If you had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, who would you choose?

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I would want to switch lives with The Doctor, which means that I would not have the brain that they do and would need to lean on Kate and UNIT to get things done. That being said, I think I could improvise my way through a normal day at UNIT which is crazy by anyone else’s standards.

I wouldn’t be going in blind, because I’d have advice from Aada floating in my head. Mostly just to keep calm and think fast. Rule following gets you nowhere in The Doctor’s universe, or ours, really. I am more powerful than I’ve ever been simply because I see the machinery behind society and I want to change it. It’s time to burn down the entire system of governance because it was built on the labor of enslaved people.

It takes someone at The Doctor’s altitude to be able to change something this big. We need input from other nations, particularly Scandinavia and the Nordics, because their governance is built on equality, not whiteness. To be clear, racism does exist in those countries, but it is not institutionalized, and that makes all the difference.

You do not appear before a judge wondering which system of justice you got, and that is the reality in America whether Donald Trump is the president or not. There are still people serving long sentences for carrying what is now a perfectly legal amount of pot on them, and that is just one way in which Black people are disproportionately paying for the crimes of all. A white person and a Black person in the same situation will be treated differently, because white people carrying the same amount were described as boys being boys and now, they shop at a dispensary that looks like an Apple store instead of still feeling the wrath of Nancy Reagan.

Being able to look at systemic problems like this from the outside would be helpful. A week away with a UK home and planet hopping would do me good. The only thing I need to remember is that I am only in charge of so much. The TARDIS is the real boss, and she knows it.

The relief would be in thinking about different problems so that I have new energy to bring back. It’s not just drug laws, it’s inequality in health care, the aftereffects of redlining, the destruction of affirmative action and DEI initiatives. It’s all too much, because that is just the domestic layer. At the same time, we are fighting too many wars for absolutely no reason. 

On a fundamental level, not our circus, not our monkeys.

We as a country are not known for our good boundaries these days, and “these days” isn’t the whole story. We’ve intruded on other countries besides Iran, they’re just our current obsession. Isolationism and Imperialism are best served by a nonbinary and not absolute, but at the same time it’s different to send supplies and support than it is to put American boots on the ground.

Because from my perspective, why?

Why risk American lives in a conflict that wasn’t ours to begin with? No one is asking for our help except Netanyahu, and that is officially bad business. It is the same in Russia. Twisting Zelenskyy’s story so that he is the aggressor is just funneling a message from the Kremlin. It does not represent American values; it expresses the fact that Trump sold his soul to Putin a long time ago. That is not United States messaging.

We in the United States love the Russian people and hate President Putin, and I’m sure that is how the rest of the world views America- they love the relatives they have here and cannot stand our leader…. which is entirely fair. I did not vote for him; I am living out the nightmare that comes with being the losing party.

Because the party didn’t lose. The country did.

Trump was always going to be a Russian UI (Useful Idiot) if not a full-on asset. Hillary Clinton told us that from the beginning…. and even though she is making the best of it, I am sure that she, like me, is watching the world burn and……………. concerned.

The only way to survive is to rise above, and a week with The Doctor would be flying over the issues the United States has. It’s easier to see them all when you’re looking down.