When I Lost Faith in Humanity, I Threw a Block Party

It was something tangible and positive I could do

Photo via Canva.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in recent years, it’s that no one is coming to save us. I foolishly allowed myself a shred of hope in the week leading up to the election, but November 5, 2024 marked just one more event in a long succession of events that confirmed what I already knew.

Our country is stuck in “defend mode”—hunkered down, clutching tightly to the things we believe we deserve. The things we believe other people don’t deserve. We are fueled by righteous rage and misplaced blame. When it comes to our collective future, we’ve entirely lost the plot.

I’ve questioned my faith in humanity more than once during this whirlwind of a decade. During a particularly low point, at the dawn of the summer of 2022, I couldn’t shake an all-consuming sense of anxiety and pending doom. During Covid, I had allowed myself to break the strict news diet I’d been on since Trump’s ascent to power, which meant once again getting swept up in the national hysteria—all the fear mongering and the name calling and the finger pointing and the word vomiting.

In the summer of 2022, we were all emerging from our Covid cocoons and life was beginning to resume some semblance of “normalcy.” This was a relief in some ways, but terribly distressing in others. I’d never been a fan of “normal” to begin with. I didn’t want to resume my furious hamster-wheel spinning.

To add to my malaise, summer itself was becoming more and more ominous. It used to mark the time of year when I exhaled. I grew up in San Francisco, where summer meant wind and fog, but it also meant the end of school and 10 precious, stretching weeks of freedom.

When I discovered that most working adults don’t get summer vacation — unlike my parents, who were teachers — I was shocked and appalled. But as a working adult in Portland, Oregon, summer came to mean a different kind of freedom. Freedom from drizzle and low gray clouds, freedom from rain boots and hoods, freedom from encroaching darkness. Summer meant slow mornings and long, bright afternoons. We emerged from our dwellings like animals from hibernation, squinting against the sun.

I was beginning to wonder if we’d ever experience this kind of carefree summer again. Over the preceding years, the season had evolved into a different beast entirely. Summer was coming to mean droughts and wildfires and triple-digit temperatures. It meant canceled plane flights and ruined vacations and stretches of time spent holed up in the house because the air outside was swollen with heat and smoke.

I could find little respite from the relentlessness of the world. Frothy articles about beach reads and watermelon cocktails seemed hopelessly out of touch, relics of a bygone era. Didn’t the authors know there were glaciers melting, wars raging, pandemics spreading, inequalities widening, murders spiking, mental illnesses rising?

It would have been easier to concentrate on the beach reads if all of that were happening “over there.” No matter when you tune in, the news is mostly bad. But now there were gunshots within earshot, wildfires lapping at my feet. It was all getting closer. It was all closing in.

That’s why I decided to throw a block party. It wasn’t because I was in denial. The futures of my children hung in the balance, but there were still days to fill. My kids still needed a childhood.

And what else can I give them, at the end of the day?