An Impossible Future

A reminder.

I cannot re-find where I found this. If this is a real place I’ll apply to become its Chief Heretic.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways is to remind you of something about the impossible.

I’ve got three things for you this week: (1) a thank you, (2) a quick explanation of the foiled attack against the White House wrestling event/birthday celebration for Trump last weekend, and (3) an attempt to kill some of your skepticism and your cynicism.

(1) Thanks everyone for weighing on what you’re most interested in reading in Think Future soon and next. I’ve tallied up the votes from the comments — or, more precisely, I’ve taken a sense of the room. I’m deep in sequencing those posts now, and in the planning, but not the exact scheduling because the events of whichever week may take precedence.

• For example, the Supreme Court is about to announce its decisions in 19 cases. A few of those decisions may reverberate unduly into the future. I’ll take a look as they come out.

(2) A few days ago, FBI announced that its agents had arrested five people who were planning to use drones to drop explosives onto the UFC wrestling match and gun down the fleeing crowd — and whichever Trump officials they could — and then flee the area by following the banks of the Potomac River. Yes, it’s as nutty as it sounds. No, no one was in actual danger. The guys hadn’t cemented a plan, the whole thing was borne of a conversation on TikTok that went bad, and they had no drones, explosives, or ways to outwit Secret Service. And one of the plotters’ parents called the cops on him because they were that worried about him. So Secret Service began an investigation, got FBI to help, and was continuing to investigate maybe two dozen other “members” (conversation participants maybe) until FBI made this dumb announcement (in an attempt to rally/create a distraction from Trump’s flagging support) and basically tipped off all of the suspects that they were being investigated. Secret Service was piiiiiiiiiiiissed.

I suspect MAGA media will argue (or already are) that the plotters were antifa or from the Left but this TikTok group was called “The Vanguard of the Old” or “The Vanguard of the Old Republic” and are militant accelerationists. Militant accelerationists are far Right types who believe that modern America is in a death spiral and that if given the right (violent) push a race war, civil unrest, or worse will break out and America will collapse into Mad Max anarchy after which the ‘strong’ (meaning armed, white, perhaps Christian nationalist conservatives) can and will seize control of the United States and forcibly rebuild it in their image. This particular group appears to be angry at Trump for not being right wing enough, amoral (when it comes to the Epstein stuff), and for betraying the common man in favor of elites. They appear to have figured that only Trump, his officials, and many elites would be in the crowd — and that there would be no innocents there, only the complicit. Or at least that’s what all the signs so far seem to suggest, but news is still breaking on this. What this means to the future is a segment of violent right wingers are now at least daydreaming about killing Trump and his class rather than continuing to help them.

(3) Some of what I’m going to say in the coming weeks will sound improbable or impossible but none of it will be, and in fact most of the country’s energy is pointed toward making some impossibilities happen rather than returning us to an old status quo that didn’t work in the first place.

But if you’re skeptical and cynical and you’re tired, I understand. I was cynical before and I’m beyond tired now, too. But this might help.

Two Sundays ago on my drive to The Falls Church I got lost in 1987 in my head for reasons I’ll tell you some other time. And I was still halfway in 1987 while I listened to Father Burl’s sermon about how Jesus ministered to The Wrong and healed those who should not be healed, and about what Pride Month is about.

• If you read Think Future, odds are you are somebody’s Wrong.

• If you want more, I wrote about The Falls Church last year here. It’s about a group of people who will not lay down and die. And if you want a bit of hidden history about the American Revolution for your own preparation for the 250th, there’s some in that post, too. And if you want even more hidden history about the American Revolution — and some of Patrick Henry’s secret origin — I wrote about the Ghost Church here.

• Here’s Father Burl’s sermon. I’ve listened to it four times already. It’s a very Think Future sermon.

Whether you listen to it or not, when I heard it in person, by the back half of it I started grinning. Not just because it’s a revolutionary message and not just because compassion and inclusion are always revolutionary acts. But rather because with some people and in some places now the revolutionary is no longer revolutionary; it’s simply the mission.

And I grinned big because I realized that if this sermon had been preached in any church in this country in 1987, well, it wouldn’t have. (Well, William Sloane Coffin would have.) Almost no congregation would have stood for it.

But this scene, now: Father Burl, an openly gay man, an openly gay ordained minister, was preaching that sermon, and in public, to a congregation that was not angry with him for doing it, did not object, did not squirm in discomfort, and did not bat an eye because they already agreed was something that I could not have imagined back in 1987 and now here it was — real and as plain as day. Even more, after Minneapolis earlier this year when unarmed neighbors who did not know each other rolled out of their front doors whenever they saw ICE on their streets trying to disappear strangers — and unlike back in 1987 when most Americans would have stood by and awkwardly said nothing when queer, closeted people were persecuted — now if you come for our queer friends and children we will show you all our teeth and punch you in all your guns.

My point is this:

If you think a better future is impossible, you are wrong:

You live in one now.