maybe it’s their children. Maybe it’s playing chess. And maybe it’s a lodestar kicking ass in various shades of spandex to tie it all together, however fictitious.
Maybe I’m the only person on the planet who needed that, but I did. I needed Tommy Oliver, even when I’d thought I’d grown past him. And I needed the man who kept coming back, year after year, to breathe life back into the memory, one exuberant hi-yah at a time. That’s why the truth of JDF’s death hit me so hard, as much as any death of a public figure before or since, self-inflicted or otherwise. How do I — whose greatest talents lie in amateur Smash Bros. battle royales and physically painful puns — beat an enemy that the greatest hero in the world didn’t, even if I didn’t know he was fighting it too until after the dust had settled? If JDF is gone, if Tommy is gone, who’s left to believe in? What’s left to hope for?
What does it all matter anymore, assuming any of it ever did?
I’ve spent a lot of time looking for an answer to that question in the past two years. I never really found one that satisfied me, and accordingly, I never really found one that I thought was worth writing about. This essay has sat unfinished in a Word doc in all that time, more a scattered collection of sentence fragments and hyperlinks bouncing around from folder to folder than anything resembling coherence — as far as a writer who routinely clears the two-thousand-word mark is ever coherent. Despite revisiting it off and on, this was yet another piece that part of me suspected I would never finish.
Then Something Bad (ft. Dr. Dillamond), as they seemingly do with increasing frequency these days, happened.
As unexpectedly painful a hit as any I’ve taken in recent years, and one that only got worse as the days bled into weeks and months. Despite trying to push away the reality of what had gone down, it kept sneaking up on me in ways I was never able to predict or protect against. So I decided that I needed to find the answer that’d been eluding me since JDF’s death, or that I wouldn’t be able to keep going, that the darkness creeping in at the edges of my vision would end up blinding me forever. And knowing all too well that wiser people than I had lived and died without ever finding an answer to the question of What It All Mattered, I contented myself with aiming considerably lower: what it all mattered to me. Specifically, what it meant to have been a Power Rangers fan, what it meant to have had heroes at all, and what it meant to have held Tommy Oliver atop that pantheon for so long.
A few answers came to my mind pretty quickly. That reminders of the person you used to be will almost always cause you to wince in embarrassment, but you can still have a laugh about it looking back. That while you can’t really earn forgiveness, you can work for redemption. That your worst enemy will always be yourself. And that even when you’ve seemingly lost the things that matter most, it isn’t impossible to get them back, however briefly.
But none of these would-be epiphanies were new, even if the context of extrapolating them from an eidetic recall of a fictional character’s biography was. Not only that, but they all seemed unbearably retrospective, in a moment when I needed to find something worth focusing on in the opposite direction. I couldn’t find a way to tie them all together, Loki-style, into a new forward-facing ethos.
And then, one night, I cracked it.
Naturally, I found the key in another joke.
To understand that joke, here’s a third thing it might help you to know about me: I am not a particularly stylish person. I recently traumatized a barber by telling him that I hope I naturally go bald so that I’d never have to worry about a hair care routine again, almost as badly as I once traumatized a classmate (whose own hair would make a Disney animator weep in envy) by telling her that I used 3-in-1 as part of said routine. On the rare occasion that I bother buying new shoes, my top priority is mostly accounting for the fact that my feet are slightly different sizes, and I cannot begin to describe how much it hurts that I cannot, in good conscience, seize this golden opportunity to say that it’s my “sole” priority. Everything else from the forehead down and feet up just needs to fit and be clean, and that’s typically enough to stay in the clothing rotation — and in a pinch, “fit” is fungible. Someone once asked me, completely seriously, what philosophy guides my fashion choices. I responded with the following, with as much seriousness as I thought the question merited — which is to say, none.
“If my outfit doesn’t let me fight, run, dance, sleep, play basketball, or hint at what color Power Ranger I’d transform into, then it’s not a good outfit.”
As philosophies go, even a facetious one cobbled together on the fly, it’s not a great one. Setting aside the absurdity of the sixth stipulation, if you routinely find yourself in situations where you have to unexpectedly fight, run, sleep, or hoop without preparation, then you have much bigger problems to worry about. But as someone who defaults to zip-up hoodies, loose jeans, and sneakers, it’s not necessarily an inaccurate one. And as to the “what color” bit, suffice it to say that if I were to wake up and find all my red, blue, and black clothes missing one day, I might never go outside again.
So I’ve kept making the joke over the years, often unprompted. And when someone recently bemoaned their difficulty in finding a pink dress that didn’t clash with their skin tone — a concern that might as well have been expressed in encrypted Aramaic for as little sense as it made to me — the joke came back out. I made it six words in before stumbling over the seventh.
“If your outfit doesn’t let you fight — ”
And just like that, everything fell into place, despite my chaos-addled and complexity-addicted mind rebelling against it at first.
…no.
That can’t be it, can it?
Was it really that simple?
Yeah. It was.
Power Rangers is often described as a superhero show, and as a certified Superhero Dork™, I suppose it’s hard to push back against that description. The main characters have secret identities, a hideout, an origin story, wear brightly colored costumes, have access to incredible powers and technology, fight hideous monsters on a weekly basis, and face off against villains bent on world domination or destruction. But something about the label never really rang true to me, in the same way that it does for the Avengers or the X-Men, that it does for the Justice League or the Teen Titans. Despite ticking off every box and then some, I never thought of the Rangers as superheroes.
I thought of them as fighters.
That may seem like an arbitrary distinction, and maybe it’s just a function of the time in which the show premiered. But to a ‘90s kid, when the Rangers were at the peak of their popularity, it means a world of difference. Because while that was a decade where superheroes were very much part of the zeitgeist, including what remain the definitive versions of Batman and the X-Men for many, it was also the era when you couldn’t breathe without getting a contact high from martial arts media. It’s the decade that Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and Street Fighter II hit arcades. That’s the decade that saw kids quoting Rush Hour and imitating The Matrix, years before we probably should’ve seen either. That was the era of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 3 Ninjas, Surf Ninjas, Beverly Hills Ninja, and if you’re starting to pick up on a theme here, I can assure you that we loved our ninjas in the nineties. After all, you can’t spell nin — nope, that joke doesn’t work, does it? Moving on.
Despite the overlap, and the hundreds of hours of fun you can have crossing them over, I never saw superheroes and fighters the same way. In my eyes, the former was created by circumstance, the latter by choice. Spider-Man was bitten. Iron Man was built. Wonder Woman was born. Batman was traumatized at an early age and trapped in a mental prison of his own making, much like many of the unfortunate members of his rogues gallery and extended family. With a few scattered exceptions, a hero is something you either are from the jump or that fate forged you into, and that you ran with from there.
But a fighter? A fighter was something you chose to be. A hero was someone you watched and clapped for from the sidelines, but a fighter was something you — yes, you, ’90s child watching this on VHS — could become. Whether or not you actually did was all on you.
That’s how it went for the Rangers, at least in the original series. Jason (Red) and Trini (Yellow) were martial artists. Zack (Black) was a dancer who created his own fighting style, the painfully named hip-hopkido. Kimberly (Pink) wasn’t a fighter per se, but she was a trained gymnast, and fully capable of throwing hands when necessary. Even Billy (Blue), the stereotypical nerd who had to rely on Jason and Trini to protect him, was secretly jacked in real life, with his actor needing to disguise his own gymnast’s physique to sell the character.
While each season of the show famously reuses footage and costumes from its Japanese counterpart, the American footage of the Rangers unmorphed was all new, and a lot of the stunt work was performed by the five primary actors. And when Tommy joined the cast, you can bet that Jason David Frank performed many of his own stunts too. While their morphed forms made them more formidable, each of them was already a budding badass in their own right. And as the show made clear time and time again, even when stripped of their powers, their weapons, or their technology, the Rangers could and would still fight on.
They had to. Because week after week, year after year, the monsters kept coming. The Earth was always in danger. The day never stayed saved. The threats only got worse, and the new tech to stand against them would inevitably falter, setting off a scramble for a new power source — and conveniently, a new toy line. Small wonder that (the unsafe and downright abusive real-world circumstances behind much of the cast’s departure aggressively notwithstanding) the characters would inevitably tap out.
And small wonder that I, that every Ranger fan, gravitated towards the guy who kept coming back to keep fighting, over and over again. It was in this epiphany that I found my center, and that I found something worth writing about, resulting in the behemoth before you now.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if the people you fight with, the people you grow to love and cherish, stick around to the end. Because the day’s always around the corner when you’re going to look up and they’re going to be gone. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if the people you fight for stick around either, because they’re just as likely to vanish without so much as a “good-bye.” Because if it matters to you, if it really matters, then you don’t do it for recognition, reciprocation, or gratitude — as much as any of them or all three would be nice. And more than anything, it doesn’t matter if you win, assuming you even can. Because if it was a fight worth fighting, the victory won’t stick.
You’ll always have to keep fighting.
But more than that — you’ll get to keep fighting.
It isn’t an obligation. It’s a gift.
Because if, say, you’re a suicidal bleeding heart with little to lose who checks off most boxes on Privilege Bingo, and who keeps hearing that the best thing about you is the effect your work or your words have on other people, then that means that there will always be someone else to fight for, and someone else to fight against to protect them. And no matter how bad the days are when you want to stop living, then that also means that there will always be something to live for, even if it’s never for your own life.
You just have to keep looking for the next battleground.
And boy howdy, if you’re looking for fights, then 2025 is shaping up to be a veritable Thunderdome already, isn’t it?
We’re nearing the six-thousand-word mark, so if you’ve made this far, it’s half past time for me to wrap this up. After all, Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, and you’ve doubtlessly got plans to finalize, don’t you? ‘Course you do, you little miracle, you.
I have noticed, among the many rules that shape the ways We Are or Are Not Supposed to Talk About Suicide, that there’s an unspoken mandate to end things with a hopeful finish — to reassure your audience that you’re going to stick around and that if they are haunted by the same demons, that they should too. But this piece was not written from a place of hope. I don’t know if I’m capable of the emotion anymore, and I don’t think that I’d express it here even if I was. Setting aside my personal particularities, this is not a moment, at least within These United States, that I think calls for hope.
- Immigrant families are living in terror of being torn apart, even those who did it “the right way.”
- The civil service is being gutted, from scientists to special agents.
- The planet is burning, and it’s only going to get worse.
- The historical rewrite of an attempted coup is virtually complete with the blanket pardon of its perpetrators — including those with preexisting criminal records.
- Transgender people are slowly, one stroke of the pen after another, being legislated even deeper into the margins — something that I have spent too much time in locker rooms, at sports bars, and on message boards with other straight men to believe for a second is about the sanctity of women’s sports.
- A man supposedly elected to be a peacemaker has already threatened war, fantasized about land grabs, and openly advocated for ethnic cleansing.
- In the immediate aftermath of an aviation disaster and during an ongoing investigation, three Cabinet-level officials went to great lengths to reinforce their boss’ insinuation that diversity was to blame for the deaths of nearly six dozen people, resulting in the posthumous denigration of a female pilot aboard one of the aircraft.
- In a plotline that would’ve been rejected as too unrealistic for a superhero cartoon — Lex Luthor would never — the richest man on the planet has been handed the keys to the federal government and is swiftly dismantling it when he isn’t busy lying about his skill at video games or playing footsie with Neo-Nazis on Twitter.
- Slightly less rich men are stumbling over themselves to lift the floodgates of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and outright lies — the effects of which are already being felt by those working to air out the truth.
- And worst of all, although I haven’t cooked with them in months at this point, apparently eggs are still rather expensive — which I was reassured, repeatedly, everything else was all about. Only a dozen eggs a day? This is how the vegans win, people!
I could keep going, but ten seems like a nice round number. And admittedly, not all of this was foreseeable, even to a cynic like me. But too much of it was. All the same, a plurality of otherwise-eligible voters did not vote against this. This time around, a plurality of registered voters voted for this. And where once there was a #resistance, where once there might have been marches and signs, where once there was outrage from some and principled discourse from others, where once there was a passionate insistence that this was all a fluke and that deep down, This is Not Who We Are… what remains seems eerily akin to acceptance. Acquiescence. “Anticipatory obedience,” as an early contender for 2025’s phrase of the year might put it. Heads buried in the sand to ignore those being dragged into the shadows, hands over ears to block out the cries for help.
Early days yet, but one wonders how much longer it’ll be until all that is left is silence.
Considering the primary people responsible, it’d all be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe it’s really too terrifying to be either, and I’m defaulting to humorizing and minimizing horror to avoid processing just how bad things really are less than a month in, and how much worse they can still get.
So no, I’m not offering hope. Not because hope is intrinsically self-destructive, or limiting, or illusory, or any of the other things that your bog-standard jaded hero or mustache-twirling villain would say. If this essay is about any one thing — if any of my essays are about anything — it’s an ode to the enduring power of storytelling, and without hope, a lot of those stories never get told. My political awakening was defined by hope. Samwise Gamgee was driven by hope. And rebellions are built on (a new) hope.
But hope isn’t necessary.
At least not for me, not anymore. Not after the first term. Not after the summer of 2020, in which the bottled fury resulted in little more than pathetic photo ops and anodyne corporate messaging that didn’t even last five years before getting rolled back. Not in anyone, or for anything, likely not ever again. I don’t need to hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t need to believe that there’s a solution to any of our problems or an optimal strategy to beat back the darkness, and I don’t need to hope that people would’ve listened to me even if I were the one to find it. I don’t need to hope that things will get better. I don’t need to hope that they even can. I just need to keep fighting against the people who are trying to make them worse, and for the people who can’t fight back.
I can live with that, and I can live like that, for however long as I have left to live.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t imagine I’ll be especially good at this particular round of fighting. I clearly haven’t been so far, even if I’ve got a fancy law license this time around. Maybe the smarter thing to do would be to listen to the many well-intentioned people who’ve told me over the last few months to take it easy, to calm down, that anger is a path to the Dark Side, that the post-Elonian Twitteratti can and will crush people who speak out, that I’ve got much to offer elsewhere and a lot to lose here, that I should just live my life. That as bad as things were last time, we survived — some of us, anyway. And as bad as things might get now, we’ll be okay — some of us, anyway. Probably.
But I am not okay with being okay. Probably or otherwise. It seems that too many people are, which is why it also seems that increasingly fewer people care about offering even a token resistance to what’s coming — at even pretending to care this time around. Luckily, I have it on excellent authority from none other than the new Secretary of Health and Human Services that we black folks have a higher pain tolerance — isn’t that right, Bobby? Who better to step back in front of the hoses and stare down the dogs? This may well be the last Black History Month at this rate, let’s go out strong.
Again, you don’t need hope to fight, or at the very least, to endure. That said, if I were the kind of person who hoped, there might be some things that I’d still place my hope in. Like the people of faith who live the tenets of that faith, even if they know they’ll pay the price. Like the January 6th arrestees who rejected their pardons, and validated the mustard seed of grace I planted four years ago when I expressed my small sympathies for those responsible. Like the communities deciding that if the Oval Office is going to continuing being cute about white supremacists, then they’ll take matters into their own hands. Like the city that, no matter how many times I leave, always finds a way to pull me back, and always finds a way to make me proud of it. This may no longer be a land of the free, if ever it was. But it remains home to much bravery indeed.
Things are bad. Things are going to get worse. Things might never get better.
That doesn’t really matter. If there’s one thing I know that I don’t have to waste energy hoping for, it’s that I’m not in this fight alone. No Ranger ever was, as much for the memories of those who were here, as for the presence of those who are already in the trenches, and as for those who are yet on their way. And sure, I’m no more a Power Ranger than Jason David Frank ever was — and considerably less of one, all things considered.
But as the song goes, I’m a ’90s bitch! I don’t care. There’s work to do, there’re fights to fight, and as long as that’s the case, I’ll die another day.
How about you? Want in?
For Thuy Trang. For Jason David Frank.
For Anastasia Golovashkina.
And for Josh.
For the parts of you that live within me, for the parts of you that I had to cut away. For what I still remember, for what I tried to forget. For what I will not apologize for having grown to hate, for what I regret trying to pretend I never loved. For the life I did nothing to remain in, for the death I would’ve given anything to prevent. For the hours spent practicing rainbow kicks and Cruyff turns, for the countless games of 2K on the couch and H.O.R.S.E. on the court, for the instant ramen we ate for breakfast and the cereal we ate for dinner, for the inside jokes and fantasy novels and R-rated movies snuck under the cover of darkness. For how hard we’d always fight each other, for how easy it was to beat down others whenever we worked together. For who you were to me from the beginning, for who I might’ve still been to you at the end. For who we should’ve been to each other now. For the boy I knew, for the teenager I resented, for the man who should still be here.
Rest well, cousin.
