2023’s in the books, and we’ve entered what’s going to be one of the pivotal years in history. The United States elections, and the lead-up to them, are going to change the world, and there’s a distinct possibility that things are going to get really, really terrible.

Not that things are going swimmingly right now; Russia’s still waging its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s killing the just and the unjust alike in Gaza, authoritarianism is on the rise around the globe, and we’re probably going to have a convicted felon running for the most powerful job in the world, with a real chance of winning. The turn of the year is traditionally a time for fresh starts and optimism, but it’s awfully hard to see any good paths leading forward.

Things happen as you get older. More ear hair, fewer erections, a longer time getting out of bed in the morning, an increased appreciation for the music of Steely Dan. And, at least in my case, an ever-growing awareness not just of how fucked-up things are, but how fucked-up things have always been, and the potential for even greater fucked-upness in the future. I read a lot of history, and the more I learn, the darker things get.

I come from a place of privilege in the United States—I’m male, I’m straight, I’m white, I’ve always made enough money to survive on, and things have been pretty good for me my whole life. I mean, sure, there have been tragedies and downturns, but on the whole it’s been easy (at least for my younger self) to be cheerful about the future. It’s not that I was blind to injustice, prejudice, hatred, the atrocities of war, the moral corruption of capitalism, the monstrousness of religion, but that these things never really had an effect on me. Since 2016, though, the scales have fallen from my eyes.

I still can’t fully empathize with how it feels to be Black and to know that the cops will absolutely fucking murder you if you do the wrong thing, I can’t a hundred percent put myself in the place of a transgender kid who has to live life knowing that millions of people hate them just for being who they are, and who has to suffer vilification, oppression, and violence, and when Donald Trump spouts his Nazi shit about ‘vermin’ and immigrants poisoning our blood, it’s hard for me to imagine being the vermin he’s talking about, after walking all the way from Guatemala to escape death squads, guided by the light of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, only to find the nation of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin is still just as nasty, intolerant, and hateful as it’s always been, and now it has a sprayed-orange incontinent Baal eleven months away from taking back the White House and all its concomitant power to make my life hell.

But I DO empathize, and my empathy gets deeper every year. I’ve found myself in tears at random points of the day, imagining what it must be like to be a Palestinian mother whose children were murdered by smart bombs, or a farmer in the Donbas chained down watching his wife get raped and killed by Russian soldiers, or a terrified young woman driving hundreds of miles to get an abortion two states over.

I can empathize with the fascists, too, but it’s fucking icky. I can imagine being so scared of Blacks, of gays, of migrants, of shadowy government forces taking away my guns, turning my kids trans, canceling my music, my television, my ingrained belief. I can understand the hero worship of Elon Musk, and the inchoate rage against new things, against wind turbines and drag queen library hours and Taylor Swift.

And that’s the thing: I can empathize with those who cannot empathize with me. I can understand MAGA. They cannot understand me. And it’s like that all over the country, all around the world. And it’s always been like that, and always will be.

There is a subset of humans—a big one—who will smile when an abortion clinic gets firebombed, but who will make sure THEIR kids get an abortion if needed, who will use food stamps, but who would disallow them for a Black single mother who can’t get a job, who have no trouble imagining vast Democrat conspiracies to traffic and rape children, but who metaphorically tongue-bathe the smelly ass flab of an actual sexual abuser and porn-star off-payer.

And I GET IT. I get how much easier it would be to not think, to accept what the preacher says, or Tucker Carlson, or the Christian dominionists in Congress and on the Supreme Court, to see the world in Manichean terms, as us against them, and to never, ever doubt that you are right, and noble, and virtuous, even if you’re Falwell watching the pool boy fuck your wife, a Moms for Liberty founder cancelling this weekend’s threesome and having your husband go assault the plus-one anyway, a candidate struggling mightily to avoid saying the Civil War was about slavery, or a god-fearing gun-toting patriot jerking off your boyfriend at a production of BEETLEJUICE.

These people think they are right, and that we are wrong, and there will never be compromise, and they vote their asses off. So, yeah, November should be interesting, and the lead-up to November, and what happens AFTER November. I remember having the day off and watching television for hours when the god-fearing taser-toting patriots shit all over the Capitol and waved their Confederate battle flags and rubbed their junk on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and as much as my imagination has gotten stronger as I’ve gotten older, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if things happen in 2024 that I could never have envisioned.

I mean, Trump kept STOLEN NUCLEAR FUCKING SECRETS in the zircon and pyrite bathroom of his golf motel, and we just accept it now. We accept Nazi talk from a major political party, we accept forcing women to give birth to dead babies, we accept policemen gunning down autistic teenagers, we accept bombs falling on hospitals, we accept flat-out lies from news channels, mass shootings every three days, using the Beatitudes as kindling for the Nuremburg bonfires of Critical Race Theory, and the Constitution as a cum sock for masturbatory fantasies about hanging Anthony Fauci and blowing migrants away from the top of Trump’s Great Southern Wall.

So, anyway. Happy New Year. Hope to see you all on the other side, and I hope the other side is a lot better than I can imagine.