Stay in the game

Some reasons to be thankful, and ideas to fortify us for the long race ahead

This Thanksgiving, we at The Ink are reminded again just how thankful we are for the community we’ve built here together. We’re grateful to you, dear readers, for sharing this space with us as we think, write, and ask the smartest folks we can find the big questions on the pressing issues of our times.

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As we head on into the holidays and look ahead to the new year and the challenges we’ll all be facing, we’re glad we can share the journey with all of you, and we hope you’ll come along with us as we continue to do our best to illuminate the road.

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We hope you enjoy the moving essay that follows from our friend Adam Lowenstein, and take from it some strength to face the road ahead. Democracy’s not a sprint — it’s a marathon, and we’re all in this race together.

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We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

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By Adam M. Lowenstein

Last weekend I ran my first 50-mile race. The gun went off at 6:30 am, and some nine hours in, I began to despair. Finishing at all, let alone under my goal of 11 hours, began to seem impossible. My legs were too flat, my body too tired, and the remaining miles too daunting, to keep pushing at the pace I needed to hit.

As the 11-hour mark started to feel increasingly out of reach, as I fell a little further behind with each slowly passing mile, a different thought popped into my mind: Just stay in the game.

There was too much race left, too far to go, to achieve my goal at that moment. But what I could do was give future me a chance.

Ok, I thought — or I may have said out loud since after nine hours of running you do tend to talk to yourself — I might not be on pace right now, I might not feel like I have a chance, but if I stay in the game, future me might be able to salvage this thing.

Just stay in the game.

I don’t want to strain a tenuous analogy beyond its usefulness. But it struck me, in the days following the race, that staying in the game might offer a liberating shift in perspective — even an empowering one — for those of us despairing about America.

As we reenter the Trump era, the forces we find ourselves up against — oligarchy, corruption, fascism — are powerful, and real. Given the scale of the threat, it’s easy to give up, to blame the voters, to resign ourselves to four more years doomscrolling and raging at everything Donald Trump and the people around him do.

While there’s no doubt that the years ahead demand vigilance, what if our work, at least right now, is not as bleak or insurmountable as it seems?

What if our work right now is not to rescue democracy or stop fascism or deal a knockout blow to MAGA, but instead to fight for the most vulnerable, to choose compassion and hopefulness, and to fortify ourselves for the endeavors ahead?

What if our work right now is not to block all of the Trump agenda — an impossible task, but one we implicitly expect of ourselves each time we let a new cabinet nomination or the realization of another Project 2025 pledge send us into a spiral of assuming that things will remain like this forever — but instead to endure, to organize and resist where we can, and to look out for each other along the way?

What if our work right now is not to save America, but instead to hold on just enough to give ourselves a chance to march forward again in two years, in four years, over a decade?

What if our work right now is just to stay in the game?

I could have passed the last few hours of the race staring at my watch, watching the distance slowly tick by, mile after mile, in a form of mental self-torture roughly analogous to reading the news each day looking for reasons to despair. Like many on the left, I spent a decent amount of the first Trump term doing exactly that.

But if we spend four more years perpetually in search of outrage and anger and indignation, if we go looking for reasons to blame and distrust and give up on other Americans, we will find what we’re looking for. Many news outlets and tech platforms and Democratic politicians and political consultants — including many of our supposed allies — will happily sell us self-righteous justifications for liberal apathy.

But we have another choice: Not to pretend things aren’t precarious, not to ignore how things are, but instead to trust that how they are now is not necessarily how they will always be.

To remind ourselves of the many reasons why, as Anand wrote recently, “our country will not be easily subjugated.”

To accept that the movement for the inclusive, diverse, welcoming, equitable democracy to which we aspire has not been defeated and that it will not be defeated in four years.

To embrace the fact that our task right now is not to “win,” whatever that means, but to choose to hang on, to endure, to keep moving, to pick each other up, and to give future America a chance to reclaim the hope and patriotism and sense of possibility that feels so out of reach right now.

The fight for democracy is a fight of generations. Our work, in this moment, is not to win each and every fight. What we have to do is stay in the game.

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Photo by Scott Taetsch/Getty Images for Rock 'n' Roll Running Series