The Light Up Ahead

Editors Note: I came across the following from a past guest of PopCultX, filmmaker Eric Shapiro. He was able to put down on paper a lot of what I was thinking and feeling. I asked if I could share it with all of you and thankfully he agreed. As you will see and read, we do need to stay and be positive in this darkness with the full knowledge that there is light up ahead. — Danny

It’s taken me a few days to collect my thoughts, or at least scrape together one or two, particularly in light of the fact that in sharing these thoughts, I know I’ll be speaking into the thicket of a severe mass trauma…

In 2022, after the Trump-appointed radical judges trashed Roe v. Wade and incited a historic human rights emergency, I watched an extraordinary movie called “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” which is a drama about an illegal abortion carried out in Communist Romania. In reading about the movie after I watched (and bought) it, I smiled upon learning that one (subliminally detectable) detail had been intentional, which is that everybody in the movie is rude.

I had only vaguely noticed it, but it was true. These characters, living under authoritarian rule, were instinctually unkind to one another; the deprivation of their human rights had yielded them coarse.

This is not a post about rudeness. I am not here to talk about being nice. I am saying that that coarsening, that ugliness, is now deep in the soil of American culture, a micro manifestation of a macro calamity. The insensitivity — the rudeness — is the punctuation mark at the end of a run-on sentence penned in trauma.

Trump ran as an alternative to the excesses of leftism. If you wanted a strong man, a decisive sledgehammer to strike at the friends, family members, neighbors, coworkers, TikTokers, or celebrities that you’ve found so annoying in recent years, then he was your guy. Espousing Alpha-male values. Taking long-form interviews in the “manosphere.” Talking about being sharp as a tack and at the top of your game. Going on about (yes) Making America Great Again.

Did people not notice how his personality kept changing? That we were being subjected to mass gaslighting? That the man who ran this time was a measured, diet cola rendition — more stage-managed, more calculating, with more professional handlers and advisors around him — than the unfiltered maniac who’d run two times before? Did we not notice how, save for his family members, the supporting cast surrounding him kept changing completely, so deficient is he at maintaining long-term relationships? This was a silk-smooth seduction. It was painstaking arithmetic to not just put him back in power, but to make his legal problems evaporate while carefully laying the groundwork to exact cold vengeance on his enemies.

I couldn’t imagine voting for him. Not after the Muslim travel ban. Not after the transgender military ban. Not after kids in cages. Roe v. Wade. January 6. Almost murdering Mike Pence. Cozying up to Nazis. Threatening/promising mass deportations. He is the ugliness incarnate. If you wanted a sledgehammer, and your goal was to cause pain, then you got it, and you’re causing it — and it could still be reverberating a century from now.

Mostly I mourn the loss of trust. That coarseness. The rudeness. The shared, ongoing acknowledgement that in being deprived of basic rights and dignity, or even just by seeing these things played around with like political footballs, we are being made less joyful, and thus less human.

But the wreckage of our country must be looked at. It must be called what it is, so its truths may be known, and it must in turn be mocked, satirized, sung about, subverted, transcended, and — however long it takes and at however great a cost — be converted into something spirited, peaceful, and new. There is no other trajectory. We must find soil in the ashes. To not do so is to align with the poisoned message that we’re not human.

But we came in as humans. That was the deal we were promised. So we have to look the disturbance in the eye and insist to it that we are human beings. Dignity is our birthright. The cloud cover cast by those who would seek to confine us is long and harsh and deep. But it’s not permanent. Nothing is.

There’s light up ahead. Keep walking.