Unwarranted Optimism

I identify with Kyle MacLachlan these days.

The actor first came to people's attention in 1984 as the then-unknown star of the first attempt at a movie version of Dune, sci-fi writer Frank Herbert's book series, which was directed by the late David Lynch. As it was one of the most eagerly anticipated movies of 1984, prospects for its success were so great that MacLachlan signed a contract committing to appear in four Dune sequels.  

It was an example of unwarranted optimism.  The film was a huge flop.  MacLachlan more or less disappeared for awhile after that. 

I identify with MacLachlan because of my own unwarranted optimism regarding my decision to stay where I was and how much time and money I spent to settle myself into my new life after my mother died in January 2024.  Having lived with my mother for decades and never struck out on my own, I chose to remain in my childhood house and spent money to freshen it up - a fresh coat of paint in one room, several pictures on the wall, a new bow window for the living room (the old one had leaks, and my mother was wrongly told that it couldn't be replaced).  I also spent a small fortune on my car, repairing damaged trim and getting my driver's seat re-covered.  I did all of this because I expected to stay in my childhood home with my two newly adopted cats for the rest of my life.

Then, on my fifty-ninth birthday, Trump was voted back into power.

And since January 2025, I have come to realize that everything I did to settle in in 2024 was based on unwarranted optimism in the outcome I hoped for in the election - that Trump would lose.  And 2025 under Trump has turned out to be far worse than I imagined it would be, and I imagined mass executions for people vocally opposed to Trump.  

This past weekend, I was reminded of just how foolish I was to invest in staying in my house - that is, staying in America - with no expectation that Trump would actually be voted back into the White House.  The Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration just issued "guidelines" regarding COVID vaccines that are really gospel.  The Musk-emaciated agencies declared that COVID vaccines are to be restricted to seniors and to people under 65 years of age with underlying health conditions.  Having been given clean bills of health for the past few years and not yet sixty, I meet neither of those requirements.  I was prepared to pay out of pocket for another COVID shot if I had to - as much as a couple hundred dollars - but the shots may, in fact, simply be unavailable for those who don't meet the new requirements, no matter what I'm willing to pay.  

Also, Trump has issued disastrous mandates regarding the environment.  Democratic states, having seen Trump and Musk trash the Environmental Protection Agency and withdraw from any and all international environmental agreements, have been prepared to handle their own environmental policy and still honor the terms of the Paris climate accord.  Ignoring the Tenth Amendment, Trump is forbidding the states to do anything regarding the environment that overrides federal policy and has U.S. Attorneys - including the insufferable Alina Habba in my own state of New Jersey - ready to make states pay for their defiance.  Trump has also gutted the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meaning that if New Jersey gets another Sandy, we may not find out about it until it's too late.  My mother and I rode out Sandy because my mother didn't want to leave.  As my own man, I now have the freedom to, whenever a hurricane or a similarly destructive storm is forecast to bear down on my area, get my cats in their pet carriers and drive to another part of the country out of the storm's path.  Trump's decision to render the weather bureaus unable to track such storms may very well have taken that freedom away from me.

And, he's already been trying to take away other freedoms, like the freedom to speak out against him, the freedom to advocate for anything he disagrees with, and, quite possibly, the freedom to travel outside the United States.  He hasn't declared martial law yet, and I still expect to travel to Europe this summer for the first time ever in my whole life, but thanks to his and Musk's emaciation of the Federal Aviation Administration and my own regional airport being the locus of the current air-traffic control crisis, he's already making foreign travel dangerous.  We're free to travel elsewhere, but we also know that we're taking a much more dangerous risk than we would have this past January 19.

Now I get it.  I shouldn't have spent so much money on a house I would have to sell if I have to leave the country for good.   I also shouldn't have spent so much money on my car, seeing as I couldn't take it with me if I moved to Europe.  I probably couldn't take it with me if I moved to Canada - for some idiotic reason, my Volkswagen doesn't have a metric readout on my speedometer.  (I think I mentioned that here before.)  That's a moot point, as the rules for emigrating to Canada are so strict that I might as well move to Ireland, which is much easier - but a major storm that hit that island country earlier this year demonstrated that that might not be a good idea.  

And because I didn't hedge my bets before Kamala Harris got her butt kicked by MAGA voters, I'm in a very precarious position.  But, as I noted before, it was most likely unfeasible to try to leave the country all along.

Unwarranted optimism.

So we all know what happened to Kyle MacLachlan.  He collaborated again with David Lynch in 1986's Blue Velvet and his career turned out fine after that, and he and Lynch would work together as regularly as Martin Scorsese has with Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio.  Dune, in the meantime, was made as a movie again and has since become the successful film franchise that everyone thought it would be in the eighties.  Things worked out for MacLachlan.  And Dune.  For me - and America in general - I'm not so sure. 😰