On Hope

For many Americans I know, waking up to find they are living through a fascist script has been disheartening. For me, an Irish child who came of age during the long 1980s, it feels sadly familiar. Then, factional terrorism was rife while religious community leaders were raping children, enslaving women in workhouses, and throwing unwanted babies into mass graves. Divorce was unconstitutional, while contraception and abortion were criminalized. The conservative majority voted in a constitutional amendment more strictly banning abortion. This then enabled the State to criminalize the dissemination of information even about how to travel to another country to seek an abortion, and to forcibly imprison suicidal children who had been raped and might try to flee the country to seek an abortion. A few years later, the majority rejected a Constitutional amendment that would have legalized divorce. The government was dominated by elderly, regressive farmers prioritizing agriculture, tariffs, and subsidies, and the economy had been mired in an apparently endless depression for decades. The State picked the industrial winners and monopolised basic telecommunications and broadcasting. Of every cohort born since the 1940s, somewhere between 60% and 80% had routinely emigrated, perpetuating the dull, agrarian gerontocracy.

Everything seemed hopeless. But it eventually turned around. There is always hope.