Welcome, reader. I’m glad you’re still around; it’s pretty rough out there.
You don’t need me to tell you that, though. If you’re reading this around the time I’m writing it, then you already know how bad it is. I don’t need to know anything about you to know that things have gotten a lot scarier for you over the last several years, worse than they ever have in your life. Prices are going up, jobs are disappearing, wages are stagnating, and our governments can’t seem to do anything to slow that process down. All of us, no matter our position on any political spectrum, are feeling the world spiraling out of control right now.
We don’t all react the same way to that fear, of course: some of us cower in our homes and avoid the news, while some of us grab for whatever control we can find, in whatever context we can find it. Some of us get energized to fight back, while some of us plaster on fake smiles in hopes that pretending the problems don’t exist will make them go away. I’m not here to judge; the fact that we all react differently to danger is part of what makes us strong as humans.
So reader, don’t let anyone, not even you, tell you you’re reacting wrong to the crisis that is the twenty-first century. You are not broken; you are reacting appropriately to a world that is getting more and more dangerous every day, in ways you might not be consciously thinking of but that you can probably feel on the back of your neck. I personally know more than one lifelong pacifist who has decided that now might not be a bad time to own a firearm after all.
What I’m going to ask of you now is difficult, but it is necessary. Our fear responses evolved to react to a world where danger nearly always comes from some other being, either human or animal. When something goes wrong, we intuitively look for who is to blame, who is at fault, because millennia of inherited experience have taught us that to resolve a problem, we must look to its source. Every single one of us has looked across the aisle and seen there the face of The Enemy, and I’m no less guilty of that than you are, I promise.
I need you to let go of that, at least for as long as you’re reading this. You are not wrong to see blame when you look at the people who are making your life miserable, but for right now, you need to allow for the idea that it may be a mirage. You need to convince yourself that the blame you see may actually be in the air between you, in the structure of this world we have created for ourselves, whether you truly believe it or not. If you cannot—if your own pain is so strong that you can’t set it aside, even in the interests of preserving our future—that is okay. Not everyone is made for the fight.
If the previous paragraphs were too soft and hand-holdy for your taste, then perhaps this will be more your speed: I need you to grow the fuck up and get over yourself. If that’s too much to ask, then feel free to see yourself out.
If you’re still here, reader, then I think you want to fix the world as much as I do. You may or may not believe that the situation is quite as dire as I do, but you know things are bad, and you desperately want them to change, even though it feels like nothing possibly ever could.
Unfortunately, the real world rarely provides us with such obvious signposts as yellow paint on climbable surfaces, billionaires who act like literal cartoon villains, or a bright red box labeled “BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF TYRANNY.” Knowing that something is wrong doesn’t mean knowing how to make it better, as the current US administration is so impressively (and illegally) demonstrating.
I don’t know how to fix everything, and even if I did I wouldn’t try; the world that would be ideal for Danielle Church, or for any one single person, would be intolerable to nearly everybody else. That’s why our government is made up of so many different people: differences of opinion make us strong.
What I can do is drag us back from the brink. I can’t fix the world, but I do know how we can unfuck it just enough to where we can all breathe again. I wouldn’t be writing this if I couldn’t see the path we’re going to take to reach for a brighter future.
It won’t be easy, though, and it won’t be possible at all unless we narrow our focus. For now, we can’t be distracted by the loss of jobs to AI, nor by the genocide of trans people in the United States, the atrocities in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, or worsening financial projections the world over. If we want to give ourselves the best chance for survival in the decades to come, we must focus right now on one thing, and one thing only.
The first step to unfucking the world is to peaceably remove Donald Trump from power and erase his impact on American politics. This holds whether you are American or not, whether you love this country or hate it, whether you wish progress would go faster or slow down just a bit. The United States is, for better or for worse, an exceptional country (in the sense of being an exception) with an outsize impact on the world economy. It is presently at a tipping point in its history, and depending on how the next couple years play out, we will see one of two potential futures come to pass.
In the first future, Trump’s legacy stands. This could take many forms: Trump might hold on to the reins for a third term and beyond; he might die in office, violently or otherwise; he might attempt a coup and fail; he might be taken down by someone else’s coup; he might, I suppose, even leave power peaceably at the end of his term. Regardless of whether or not hell freezes over, these various timelines have one thing in common: Trump’s impact on US politics remains intact. The people he pardoned remain pardoned, the Supreme Court justices he installed remain installed, and the bills he championed remain the law of the land.
Trump’s legacy could also be the destruction of the United States as a country, depending on how this war goes. We’ll see, I suppose.
In any of these futures, America—presuming it still stands—loses any remaining influence (other than military) over global politics. The United States will never be trusted by any other nation, because we will have shown ourselves to have no consistent national identity. We will see more efforts to get sham Presidents into place, and some will be successful, because the rewards for doing so are permanent. Regardless of whether we still technically have elections, the United States will remain, as it is becoming, a fascist state at its core. Even if we elect a string of respectable Presidents after this who just want to balance the budget and keep our own economy going strong, no one will trust Dr. Jekyll when they know that Mr. Hyde will eventually come back.
See, the thing is, what’s going on now isn’t even Trump’s fault, not really. He isn’t even a little bit special. One thing we know from history is that every rule gets tested eventually. The United States was always going to elect a President who didn’t give a shit about the Constitution someday. And that means that we were always going to have this crisis, regardless of if that President was Trump, or Musk, or someone fifty years down the line who hasn’t even been born yet. The fact that this is happening exactly one quarter-millennium into our country’s history brings a nice sense of narrative gravitas to it, but it’s ultimately a coincidence.
If America does fall to tyranny, or if it falls altogether, then the very real economic problems facing the world will be up to everyone else to sort out. America will either be a country that can be bought for money or it will have disappeared altogether; either way, it will be of no assistance in unraveling the mess that is the global economy. I’m not gonna say humanity has no chance at that point, but I really don’t like our odds. (I do have plans for how to unfuck the economy after we’re done here, but one step at a time.)
What happens next in America’s history, though, is and was always going to be up to us Americans. We’re the generations that happen to be alive at the point in time the US is undergoing this inevitable metamorphosis, whether into tyranny or into freedom, and so the responsibility to fix it falls to us.
Because that’s the other future. In that second future, we rise up and say that this is not business as usual. Regardless of whether and where we fit on the liberal or conservative spectrum, we say that having a President who brazenly flouts the Constitution, who openly sells pardons for money, who decides on war plans by consulting a very fancy Magic 8-Ball rather than Congress, is a bridge too far.
In that future, we remove him from power but we go one step further: we rewind, undo, and erase every single thing he did. We can’t unmurder the people he’s had killed, of course, but we can void every Executive Order he’s ever issued, we can annul the pardons he’s sold, and we can remove every crony he’s inserted into positions of power that will remain even after he’s gone. Once he’s out, we can pick and choose what to preserve from the things he did which did help our country, as soon as we can trust the people making those decisions.
In this future, America will have demonstrated that even if the Presidency can be subverted, it won’t bring any lasting benefit to the ones doing the subverting. We will also have made strides towards repairing our reputation with the rest of the world, which is going to be clutch in the decades to come, but most importantly, we will survive.
This can only be done by amending the Constitution. There is no other way to erase his legacy, and therefore, that is the only path forward. If you want to see that future as much as I do, then put all thoughts of midterm elections, of Supreme Court cases, of ICE raids, and of war crimes out of your head; any plan that does not include amending the United States Constitution within the next two years guarantees we get the bad ending.
Next time, I’ll talk a bit about No Confidence, the amendment I drafted to fix this damn mess. Until then, stay safe.
Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to read Unfucking The World. I hope it brings you at least a little comfort to know that we can put out a thousand tiny fires eroding our democracy all in one go, instead of having to deal with each and every provocation individually.
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Questions, challenges, additions, and thoughtful disagreements are encouraged in the comments; bring your good faith, and others will do the same. Today’s topic: how much about it would have to change for you to trust the US Government?
Share this with someone you know who wants to help unfuck the world, and stay safe.
–Danielle
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