Does anyone else feel like they are living in Back to the Future II or is it just me?
For those who need a refresher, Marty and Doc travel to the future, then return to the present only to find the space-time continuum has gone haywire, landing them in a nightmare version of 1985 one ruled by a corrupt billionaire who has transformed Hill Valley into a dystopian hellscape. Sound familiar? Because I swear, we are in some alternate universe where every day feels like a bizarre twist on what life used to be.
I start my day catching up on world news. Sure, my mental and physical health would probably benefit more from lemon water, a 5km run, or some meditation, but here I am. Each morning, as I scroll through the latest events, I feel like Marty McFly, dazed and scratching my head, thinking, “What the actual hell is happening?”
We often sit back in Australia and convince ourselves we are immune to what is happening in other countries. But we are not immune as we saw in the Bondi terror attack in December. And just yesterday, in many of our capital cities, neo-Nazis marched through our streets shouting “White Australia” slogans, cloaking their hatred in the language of anti-immigration and “protecting our culture.” The rhetoric is escalating, and the violence is no longer theoretical.
Watching the death of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse in Minneapolis, over the weekend and then watching the Trump administration attempt to tell us what we can see with our own eyes, is a form of passive-aggressive gaslighting that has the potential to inflame an already combustible situation. When those in power deny reality itself, they don’t just insult our intelligence they corrode the very foundation of truth we need to hold societies together.
There is a demonstrable rise of hate and anger in the world. According to recent reports, hate crimes have surged across Western democracies, with attacks on women, minorities, and marginalised communities increasing at alarming rates. Loud voices and anti-rights movements are deliberately playing into people’s fears, exploiting economic anxiety and social fractures to advance agendas that roll back decades of progress, particularly for women.
As a feminist, I can’t help but notice the patterns. The same movements stoking xenophobia are attacking reproductive rights, rolling back protections against gender-based violence, and actively working to push women back into subservient roles. In the U.S, abortion access continues to be dismantled state by state.
Globally, according to UN Women, women’s rights are regressing in 40 per cent of countries. The gains our mothers and grandmothers fought for are being systematically eroded, and we are supposed to just accept this as the new normal.
Last week, Trump dismissed NATO troops’ sacrifices, claiming they didn’t fight on the front lines of wars America pulled us into. Wars fought to defend the very freedoms he now takes for granted. The disrespect is staggering, but it’s part of a larger pattern, the rewriting of history, denying facts, and destabilising the international order that, for all its flaws, has prevented another world war for 80 years.
A friend told me recently that after watching the news, she had a good cry because everything felt so depressing.
“It feels like we’re living in an alternate universe,” she said, “in a world I don’t recognise.”
I understood completely. We are increasingly divided, allowing hate to be sown into the fabric of our society like poison seeds.
And here is what breaks my heart: this isn’t just happening to us. We are letting it happen. We are normalising the abnormal, accepting the unacceptable, becoming desensitised to daily outrages that should shock our conscience.
In Back to the Future II, Doc tells Marty they have to go back and fix the timeline before it is too late. Maybe that is our call to action. We cannot go back in time, but we can refuse to accept this corrupted version of our present. We can speak up when hatred marches through our streets. We can support each other when the news becomes unbearable. We can resist the gaslighting and cling fiercely to truth, empathy, and our shared humanity.
Because right now we are far from being great. And 2026 already feels like it is balanced on a knife’s edge, one push away from either falling into the abyss or finding our way back to solid ground. The choice of which direction we fall can still be ours to make.