The Choices that We Make or Don't

As long as we have choices - and we always do - we have the possibility to change things, even when they get dark and darker...

I grew up knowing that in our bathrooms, on the top of the toilet tank, sat a short stack of books and magazines. Aside from the most recent issues of Ms. magazine, there was nothing heady in the stacks, just Sports Illustrated. The books were either popular refences like Guiness Book of World Records and Book of Lists or the bathroom humor books that were popular in the 1960s.

Because of the books and mags, it was not uncommon for a Soriano to disappear after entering the bathroom, lured back from “gone missing” with a shark rap on the door. “Okay okay, I’m done!” Aside from my dad – who seemed to read only when atop his throne – I overstayed the most. Through overstaying, I became is diehard bathroom reader.

The books and mags that now live in our bathroom are housed in a small closet. The mags are old music zines like Creem, Bomp, and Flipside. The books range from single volume encyclopedias (usually on music or history) to collections of short essays. Currently, the book getting the most dog-earring is a copy of Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia – an encyclopedic collection of short essays on Twentieth Century intellectuals and cultural icons who James believes deserve more attention.

One of James’ subjects is Golo Mann, the third child of Germany’s great novelist Thomas Mann. Like his father Golo Mann was a man of letters. Unlike pops, Godo dealt with facts not fiction; he was a historian, Germany’s greatest according to James, not that non-Germans or those not deeply into German history would know.

After a brief biography, James uses a quote from his subject to explore an aspect of that person’s life and/or contribution. James’ choice of quotes for Golo Mann reads:

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn’t have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, willful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows.

Mann’s quote comes from his 1962 book Geschichte und Geschichten, and was fairly controversial at the time as it went against the popular notion that history propelled Germany towards the Holocaust, an opinion held by AJP Taylor and other mid-Twentieth Century heavy weight historians, claims James.

James is a cleaver conservative – witty, erudite, and not above throwing cheap shots at leftists like Taylor. Still, James has a point when, prompted by Mann – another conservative – he writes:

According to him, the Weimar Republic didn’t have to collapse; after it did, to say that it had to was yet another way of undermining it – sabotage after the fact. Similarly, the Jews didn’t have to die, or even be classified as Jews. The classification was Hitler’s idea, as was the massacre: the second thing following the awful logic from the first. But the first could have stayed in his sick mind, and he could have stayed out of power.

James acknowledges that the Weimar Republic – German’s pre-Hitlerite, quasi-socialist government – was weakened by “inflation, the Depression, the unemployment,” but is emphatic that as weak as Weimar was, someone(s) had to push it over for it to fall (and, according to me, fail to defend Weimar from those wanting to topple it). Ripe conditions aside, history itself is not the sole or main actor in human affairs: People are and people, conscious beings whose actions are not controlled by predestination or some sky god, and who make choices that have consequences that must be acknowledged and owned.

Taken to an extreme – “you are responsible for everything that happens to you” – James’ notion is a dangerous thing, especially when it fuels privileged hypocrites like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Same goes with the idea that history builds upon itself, an idea that which at its furthest out assigns responsibility to a dialectic devoid of human choice. I see “the truth” as bit of both.

People make choices that shape historical events, events that introduce new factors to the present that prompt more choices that shape events, and so it goes. Though we can often identify what specific choices people are tasked with making, we can never say for sure what people will chose. We can use history, data, psychology, and even mysticism to try to predict how a person will act, but no matter how we try to guise it, a prediction is a guess.

Donald Trump doesn’t have to be president of the United States and the United States does not have to be in the situation it is in now. Had Chuck Schumer played hardball with Trump on the budget, Trump might not have escalated his war on America so quickly. Schumer made a choice. Had Kamala Harris not panicked and shifted right when her poll numbers started wavering, Trump might not have won. Harris made a choice. Had Joe Biden checked his ego earlier and refused to run for a second term before primary season, a Democrat could have won. Biden made a choice.

If the Supreme Court didn’t rule that presidents are above the law while in office, Trump would not feel as empowered as he does now. SCOTUS made a choice. If the mass media treated Trump as the fucked-up, vengeful, shallow, mean, irresponsible narcissist that he is and not a “normal politician,” perhaps Trump would be a footnote. Publishers and editors made that choice. Hell, if Barrack Obama never used a high-profile event to ridicule Trump to his face, Trump probably would not have run in 2016 and we’d know him only as a failed real estate developer and reality TV star. Obama made a choice. And, having been dunked on by Obama, Trump could have return hard fire and not run for president. Trump made a choice.

Now, that’s a whole lot of ifs attached to decisions that were based on too many unknowable factors to establish any certainty about any of this; however, the fact remains that at the moment a choice had to be made, a person made a choice, a choice that not only have consequences for all of us, but presents us with a handful of choices:

Do we accept what is going on as inevitable or do we recognize that we are participants in life, not powerless spectators? Do we “fight back” isolated in our own rooms, staring at our own screens, slinging memes and sharing news stories on the actions of others, or do we come together in solidarity and do the hard work needed to change things for the better? Do we keep staring into the abyss, inviting darkness and cynicism into our lives, or do we stand up, look at our numbers, our strength, our intelligence, our compassion, and our know-how, and fight these fuckers until they are down and out? Do we say fuck it and give up, or do we take as much control over our lives as we can and make our own destiny?

Of course, its not as simple as all that. There’s gray area in these choices and, certainly, between my binaries, which could also be off. Point is that we have some control over what is going on and how things play out, based on what we decide to do or don’t as individuals and in solidarity with each other. And, as more of us choose to participate in shaping our politics, we increase not just our possibility for success but for there to be more possibilities to work for. Know this and things do not seem as dark as they do right now.

Like most of us, I’ve spent my life making hard choices. Some of those choices were dumb and reckless; others were pretty damn good. On balance, given that I am healthy and alive, in a great relationship, have a wonderful little dog friend, feel pretty decent about myself, have made peace with my “faults,” continue to create, and am still in the fight, I’d say my choices have worked out. I can be prudent to the point of over-cautious, but I don’t shy away from hard choices. Fighting Trump is not a hard choice.