Writing and working for a future beyond sorrow.

Poetic title, I know. But it's the kind of thing I need to write after the events of the American election. I won't dignify the current president elect by mentioning their name (an expletive is the closest I want to get at the moment of writing). Suffice to say, they should never have gotten this far. It appears the world is going through terrible times in more ways than one. I couldn't do anything about it since I live in the UK, but seeing it happen to a country where our family has friends, where my very liberal publisher is based, makes me feel very anxious and depressed. We're going to see four more years of that certifiable person's actions in office, self-serving policies that make everyone suffer.

One might ask: What's the point of writing? But let's remember, people write things because they feel motivated to do so. I'm fortunate as the UK is--relatively speaking--all right. Not perfect, not by a long way, but still okay. There are loads of books that were the better for the writing, even when the country they came from had a vested interest in not letting such books be published. All Quiet on the Western Front released in 1929, its sequel The Road Back in 1931, both when Nazism was beginning to gain ground in Germany. Many anti-nationalist and anti-oligarch pieces of media have seen success in countries which have those institutions engrained within them, like Japan and even China. And when McCarthyism and the so-called "Lavender Scare" were gripping America, fiction was created that pushed back against that reality.

Fiction is a means to vent frustration, but it is also a means for people to see something that could be made into a reality. There are reasons why some books helped galvanise popular movements against something that had previously not seen a consistent and conscious move against it. Film makers broke the Hayes Code, writers can topple and ridicule regimes. It's not going to be easy for anyone. For the moment, a power has appeared in America that taps into the country's worst aspects. Elitist culture, ingrained sexism and xenophobia, unwillingness to change in any meaningful or radical way, a political system just as likely to be a rotting snake eating its own tail as a dragon sailing over the world.

There are possible (perhaps foolish) silver linings. Firstly, this is the second term, so the incoming president legally can't run a second time unless there's some kind of sacrilegious change to the law and constitution. Secondly, it is possible members of the incoming incumbent party will actually restrain the more idiotic decisions (not very probable, but one can hope). Thirdly, most horrifyingly, the new incumbent has a vested interest in not provoking too major a conflict with the other two oligarch-driven world powers currently in the world. Fourthly, cultures and attitudes surrounding sexuality and gender once firmly pushed to the sidelines have become accepted enough to the mainstream that there should be some level of pushback to attempts at censorship (indeed some of the most radical pieces have come out in the most conservative times). Finally, perhaps most hopefully, America managed to survive last time. And of course, it could all go to the deepest and coldest bowls of hell in a hand basket.

I won't say don't rage. You should rage, though not in a way that gets you easily demonised and shut up. There are dark years ahead, but for the sake of people I know in America, I will continue working towards my degree. I will continue writing about worlds where it's completely okay to be LGBTQIA+, to be non-White, to be any gender or gender-nonconforming, to be disabled, to be different in some way, shape, or form. Being different isn't a crime. We need to remember that for the next four years, spread the word for the next four years, try not to trap ourselves in any kind of echo chamber for the next four years. And maybe, during and even at the end of those four years, things can be changed for the better.

Image copyright: Square Enix. Source: SaGa Emerald Beyond