Caring, Not Dooming, In 2025
It's never going to be cool to care. That's OK.
Today, in what will likely be the last Bad Faith Times newsletter of 2024, I want to share a few experiences from my past year that you might consider “good” and not “depressing” or “soul killing.”
But first, a thank you to everyone who has subscribed to BFT over the past year. Subscriptions to this humble little newsletter have more than tripled since January 2024, thanks mostly to a rush of subs in the final sixty days of this year’s election cycle, when I was – in hindsight – far too optimistic about America's antifascist coalition. It means more than I can say that folks have subscribed and, in many cases, supported Bad Faith Times with a few bucks a month. There might be a BFT podcast coming next year if folks are into it.
Though I’ve already written about what this newsletter will look like in 2025, let me clear my throat and in my best Barack Obama voice say: Let me be clear, Bad Faith Times will not be dooming in 2025. No dooming allowed in this little community.
Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!
We are not “cooked,” nor are we “so fucking cooked," as so many BlueSky posters are wont to say. There is no point in declaring we're "cooked" beyond protecting oneself with layer after slimy, toxic layer of irony. I’ve done just that for too long. No one is better than me at shielding themselves with irony. I realize this sounds Trumpian but it's true. If irony-shielding were a profession, I would be the GOAT and no one would be close. I’m done with all that because there is no future with such an approach, and it’s exactly what the bad guys want us to do. Enough.
Which brings me to my first 2024 story.
Caring Is Not Cool
I coach my son’s flag football team every spring, and every spring there are at least a couple kids who take the game far more seriously than their peers. Some kids on this co-rec team are clearly there because their parents said they have no choice. Others are there because their friend joined the team. The Serious Kids are there for an entirely different reason: They want desperately to win, both to taste the thrill of victory and to dodge the anguish of defeat. As a kid who wept after little league baseball losses as if my entire family had been abducted by aliens, I can relate. Relatedly, I watched X-Files way too young.
It was the last game of the season, a consolation matchup that would determine who finished third in our 12-team flag football league in the exurbs of Maryland. We had started the season so well, with resounding victories over a couple teams that had no answer for the reverse handoffs we ran to get the ball into the hands of our fastest kids (this is the entire point of football) with the defense off balance. Then we ran into the buzzsaw of teams that, I’m fairly certain, had Ravens and Commanders practice squad players on their rosters. The 11-year-olds with chinstrap beards kicked our asses.
Anyway, it was the consolation game and we had a fourth down from the opponent’s five yard line, down by five points, in what would be the final play of the game. I had rotated quarterbacks all day for reasons you probably don’t care about, and in this high-pressure situation, I wanted my son taking the snap from under center and throwing the game’s final pass. I didn’t want to put that on any other kid because I knew my son could handle it; he’s good at compartmentalizing. He dropped back, avoided a flag pull from his left and threw a nice ball to the corner of the end zone, where his receiver got a hand on it while slipping to the ground. The ball fell harmlessly to the wet grass. We lost.
The children were as dejected as you might imagine. They drowned their sorrows in Gatorades and Doritos served by the team’s parents and within ten minutes, had moved on. I gave a quick postgame speech thanking them for being on the team and working to improve and all that stuff coaches say when I noticed one kid, a boy I’ll call Dustin, doing everything he could to hold back tears.
Denny Carter
Dustin was something of a hot head. He had next to no control over his emotions, just as I had no ability to regulate myself in the heat of competition as a child. I benched Dustin twice during the regular season after he yanked an opponent’s flag and threw it toward the sideline. He protested that they had done the same to his flag; I told him I didn’t care and that that’s not the way we play. It wasn’t easy to bench Dustin: He was a damn gazelle out there, easily the fastest kid on the team who glided by would-be flag grabbers with regularity. He accounted for at least half our touchdowns and in one game had not one but two pick sixes. Dustin was good. And he was cursed with the need to win, or at least not to lose, which is really the motivating factor for every great champion in sports history. They hate to lose. Winning is but a relief.
I took Dustin aside after my postgame speech, got down on one knee in the soggy grass, and asked him if he was OK. He broke down within seconds and buried his face in my shoulder. Shit, I thought, you’re gonna make me cry in front of everyone. I welled up with a speed that stunned me, and soon I too was crying – not quite ugly-crying, but close. I didn’t care about losing the game. In my old age, I can’t pretend to care about winning or losing anymore (this coming from someone who once, about 15 years ago, punched a fence during a softball loss and broke several bones in his hand). But I was touched. This kid was in pain.
Dustin and I cried together for a little while. He cared so much, and I thought that was beautiful. He wasn’t afraid to show how much he cared either. A whole sideline of players and parents and onlookers were within earshot and Dustin bawled over our consolation bracket loss. He didn’t give a shit what they thought. I collected myself and told him that it was OK to care, that he would have success in life if he cared about what we did and how he treated people. It’s good to care, I said. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
And so I say to you, in this time of endless political horror: It’s OK to care. It’ll never be cool, and that’s OK. Caring is a choice, it doesn't just happen, and it's the only thing that matters now.
We Have To Stop That Man
Someone finally picked up the damn phone. It was an older woman with a deep southern drawl, and she was friendlier than the last person I had talked to, a gravelly-voiced elderly man who said he would do anything to put Donald Trump back in the White House.
I was making ballot-curing calls to voters in North Carolina a few days before the 2024 election, trying to reach Democratic voters whose ballots had not been counted due to some kind of clerical error, but who could fix those errors and log their vote before November 5. It was a tedious thing, making call after call that went to voicemail or just endlessly rang and rang. I had dialed maybe eighty numbers before I reached the woman, Kathy, who was borderline panicked about her vote not being counted.
Kathy said she had never voted for a Democratic candidate for any office. By the age listed on her profile, I figured that accounted for almost a half century of voting. She told me she voted for Democrats all the way down the ballot, including Kamala Harris and gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein, because, as she said: “We have to stop that man.”
Denny Carter
Kathy never uttered Trump’s name. She referred to him only as “that man.” I have a family member who stopped watching TV in October because she couldn’t stomach the sight of “that man.” He is a living obscenity, a sentient curse on the country and yes, the world. Kathy and my family member both refused to say his name. That man was enough. That man, the worst man.
It lifted me to hear Kathy, a lifelong Republican, join the opposition to Trump. That this phenomenon was not widespread – Republicans always come back home – is as baffling to me as it is to you. Whereas 2020 was treated as a civic emergency, by 2024, people’s memories seemed to be wiped, or perhaps they were just bored. We need our stimulation, now more than ever, and who better for that job than That Man, a Hollywood creation whose one promise is to make politics as hectic and salacious as possible. No one will be bored over the next few years.
It was heartening to hear Kathy say that she (eventually) saw things for what they are. After presumably voting twice for That Man, she had some kind of epiphany – I wish I had had more time to talk with her – and said no more, even while the country said yes please, more please.
Peanut Butter And Jelly And Realizations
Way back in January, I took my kid to a nearby community center to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a homeless shelter down the road. The task, we were told when we arrived early on a Saturday morning, was to make 1,000 PB&J sandwiches over a four-hour span. This seemed next to impossible until folks streamed in later and we had upwards of fifty people to create a sandwich-making conveyor belt. No one has ever seen more jars of Jif.
I sat down between two high school kids who made their sandwiches way faster than I did. Was I jealous and resentful? Yeah, a little. I had my son sit on the other side of the table because I didn’t want him to lean on me to do his sandwich making when (not if) he got tired of the job. On and on we went, slapping jelly on one slice of white bread and peanut butter on the other, putting them together, bagging them, and passing them down the line.
We took a short bathroom break about two hours into the job and I listened to my son talk to another preteen about regular preteen shit: Fortnite, whatever they had seen on their brain-breaking YouTube channels, and finally, the sandwiches they were making. The boys realized together, with an assist from a nearby elder millennial (me), that the folks who would eat these PB&Js had no reliable access to food. Yes, they would have these sandwiches for a day or two, at most, but after that, they would be what we call “food insecure.”
The boys put two and two together and recalled that term from their schools, where children are served free breakfast because so many of them have nothing available for breakfast at home. These boys go to school in one of the single richest school districts in the United States.
“That’s screwed up man,” the other boy said to me and my son. “They don’t deserve that.”
We nodded and went back to our seats to make the final few hundred peanut butter and jelly sandwiches of the day.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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