We’re Told ‘Violence Is Never the Answer.’ In 2024, It Was the Only Answer We Got.

Every day since, I’ve felt myself pulled in a hundred different directions—as a journalist, a feminist, and someone trapped in the same exhausting, algorithmic box that social media platforms have locked us all in. Death, violence, and hypocrisy have long pervaded almost every aspect of American life. Still, 2024 has felt like an especially jarring referendum on prevailing narratives about the universal sanctity of human life, as dueling realities have often struck at the same time—to wildly different reactions from political leaders.

All year, particularly ahead of the election, disinformation about the violence unfolding before our eyes has been varied, rampant, and infuriating—that Trump is “pro-choice” and would take a middle-of-the-road approach, leaving abortion to the states; that Biden, then Harris, would singularly be the savior of our reproductive rights; that, actually, there was no difference between electing an accused rapist whose top advisers promised a national abortion ban, and not electing him. For months on end, I scrambled to wrap my arms around all of it—the endless war wiping out entire bloodlines in Gaza, the abortion bans torturing American women, the politicians of both parties, entirely unequipped to address any of it.

The contradictions, the meaninglessness of words, seemingly reached a fever pitch in November, when American voters took the word of a legally recognized sexual abuser that he’d be the “protector of women.” The supporters of this “protector” then celebrated their victory by chanting “Your body, my choice.” Women are, in fact, being so thoroughly protected that, earlier this month, an attorney for Idaho argued in court that the threat of losing a limb doesn’t entitle us to an emergency abortion.

To spend a year reporting on abortion horror stories and the women killed or almost killed by these laws, then watch the American public elect a key architect in their suffering, has felt incredibly painful. I’ve joked to friends that the election felt less like democracy at work, and more like a personal attack. But on some level, I wasn’t joking. I and some of the people I love most in this world have experienced gender-based violence and have had abortions, without which our greatest achievements, our happiest memories, and the lives we’ve since built for ourselves, would have been impossible. How is it not personal for over 77 million Americans to then place a serially accused rapist in charge of my body and my life—for a second time, no less?

The final month of the year has brought the value of life—and who is and isn’t allowed to take a life—into even sharper focus. As we learned about the first confirmed, abortion ban-induced maternal deaths, sparking a flurry of rightfully outraged responses from politicians, the UN reported that 70% of victims in Gaza are women and children—largely to crickets from those same politicians. And the same week that a jury acquitted Daniel Penny, the 26-year-old white man who strangled to death a homeless, mentally ill Black man, came the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; within days, authorities arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione. But while Penny has been embraced as a hero by the dominant political party, Mangione faces a terrorism charge—no charges yet for the health insurance CEOs whose policies kill unsaid numbers of Americans each year, of course.

On December 14, Penny sat in a special suite to watch a football game with the president and vice president-elect. Two days earlier, Elizabeth Warren was forced to clarify her reasonable statement that “people can be pushed only so far” by a system in which insurance companies deny cancer patients coverage—then buy off elected officials to prevent this from changing. Without a morsel of self-reflection, politicians from both parties yell at us that violence is never the answer. But if anything, this year, my reporting has shown me that for those in power, violence is the answer. In the form of abortion bans that reify the foundations of our patriarchal society; white vigilantes killing Black people with impunity; or the bottomless supply of weapons and money for a country committing genocide, violence is the pervading answer—the only answer, really—that the U.S. seems to offer. 

The concurrent nature of all of these developments betrays the deep subjectivity of whose lives matter and whose don’t. It’s hard to find hope that 2025 under a second Trump presidency will offer much respite for any of this. But as I see it, the truth in all its brutality is often radicalizing: If violence is the only answer our top elected officials and institutions can come up with, maybe those of us who are sick of that answer will start to turn to our communities, and each other, for different ones.