Sometimes, on this blog, I show up with fully-formed opinions and ideas I want to communicate. But other times, like today, I come across something I’m not sure how I feel about, and I like to just open up the discussion publicly and put my preliminary thoughts down.

A YouTuber that I follow, who makes no bones about his feelings about Donald Trump in general, has recently been posting about the aftermath of the election, and has chosen to take what he calls an “eternal optimist” approach to the whole thing. He’s a channel I follow about the war in Ukraine, but he’s an American who used to serve in the Air Force, and his take on the situation is that while he still is fervently anti-Trump, he is hoping for the best and hoping that Trump will do the right thing for Ukraine because, in his words, “he’s our quarterback now and we’re in the third quarter”.

And I’m kind of torn on this approach. On the one hand, I am a fervent believer in confronting things as they are, and not as they should or could be. Donald Trump was legitimately elected president by people who knew what they were doing when they picked him, and I live in America as an American citizen, so in some sense it is entirely correct to say that he’s my president. He is. And I also do support optimism as a life strategy. I do hope he does the right thing, for Ukraine, and for transgendered folks, and for people who need healthcare, and everyone else.

However I also think sometimes optimism can turn into a denial of its own. The truth is that we have no reason to suppose that Trump will do the right thing for any of these groups of people. There is every reason to expect that this will be a dysfunctional, corrupt disaster. And, in this case, it is important to be prepared to resist dysfunction and unethical and immoral behavior as soon as it occurs, as forcefully as we can.

In addition, I’ve been struggling lately with this idea of me “being an American”. That’s worth its own blog post, but the fact is that I don’t feel ethically or morally responsible for the acts of a man I’ve never met, didn’t vote for, didn’t want, and don’t agree with or like. There isn’t much I could’ve done to keep him from being president, and what little I could do, I largely did. So in some sense he isn’t “my” president; I don’t feel any sense of ownership, and in fact I feel quite disenfranchised. (There’s an important conversation to be had about whether he really would be my president even if I had voted for him, but that’s for later).

So I don’t know how to feel about this. What do you think? Is this sentiment of “well, he’s what we’ve got, so I guess I’m rooting for him” a positive way to look at things? Is optimism ever unwarranted or unhelpful? What’s the right way to look at this?