As the election approached, my fear rose.
I gave up on the news. I turned off the TV. I hid myself away and got high on Hopium.
Hopium is a warm feeling of hope, the idea that people are good, that they’ll see things as they are, that they’ll do the right thing. It came mostly from Twitter, then mostly from Simon Rosenberg, who followed the early vote for The Democrats. They were coming out, he said. Coming out in numbers. Coming out by the millions. Coming out nearly everywhere.
I don’t recall there being early voting when I was young. In New York everyone did it on the day. I remember an Election Day line in 1976, when I was at Rice, but it wasn’t very long and the weather was warm.
Over the years I watched election returns come in on TV and bought into the lie that candidates were “catching up,” or could. But as I aged, and the stake grew, the day grew more fraught. I went to a Democratic Party in 2004 only to be met by the re-election of George W. Bush. I watched the returns in 2008 and cried before Obama spoke. A recording played the final theme to Remember the Titans, filmed partly at my daughter’s high school, about a black head coach and white assistant who built a mixed race team that won the title.
In 2016 I went to a friend’s house in Americus. We were going to celebrate the election of Hillary Clinton. The horror show that followed so appalled me, because I saw clearly what was to come, that I drove back home that night in a cold sweat, and it’s amazing I wasn’t killed.
In 2020 I avoided everything. I stayed away from the news for three days. Hard to do as a journalist, but my beat is technology, and finance. All I knew about politics was uncertainty until that midday when the race was called. Suddenly there arose such a cheer in the neighborhood as I’d never witnessed. Car horns blared and people screamed in delight. It was the greatest political moment in my life.
So, I huffed Hopium. I huffed it Election Eve and all Election Day. Until it was nearly time for the polls to close. Then I picked up my son from his place of work and we went out to a Japanese restaurant that had no TVs. I had a delicious dinner. But as I was finishing, I looked at my watch, saw it was nearly time for polls to close, and I became very stick to my stomach. I felt like throwing up.
What I needed was Copium.
We drove home. I took to my bed. I opened a cozy mystery set in a faraway time and I tried to read it. I kept having to go back a page or two to pick up the thread, but I plowed forward until I was near exhaustion.
That’s when the Copium hit.
It’s not a warm glow. It’s a cold stab. In the arm, in the back, in the neck. It hurt like hell.
But it also has its purpose. It cures what ails, the things Hopium can’t deal with.
Under Copium I imagined the worst. I saw that the world might go on, that I would go on, that whatever was happening out there in the world, it was not the final word.
The struggle will continue. There is no “The End” to this story, just a separate ending to all our stories. When that ending comes you hope that your contribution was a positive one. You hope you have done your best to move things forward just a little bit, through work, through family, through career, through service.
It’s not Hopium that will get us through. It’s through Copium that we survive.
So it was that I woke up.
Nervously, I opened my browser to the news….
