The Year of Living Hopelessly

Things are not going to get better.

It’s not that the problems are too entrenched, it’s that the people are too stupid. Enough of them, anyway. Enough of them to tip the balance in a system that’s already wildly imbalanced in their favor.

We’ve run out of hope.

Hope was slim to begin with. We’ve been wildly late to fix things, perhaps too late already, but we had a shot at it, a shot at turning the ship around, or at least making an effort. And we still do, really, although the reasons we didn’t last year are unchanged going into this. Joe and Kyrsten are not going to stop being Joe and Kyrsten.

Merrick Garland is not gonna stop being Merrick Garland either, whoever he is, because hell if we know, we think he was somebody once. Louis DeJoy is gonna keep being Louis DeJoy, and nobody in a position to stop him seems interested in it. The national political media is gonna continue being a shame to journalism, manufacturing balance instead of seeking truth.

All the flaws that were revealed in our nation’s structure of governance and institutions that were revealed during Donald Trump’s time in office have not changed in the year since he violently left. Last year was, at best, amelioration, a moment where things didn’t keep getting much worse. This year will be the same, almost, as well as the next two: Whatever isn’t being done, it’s still better than what could have been done to us.

Not that things won’t get worse. We’re still sliding downhill, if not barreling. There was a major wildfire near Denver just before New Year’s, a thousand homes destroyed. In the middle of winter. Where it has barely snowed this season.

It wasn’t a freak occurrence. We’ve known this is coming for thirty years. We’ve been watching it unfold over the past ten. Joe and Kyrsten suddenly coming to their senses wouldn’t have prevented that. And in two years, it’s entirely possible that anything they might have done would quickly be erased, anyway. But it would have been something. Anything.

This is why we can’t have nice things, goes the line that was recently popular, oh, let’s say five years ago. Haven’t heard that much since the bottom fell out of everything, since we were no longer able to ironically shrug about it. There’s still a tsunami coming, and treading water ain’t gonna cut it.

Shit’s not gonna get better. The best we can hope is that it won’t get a lot worse. Hey! Hey! Be careful out there.

10 Comments

First Bet he White and now Aristocrats killed Bob Saget.

@ManchuCandidate: I’ve seen one person so far mention Full House. Everyone else is going for the good stuff. (Except fellow comedians, whose honest praise for the man really contrasts with the bullshit we hear when politicians die.)

@nojo:
Full House isn’t a legacy I would want to be remembered for.

Societies that are collapsing don’t self-correct, in fact they seem to lean-in to their collapse and do even more of what was causing them to collapse, with the exception of the United States in the 1930s. Is it possible we’ll get lucky and turn it around twice? Looks like we’ll find out in the next two to three years.
Sad to say, the centrist Demonrats have failed spectacularly to meet the challenge. America’s best and brightest have flunked the tests so many times that the only conclusion is they’re losing on purpose because it’s now more profitable to destroy the country rather than preserve it.
Merrick Garlandtointte certainly isn’t going to save us. Let them eat endless investigations.
We’re experiencing first hand the effects of atomization, in which our communities are broken down into only our families and ourselves. Our challenge as individuals is to survive by finding meaning in this mess.

@¡Andrew!: I remember years ago — many years ago — thinking how close this country came to losing it in the 1930s, and then, many years later, now living through the rerun.

I really don’t see what stops it. All we do is lose what little time we have to make even the mildest effort at preventing it.

Ten charged with seditious conspiracy, so Merrick’s doing something.

@nojo: Garland is doing everything by the book, ring by ring, conspiratorial layer by conspiratorial layer until he is holding the completely informed case against Trump, with every evidentiary resource available to nail him for elections fraud, insurrection and treason. Mueller’s stuff will finally pay off when it is used to trace funding and collaboration threads back to Kremlin-managed venues and personnel involved in the run up to J6. People are confusing the DoJ with the WWF. It would be nice for Garland to get on TV twice a day and describe how he going to rip out Trump’s heart and eat it but it’s not the kind of thing that a long-game prosecutor would normally make time for.

None of it will matter until Garlandtoinette indicts the ringleaders and funders of the 1/06 terrorist attack, including Congressional Republinazis and Tr666p.

I’m still burned by what a worthless coward and a fraud that Mueller turned out to be.

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