When my grandfather was born in 1919 in Hong Kong, it was a British dependent territory, but there would’ve been people walking around him, not even all that old, who would have remembered the 1897 decree that took it out of China’s hands. I don’t know the first detail about his own grandfather besides that he did at one point end up in San Francisco in the late 1930s. I also know that he basically had to have remembered what living in China during the Opium Wars was like.

During the Bush years, I expressed dismay to my father. I can’t remember which piece of shit thing W. had just done. We’ll say he’d just invaded his fourth or fifth country, or cut his 29th tax, or issued his 300th executive order. Zipped the body bag on his 4,000th or 5,000th stop-lossed troop, maybe.

“You can’t see something glacial move when you’re standing on top of it,” he told me, which sounds like something somebody probably once told him on a day he despaired. He would’ve had plenty such days. He remembered the Stonewall Riots. He was a young man when Bobby and Jack and Dr. King were killed. He had to duck and cover in school. His whole life, from when he was born until I was old enough to go to school, he lived with the nagging feeling that one of the stupid old men running the Kremlin or the White House would push the wrong button and destroy us all.

It all feels impossible today, when the only woman in the presidential race – indeed, the only good candidate; the clearly superior candidate; the person, male or female, who should fucking be the next president – steps down. It’s not for me to sit here and say “Oh, don’t despair. It’ll all work out in the end.” Because it might not. My grandparents made it out of Cuba alive, and we don’t hear from the ones who didn’t. The ones, right now, whom Trump is cheerily erasing.

History is a tide. It moves slowly and it knocks over everything, and everyone, and we live atop what it has left behind, in the world it chooses to give us. This is hard to accept on days like today, when your own individual actions seem completely fucking meaningless. There will be other days. Despite everything, I believe you will live to see them.