James Leo

Shortly after November 5th, 2024, I began to write a piece on the national media’s role in that evening’s result, their complicity and failure to tell us what many could see right before our eyes. Then I got a little sidetracked: On November 11th, early in the morning of a crisp Mexico City autumn, our son James Leo Harwood Bachi was born.

At one point, the doctors told us that his birth might in fact take place on November 5th. Given how things turned out, my wife Daniela and I are both glad that he stuck to his originally scheduled arrival. During a calm period of the labor, a member of the team looked at me with wide eyes and said “Qué tal Trump!?” It was easily the last thing either of us wanted to talk about in that moment.

My mom has told me of how excited she and my dad were that I was born soon after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. After twelve years of cultural sterilization and right wing consolidation under Reagan-Bush, the Man from Hope was a breath of fresh air. I admit that I wished to feel something similar, my own son’s birth coinciding with the death knell of the Trump era.

Fortunately, most of us are not “handcuffed to history” like Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children. We are influenced by it, but not helpless before it. And, of course, we can shape it as well, but not always in the way we might think.

I’ve found that many in the world of national politics are caught up in grand narratives, believe themselves swept in the wave of transcendental changes that supersede the mundanity of daily life, smaller obligations. They neglect their immediate circles, believing that they have been chosen for something greater than themselves, that daily kindnesses pale in the face of that broader altruism. (Paradoxically, we feel the movements of national politics most acutely when they hit us at home - lately in the form of a friend or close relative suddenly and callously laid off).

In the days since Leo was born, as I’ve steadily internalized his sounds, movements, expressions, everything has a different color than it did before — lighter, more expansive, the wind-changing feeling of a new and constant love. Sure, thousands of people have babies every day. But as we’ve moved through this new experience, one day at a time, I’ve found that its commonality — you could even say ‘mundanity’ — does nothing to diminish its transcendence, at once gentle and profound.

It’s sort of like this, we all have this internal chain tightened around our chests. We kind of like it because it keeps us grounded, safe, linked to consistent thoughts and habits. Sometimes we experience how it might feel to dissolve that feeling, go beyond it — a feeling of genuine bliss. Usually we catch it in fleeting glimpses before the chain takes us back down to earth. These first four months of family life, exhausting and stressful as they’ve sometimes been, have afforded me that glimpse, a window into that bliss, which I think is accessible to everyone, anyone, family or no, and comes about unexpectedly, sometimes in the quietest, most quotidian moments.

So don’t let them fool you. Our daily lives might sometimes seem small compared to the high-stakes dramas playing out at the national level. We might feel helpless and overwhelmed before the onslaught of daily catastrophe. It doesn’t change the fact that there is magic in the everyday. That’s where the real stuff, the good stuff that life is made of, is always taking place. It doesn’t mean that elections aren’t important — we have already seen with striking clarity just how important they are. It means that they’re no more or less important than any other day of the year.