(Be warned: This is an edited transcription of my vocal rambling. I’d post the audio link but unfortunately I’m under the weather with seasonal allergies and wouldn’t be able to edit out all the sniffling and coughing.)
I’m almost tempted to call this 20 minutes of rambling bullshit. That’s pretty much what it is, because while there’s a common theme it’s really a moment of catharsis, because we’re sitting here four months in to this madhouse of an administration, a regime, a dictatorship, whatever you want to call it. We’re here, and it’s plainly evident how things are going to play out if nothing changes.
Things will continue to get worse, with people reaching a breaking point and having moments of genuine resistance. Maybe it’ll be bloody, maybe it won’t be, but we’ll eventually get through to the other side. We’ll reach a point where this country will not have the deranged, incompetent, actively harmful leadership that it currently has—but we won’t have fixed anything. Even if we have the golden ticket in 2028, a progressive dream president, blue Congress, reform galore, the mechanics will be fixed. But my struggle with idealism right now is because of the people, not the system.
The public at large, humanity, we don’t learn lessons from history. We learn pieces, but we don’t learn the greater picture: look to the past, notice the trends, and then shut them down before they become a problem. The signs were here years ago, but we ignored them because we were more focused on our daily lives and not early signs of possible religious fascism. We as a species generally we don’t care unless it affects us. That’s not a recent phenomenon, that’s just human nature.
Its in our DNA. We didn’t evolve for a continental awareness, the average human (based on what I’ve read) can’t have more then one hundred or so relationships in their life. Platonic, professional, any at all. You can still care about broader issues, and many do—but it’s uncommon. It’s not the default. Those who do care in other ways, who do worry before it affects them, they are the exception. They are the triumph of our species’ sapience. Not just sentience, but sapience. And through this, they consider what comes after.
A hundred years ago, the worst calamity of warfare to ever happen happened. A total war. An entire continent shredded, many parts of it destroyed. The greatest human tragedy caused by humanity happened. Complete industrialization of slaughter, a nationwide effort to gather and kill an entire people. Now it’s in vogue to question whether it happened at all. I don’t think that’s just the domain of the Holocaust deniers either. I think in the wake of that kind of trauma, people want to ignore it. They don’t want to acknowledge it. That’s why General Eisenhower, the moment he saw what happened at Ohrdruf, he ordered photographs to be taken, and everyone who lived nearby to be brought there and to be made to look and see for themselves what happened. Maybe they knew, maybe they didn’t, but now they wouldn’t be able to forget.
Those who witnessed cannot forget. Their children will remember. Their grandchildren, however…It seems to be in human nature to ignore that which you find uncomfortable. Maybe you reject it outright. Maybe you believe alternative theories. Grandchildren weren’t alive during the prime of their grandparents’ lives. It’s just stories, and in our age of ‘post-truth’ stories are what you make them. Maybe they don’t like to think about it. They put their head in the sand.
As a species, we take two steps forward and one step back all throughout history. Even then, progress is not evolution. We’ve made better tools. We’ve made more comfortable lives for us, but we have not become better humans. We still have these same emotional flaws that led to the Crusades, that led to Genghis Khan, to Alexander the Great, to all of these men throughout history who thought that the invented concept of glory and conquest is worth not just them dying over, but all who stand to stop them. Allies they gather to fulfill their goals. There’s nothing worth going to war over. There’s nothing that is so extreme that we should kill over it. Does that mean that there are not moments where you have to respond to violence inflicted upon yourself with violence? No. Your country is attacked. You have to defend it, but was it worth it? Of course not. You would’ve much rather war not break out at all. Wars always have an instigator, and those instigators are to blame—yet what good is blame when everyone’s dead?
It’s easy to just not care about what doesn’t affect you. You see it in this administration. How many farmers are complaining now because there’s no one to go work the fields, to gather the crops? Yeah, that’s because ICE, our own Gestapo, rounded them up—and you just can’t seem to educate people on why they should care.’First, they came for’ is a powerful sentiment because it’s by a repentant man. He wrote that because he was one of the bystanders. It’s not a message of bleeding heart, ‘this is what we must do because it is right.’ It’s a message of someone who realized there was no one left to come for, to look after him, because they came for everyone else. It’s a selfish message, but if selfishness can be made to work for collective good? Go for it.
I believe Tolkien, in one of his writings, mentioned that he felt that humanity’s natural state was effectively anarchism. Like, consider the hobbits. Consider that they didn’t really have much of a government, to speak of, they all just kind of had their space. They handled matters in an ad hoc situation, but you know, you had communities, but there was no real administration. Each ruled their own domain in the same way a homeowner rules their home, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, the hobbits weren’t able to exist like that forever. They had to change. They had to confront the harshness of reality marching onward into the unknown future.
So Tolkien decided that in the absence of his ideal system of non-government, a centralized monarchy is the best alternative. Benevolent dictatorship in essence. What the king says, is. Imagine the USA with a system like this, and a sane leader in charge. A storm hits a state? Aid is ordered, it is delivered posthaste. People wish to live their own lives their own way without hurting anyone or contributing to hurting anyone? Any laws intruding on that are stripped away. It’s great, until they die. That’s always the problem—and even if that was somehow avoidable, with an immortal king? You live long enough and I am convinced that you no longer will be able to rule according to the common man. We’re meant to die, not go on forever.
Maybe that’s just the inevitability of human existence. There is going to be no utopia because we are ever-changing. People come and go, they live and they die, and all good times will eventually lead to bad times. It’s like Hopf said: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” It doesn’t matter how many men plant trees they’ll never enjoy the shade of; eventually they die and their descendants just want some more wood today. Why care about tomorrow?
It’s a lot harder to sell proverbial tree-planting if every few hundred years everything gets wiped out in one way or another because we don’t learn the goddamn lesson, which is ‘don’t let things get so bad. Act first, don’t wait and see if all historical signs point to tragedy.’ Act in that moment.
What’s going to happen is people in this country are going to be pushed to the point where they have to respond. Like Churchill is quoted as saying, us Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing after all other options have been exhausted. It’s not just us though. When push comes to shove, most people will do that. The people we need to be in power however, those who are measured and long-sighted, who will not give into temptation and megalomania are never in those positions of power. Maybe they have influence and power of their own, as part of a whole—a whole that, due to the simple virtue of your average person being short-sighted, believes differently than these few.
So I struggle with idealism, and optimism, because each passing year, each passing month of this year, it’s so much harder to imagine that we’ll actually learn from this moment. George Friedman predicts the 2030s to be an era of American enlightenment and prosperity. Maybe so, but what will we learn from the long and painful road to that era? What happens when that era fades? We’re being cut so deeply, and we feel the pain, and we’re going to eventually grab the knife and pull it out, and we’ll patch ourselves up, but we’re not going to remember the lesson of that pain. We’re just going to remember that the pain was bad and let’s not think about it anymore. Why did we start being cut? What led to it? It won’t even cross our collective minds. And the little nagging voices in the back, those small voices that are speaking the truth, they’re so easily overpowered by the desire to just put your head in the sand.
I’m still committed to the actions that I’ve declared in the past, of working to bring about saner leadership and all of that, but I don’t have much hope in it lasting. Maybe not even lasting long enough for those trees to bear fruit. I suppose that’s what they mean by cynicism in the classical sense. You still know what you must do in society, but you know what’s going to end up happening eventually. Maybe the goal is to give the next generation a shot at having a nice time, and the one after them, well, that’s Generation B’s job.
My life has taken a (temporary, I know rationally if not emotionally) downturn recently. So, you know, there’s a lot of that in the background. I realize that these are not the words of a man who lives in Candyland, but this feeling has been nagging for awhile now. I’ve been working to maintain my optimism as best as I can, because morale matters. If you feel better about the situation, you’re more willing to act in ways that actually make the situation better. It just kills me to see so many people not learning the fucking lesson.
There’s people down in Mississippi, and then other parts of the South and the Midwest that have been hit by storms, begging for FEMA aid. And Trump’s not going to give them that. He doesn’t care about them. They can’t admit it. They can’t look at what’s clearly evident, that the guy they supported doesn’t care about them. They can’t accept that. So they won’t, and he’s going to continue hurting them. And they’re just going to not think about it. Not talk about it. ‘Don’t want to think about it.’ ‘It is what it is.’ Don’t want to fucking think about it. If that isn’t the watchword of this entire century so far, and really about half of the one before it.
Who the hell knows what happens in 2028? Like, like not just electorally, but after that. I’m not someone who thinks that we’re not gonna have elections in 2026, or even 2028. I think there will be influence, but I think they’ll even still be legitimate. Do I think that Presidente el Capitan, our Illustrious Leader Trump, will be leaving office on January 20th, 2029? Absolutely not. I think he’ll have to be taken out of there at gunpoint. Or he might have already died of old age, or someone might have shot him already. He will not have a peaceful death. I know that much—but it doesn’t matter, because there’s always gonna be another. I’m not talking about Vance or his kids. It’s just… Trump is merely the latest in demagogues that leverage the people’s collective ignorance for their own ends. Throughout all of history, we can see we’re still the same hairless apes we were thousands of years ago. Eventually, a long time from now, we might evolve to a higher state of thinking. Maybe technology will be the answer.
Like I said, I’m still committed to doing what I can however I can, but if I manage to make it to 2100, which I acknowledge is unlikely, but if I do? My words to the generation whatever-the-fuck that’s in school then learning about what came and thinking about what will come is: Hold on to your butts, because humanity loves reruns.
