Lefty Freakout: Elie Mystal, PARENTING MY BLACK SONS IN THE AGE OF TRUMP MAKES ME SARAH CONNOR AND TRUMP IS THE TERMINATOR...OR MAYBE SKYNET...IDK

Or: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I know--Elie Mystal and the Nation. What next? Jeet Heer and Jacobin?

Well, write your own stupid blog and you can make fun of a higher class of idiot.

But look, you gotta admit, this is gold:

It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day atrocities committed by the Trump administration. Every hour brings a new crisis, every day something precious or useful gets smashed. That’s on purpose. The torrent of Trump lawlessness is designed to keep us forever focused on what’s happening right now, constantly defending ourselves against the latest unhinged pronouncement. 

I would have fallen deep into this myopic trap these past two weeks, but there has been one thing keeping me focused on the long horizon: my children. I have two boys, ages 12 and 9. Every day I look at them, I am forced to contemplate the future—to worry about the future Trump is stealing from them, and the terrible suffering that awaits them in the world Trump seeks to create.

Like any parent worthy of the title, I don’t give a damn about what happens to me. I’ve had my chances. Born in 1978, I had the opportunity to grow up during a brief window where this country seemed genuinely interested in becoming the multi-racial, multi-ethnic democratic polity that it always promised to be but never once achieved. I benefited from the heroic efforts of my parents and ancestors.
...
For inspiration, I’ve looked to a fictional parent who knows what it’s like to be raising a child on the cusp of the apocalypse: the heroine of the Terminator movies, Sarah Connor. For people unfamiliar with this 40-year-old movie, allow me to regale you with a brief synopsis. On August 29, 1997 “Skynet,” a military artificial intelligence, became self-aware and unleashed a nuclear holocaust. It created a race of sentient robots, Terminators, to crush the remaining human opposition. In 2029, one such Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back to 1984 Los Angeles to kill Sarah Connor, who is the mother of the future human resistance leader, John Connor. Future John Connor is able to send one soldier back in time to protect his mother. 

When we meet Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton) in 1984, she is weak. She’s a classic Hollywood “damsel in distress” updated for the 1980s with big hair and spunkiness. She spends most of the first movie running and hiding, and nearly ensures her doom by calling her mother. She and the soldier bang, and the soldier sacrifices himself to try to destroy the Terminator. He fails to kill it, but Sarah is able to lure the robot into a hydraulic press and… terminate it. The movie ends with her visibly pregnant with the soldier’s baby, who will become John Connor, and is leaving audio tapes for him about what the world was like before the tragedy she now knows is coming. Little does she know that Schwarzenegger will be back, more or less as a good guy. 

Fast forward to Terminator 2: John Connor is now 10-years-old, but he’s living with foster parents because his mother has been sent to a prison psychiatric institution because she has (entirely reasonably) become a bit of a terrorist trying to stop the people building Skynet from bringing about the end of the world. When we first see Sarah Connor in T2 she is ripped. She’s changed her physique from Olivia Newton John to something approaching Rambo. She is hardened. She can kill. When she breaks out of prison, we find out that she’s been stashing guns and ammo all throughout the Southwest, and has been training her son in military strategy and computer hacking. She has transformed herself, body and soul, from a victim of forces beyond her control, into John-the-Baptist of badasses. 

I believe that every liberal parent is now in the position of Sarah Connor after the first Terminator movie. We can see the future awaiting our children, and it is bleak. Our mission, our only mission, is to prepare our kids for what is coming, and maybe see if there’s anything we can do to stop Trump’s future from happening. We’re going to need to teach our children skills that we never had, to face a future different from anything we ourselves experienced. We’re going to need to get in shape and learn how to fight for them in ways that disregard what others may think of our methods.

Gold, baby.
Gold.