La Voz de Galicia – November 8, 2024 →
This past Tuesday, on election day, I ran into a neighbor from my New York neighborhood, and of course, we talked about what might happen that night. After spending twenty minutes solving the world’s problems, he ended by saying, with that typical New Yorker attitude of someone who has seen and lived through it all, “Whatever happens, life goes on, for better or worse, life goes on.” I continued my walk with my dog, but the phrase stayed with me, echoing in my head, “life goes on,” with everything that implies.
Xan and I have been in this country for twenty years. We arrived when the Republican George W. Bush was in office, lived through the exciting arrival of Democrat Barack Obama, the unexpected victory of Donald J. Trump in 2016, and the Democrats’ return to power with Joseph Biden in 2020. And now we are also experiencing another shift to the Republicans, with a Trump truly strengthened, in a victory not everyone saw coming.
“Life goes on,” but what does this victory mean today? Whose life will be dramatically changed by this political shift? And what will those changes look like at both a national and a global level? Perhaps this is the great unknown of this chapter in American politics, because if we’ve learned anything from Donald J. Trump during his campaign, it’s that he will do what he wants, how he wants, and when he wants.
In this society of extremes that we live in, it’s hard to predict what will happen around us; it’s hard not to feel as though we no longer have any control over what’s happening to us. And maybe that’s why, despite everything, the idea that “life goes on” is the only certainty we can cling to in order to keep going in a complex, contradictory society.
