You have no idea how bad it’s going to be.

Emphasis on “no idea”

You have spent days hearing about how bad things are about to get. But they could be even worse than that. Or they could be better. Or they could be some way that you can’t possibly fathom yet. Some things you fear will happen will happen, and others won’t. Some things you’ve never considered will happen, too, some of them terrible and some of them wonderful.  

I don’t know what exactly we’ll experience in the next four years. But I can promise you that it won’t be exactly what you’re imagining right now.

It is ironic, but very understandable, that there seems to currently be a resurgence of certainty about the fate to come, given that the hubris of our certainty is largely how we’ve arrived here in the first place. Shocking change, for better and for worse, tends to look a lot like one group relying on inevitability while another imagines something otherwise unimaginable.

If there’s anything I would have liked to have learned from Trump in 2016 or Obama in 2008 or my own ideas about the course of my own life, is that we’re rarely good at predicting what’s going to happen in the next year – and not even close to knowing what’s coming two, three, or four years down the line. It seems wrong, but worth remembering, that Obama was 26 points behind Clinton with less than 1 year to the general election where he won 365 electoral college votes and +7.3% of the popular vote. Given Trump’s 2016 control of both houses of congress – including the Republicans largest governing majority since 1929 – it seems wrong, but worth remembering, how ineffective they were in imposing a sweeping agenda.

Which is not to argue that we should be optimistic about some kind of new ascendant leader, nor that our opponents will once again struggle. It’s to argue that we don’t know. 

Many of the great calamities of not just American, but human, history seemed unthinkable just a few seasons before they happened. Some of those wars and genocides were preceded by warnings; some of those pandemics and disasters, weren’t. Our advances towards freedom and justice were never certain, either. The US held elections for roughly 100, 150, and  200 years before allowing black men, women, and 18 to 21 year-olds, respectively, to vote. Each time, the change was unprecedented, ill-fitting with the history that led towards it. And also, each time, the change in law didn’t necessarily herald some cascade towards real freedom. The end of slavery was not inevitable to either slave or slaver – and abolition didn’t herald equality. We’ve seen such unpredictability in our lifetimes, too. Sixty percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage in 2005; sixty percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage by 2015. Our society seemed to shift drastically. One might have then thought, by 2025, we wouldn’t be facing the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ agenda we are now.

But neither our best or worst stories follow the scripts we imagine for them. The course of history doesn’t just flow forward; nothing will be just because of the way it is now. The difference between a trend and a detour is made, in part, by chance and it is made, mostly, by action.

I want to say these things to you – to myself – now not just as a matter of individual psychology, but as a matter of collective strategy.

Many of us with privilege and protection spent the first Trump presidency in perpetual angst and vigilance beyond what was warranted by our position. Which is not to say that care and solidarity and caution and, sometimes, bravery weren’t then or aren’t called for now — but that a certainty of doom can inhibit exactly those tendencies and eventually extinguish them altogether. For the sake of our individual participation in the communities around us, to use whatever power we do have to support and protect one another, I don’t think we have to be hopeful – I just think we have to know that uncertainty tips many ways, and that it’s uncertainty itself that is permanent. Our best strategic assessments of what to do and how will come from clear-eyed analysis of what’s actually happening, not from our darkest assumptions from our darkest days.

Particularly if we are facing the most fascistic future, resignation over its inevitability only serves as permission and protection for it. Any kind of collective flourishing that will threaten an autocracy – whether political or social or creative – will depend on believing that kind of flourishing can still exist.

I understand the appeal of certainty. I spend most of my life trying to maximize it. But, at least in this respect, I hope we can help support one another in embracing the unknown.