The No-Win Scenario

I’m writing today about despair. I’m talking politics, but the details of what I’m saying about the particular strategy are subject to change, as I’m undecided about my direction, and I’m no expert on the details.

Tuesday night and into Wednesday, progressives experienced a numbing, teeth-chattering despair as we watched our assumptions about where this country was headed crumble, watched them wither into a bitter, ugly pile of ash. I sat up late, meditating in horror about our prospects as a nation and a planet, now that half the nation has selected an uncurious narcissistic thin-skinned bigot to lead the most powerful country in the world, at a time when we are precipitously falling into a state where there may be no turning back from environmental destruction.

I spent much of Tuesday night thinking about what to tell my daughter, an eight-year-old who was all excited to see the election of the first woman president, succeeding the first black president, the only president she’s ever known.

The talk in the morning went as well as can be expected. There were tears and disbelief on her part, and on my part, reassurances that we (as white middle-class people of European background, I thought to myself) will be safe, and that the president is not a king, and his power is checked by the legislature and Supreme Court (which are now in the position to do as he says or lump it, I thought to myself). I hated myself for uttering these platitudes, and I kept thinking, these are like the reassuring lies you tell a terminally ill child.

A despair enveloped me like a numbing cocoon. Well, that’s it, I thought. Now it’s just a matter of time, so we might as well just make life as pleasant for the kids in the time we have left. The meteor is coming and there is nothing we can do about it. So just telescope down our priorities and hold our loved ones close and wait for the coming wars and disasters, the unchecked abuse and shootings, the happy sociopathology that now defines America across the globe. And wait for the end.

There were no tears on my part. Even prayer, often a consolation and a release for me, left me cold.  Still, I was able to function quite well the following day, I think better than some people around me. That’s one of the little blessings of being a pessimist: as you are always waiting for that other shoe to drop, when that moment comes, your machinery doesn’t seize up. Still, my soul felt dark and dead.

And then something happened, and here’s where it gets silly, so stay with me. There’s a prize at the end.

I was driving home from work, and instead of my usual audiobook, I flipped on my iTunes music, looking for something to distract me, a soundtrack to check out to. Like the prayers, much of the music left me cold. There were just a few songs which soothed me, like Girls in Trouble’s “DNA” and David Bowie’s “Fantastic Voyage.”

And then the app shuffled onto a track from James Horner’s incredible score for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. It was the sequence where Khan has started the countdown on the Genesis Device, insuring the inevitable destruction of the Enterprise, until Spock sacrifices his life to make the necessary repairs.

It got me thinking about Spock’s sacrifice, and his adage, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” And about how he bravely walked into certain death to save his friends.

And my mind wandered to an earlier part of the film.

And it hit me like a punch. Captain Kirk wouldn’t give up. He doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario.

Now, you have to fudge some of the analogies, because the film is ultimately about Kirk’s embracing the inevitable. But he didn’t embrace the inevitable at the first go. Big picture, James T. Kirk made a career of staring the inevitable in the face and laughing at it.

Captain Kirk wouldn’t give up, something inside me said, and neither should you. And the tears came, finally.

And I’ve been thinking about this more and more, silly as it is. It’s nonsensical, but the thing is: my despair totally evaporated. Where my current faith failed to do the job, the religion that I have followed since I was my daughter’s age did.

I said it was going to get a little silly.

I’ve been meditating more and more about this, and thinking about what it means for us. This is our Kobayashi Maru, and we need to change the rules. We need to refuse to accept this, and we need to fight it with all the tools we have available. Because that’s What Kirk Would Do.

Because the story of Star Trek, from the first pilot episode up to the latest film, is about using all the skills, each according to their gifts, as a team. We need to be fearless like Kirk, but we need to not go off half-cocked. That’s why he turned to Spock. We need be brave and bold, but logical. And he also turned to Dr. McCoy, because we need to remember our heart, remember that we are fighting because we care.

And we need to fight. I’m not quite sure what form that will take, but I am confident that lefties have the passion and the brains to do it. We just need to have more of that Kirk element, to be willing to break the rules, take what means necessary to achieve our goal.

Having seen how easily Clinton manipulated her opponent in the debates, I have full confidence in our ability to use the weaknesses of the most emotionally vulnerable president in history, a humanoid with a hair-trigger temper and the attention span of a fruit fly, to our advantage. We have to stop looking at it as a curse, and instead reap the benefits of this blessing. But we have to break the rules. Playing by the rules is what got us here.

Captain Kirk would not give up.

I know this is all supremely silly, for me to be hopeful because of a fictional swashbuckling spaceman from my childhood. But if this election has taught me anything, it is that a myth has an unstoppable power.

If Republicans can be inspired by an unrepentant liar, denial of the science that every schoolchild knows, and tribal allegiance to an imaginary rabbi, then I certainly can defeat my despair with a TV show that taught that peace is the way, and strength, courage, logic and compassion can coexist in our heroes.

There will be time enough when we’re dead to accept the no-win scenario.

Here is your apple. Take it.