A new year

    I’m writing this the week before Christmas, but I’m scheduling this to go up on the first of January 2022. Happy New Year! Or perhaps, a slightly less than miserable new year. 

     I remember everyone being so excited for the 2020’s. We were so tired of how awful things had been that anything we could hope for, we did. To say nothing of the fact that we were all told how amazing the 1920s were, it had been thirty years since the nineties, and in school we learned that the great decades were spaced about 30 years apart from one another, give or take.

   I don’t need to explain why that didn’t happen. 

   I remember the excitement when 2020 ended. It had been awful, but things had to get better now. How could any year possibly be worse than 2020?

    Six days after the new year started, the capital was overrun, and fascist attempted to take over the United States.

   I can’t think of any particular events that made 2021 awful after that, but I think we can all agree that it failed the moment it started. The pandemic is still going strong, republicans get stupider with each passing day, and every right we thought we’d won is being taken from us, bit at a time. 

     I don’t think it’s unreasonable to feel like this year won’t be any better than last year was. 

    I hope it is. I want so badly for all this madness to end. But I keep hearing people talk about going back to normal, and I have to ask, what normal do you want to go back to? The 2010’s sucked. They were better than now, but we still elected a monster to the white house. The 2000’s were mostly okay, apart from declaring war and Iraq and Afghanistan and the recession close to the end. I know everyone talks about how great the nineties were, but I don’t remember the nineties at all. No one born during or after 1995 would be. There’s an entire generation of people for whom the only normal that’s even appealing is a normal they don’t remember at all. That normal was before gay marriage was legal, before high speed internet, before most social media. They were better, but they weren’t great. 

    We can’t try to go back to normal. Even if the pandemic ended tomorrow, that wouldn’t be possible. I will never condone the choices that got Trump into the white house, but his election should have been a wake-up call. It was a sign that we were deeply unhappy and nobody who could fix things wanted to fix them, or even seemed to be aware that there were problems. 

     I don’t have any solutions. I don’t think anyone does. We’ve only dealt with a situation like this once in human history, as far as I know, and as soon as it was over, we tried to forget about it. We can’t do that again when this is over. We need to learn as much as possible. I don’t want this to happen again. 

Holding onto hope

    I know no one reads my blog. I know my thoughts probably won’t have any impact on the world, good or bad. But I think I need to say this, even if no one will see it.

    I saw a thread on twitter today, talking about how the right is planning on criminalizing abortion. About how they’re going into full gear to strip rights away from women as fast as they can. And one tweet really stuck with me. 

 

   I confess, I agree with the sentiment. Not that long ago, I thought all our problems could be solved. I know I’m not the only one who grew up thinking that war, hunger, and greed were all things of the past. We’d grown as a species, we’d learned from our mistakes, we wouldn’t break things to the point where we couldn’t fix them anymore. I thought that all the way until 2016. I realize that I was naïve, but I honestly wonder if progress would be possible if we weren’t just a little stupid. If we realized how utterly pointless our lives were, would we even want to keep living?

   But I’m not going to give up hope. Not because I think we can win, but because the moment we give up hope is the moment we truly lose, the moment the world stops belonging to us. I used to think that democracy was pure, that all you had to do was believe in it and the rest would sort itself out. The more I learn about the world, the more I realize that isn’t true. No matter how good a system is, the people in charge don’t care about you, not because they’re cold and heartless, or even because they don’t know your name. They have an impossible job. The have to try and create a system where everyone within their borders is happy. Any competent leader quickly learns that this is impossible. People just don’t want the same things. I think the reason corruption is so rampant in politics is just that it’s so much easier to be a corrupt ass hole. You don’t have to worry about pleasing people, since the populace will just hate you anyway, and you get more stuff. 

   I don’t think we should give up, I think we need to let go of the idea that there’s a way of fixing major issues in a systemic fashion. The system, democratic or republican, will always benefit those in charge. It’s important to remember, those in charge don’t control the world. They may make the laws, collect taxes, build roads and schools, but the only reason they’re in charge to begin with is we let them be in charge. We’re the ones who create the wealth they convinced us belonged to them. The only reason our economy works is that we agree that it works and participate in it daily. 

   I don’t want to vilify those who participate in our system. I despise it, but a lot of me wishes I could participate in it, rather than rant about how unjust it is because I know it has no use for me. But I want you to remember, you aren’t powerless. Every day you get up and go to work, you are shaping our world. Anything you do will have an impact. If all you can do is tweet your frustrations about how your life sucks, than do that. If all you can do is complain to friends and family, than do that. Whatever you can do, however you do it, it isn’t meaningless. A story told time and time again is a story of how a small mistake doomed the world, so whatever small acts you do will help in the long run.

    But if you have to give up, because it’s too much, that’s all right to. The reason the republican party is trying to strip rights from people is because they know if they do it enough people won’t want to fight anymore. They’re doing it because they know it works, and growing up in a world saturated with ads, I’m not ashamed to admit that propaganda is deeply effective. Our world is broken, and it’s beyond the abilities of any one person, no matter how strong, to fix it anymore. 

    I can’t claim to have a solution. I only fight because I hate feeling powerless. I’ve spent my entire life keeping my mouth shut because I didn’t think anyone cared about what I have to say. I confess, in a way writing feels liberating. It doesn’t matter if no one cares, I’m still allowed to say what I feel. I just want to help people hold onto hope at a moment where hope is increasingly hard to find. If I can do that an any way, I’ll be grateful.