The Fires + The Freeze: Inauguration Day 2025

This is not a hot take.

Today Donald Trump’s second inauguration will be indoors due to temperatures well below freezing, the first time since Reagan’s frigid and hostile Morning in America ceremony in 1985. Countless more of us will be indoors as well, plotting our fugitive paths through the coming years.

Since November 5 there have been a lot of hot takes on the election, and in the weeks to come you’ll also hear a lot about what we all should be doing. Because I love history and I love underdogs, I’ve been drawn to those writers who point to moments in history where people get it together and make something bigger and newer and better.

But we all recognize that history is no guide here.

Americans have never before elected a convicted felon. A treasonous insurrectionist. One who talks of creating concentration camps for immigrants. One who has treated women, poor people, working people, trans people, Black, Latine, Pacific Islander, Native, and Asian American people this brutally. One who even now is cashing in on his presidency with a crypto meme coin.

Yes, the cynicism is breathtaking. Yes, a slight majority of voters also selected this.

America remains a country of binaries. If we don’t feel ready to affirm one candidate’s warm but potholed, thinly drawn narrative of a shared future, then we get a shameless immoral narcissist with an authoritarian fetish and a bottomless greed.

America sucks that way.

Today I will not be one of those hot take people talking about why we failed here or what we should have done there. There have been — and there will be many more — who will accuse us of not doing or caring enough, who will blame “identity”— whatever they think that is a pejorative for—and try to shame us even as they vie to lead us.

Fuck them all.

The noise amid this chaos is already too loud to hear each other.

Maybe it’s time to stop pointing fingers. Maybe that’s the logic of every-manly-man-for-himself. Maybe that’s the logic of Hey guy! A private fire-fighting team for me, ashes for you.

When you do something wrong, you figure out what it was, and you move forward. (By which I mean, you make it right.) And you never move forward alone.

When something wrong is done to you, you figure out what it was, and you get some help to fix it.

(The fact that so much of American mythology denies this basic fact could be one of the reasons we find ourselves here. But OK, not the time today.)

In Los Angeles these past two weeks, we’ve seen lots of people who choose to use their hands not to point fingers at each other but to provide each other with care, shelter, support, relief, and kindness.

Someone somewhere will remind us that today is also the day we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., and that someone will remind us of his idea of the “beloved community.” It will be a timely and welcome reminder.

In her book A Paradise Built In Hell—which Rebecca Solnit wrote to document the mutual aid networks that sprung up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and which, to me, is one of the defining classics of this millennium — she reminded us of King’s words:

“Noncooperation and boycotts are not ends in themselves… The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.”

Rebecca’s words are equally moving: “When we talk of social change, we talk of movements, a word that suggests vast groups of people walking together, leaving behind one way and traveling toward another. But what exists between these people is not a movement but a settling in together that is the beginnings of community.”

Catastrophes, in other words, can and usually will bring out the very best in people.

In the face of four more years of Me-First toxicity, it is inspiring to remember that we’re still here and we still got each other.

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If you’re in the mood for something different than watching the shitshow, have fun and plot strategy with friends to this soundtrack to this coup de’tat.