I remember my childhood mostly as a happy, oblivious one, affordable food, the usual disagreements between liberals and republicans, but nothing unhinged (say taxes, migrants or abortion). At least it looks reasonable today.
Now it’s like everything is unhinged: politics seem to be based on purely emotional reactions and the other side is hell bent on destroying the country: texas starts heavily gerrymandering to secure 5 extra republican seats at the next midterms? california starts lobbying for doing exactly the same and dismantling an independent redistricting commission texas never had.
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing. Now we execute people with nitrogen gas, meaning a conscious person has to breathe something he knows its going to kill him during 4 minutes. This is somehow not cruel and unusual. And nobody bats an eye.
I still don’t get how populists can be so popular now, they simplify complex issues most people without a degree in the matter, cannot grasp. This includes me.
I’m now 35 and wonder if I’m already talking like an old person who misses his young days so hard. I see that in people in their 60s and hoped never to become one of them, but here I am. To a younger person I may look like one of those old guys who lives to rant.
Am I going to feel even more detached and depressed with each passing day?
The cruelty was outside our borders. The rational, reasonable debate was for domestic issues. Foreigners got the bullet.
As the empire collapses the cruelty turns inwards i.e. fascism.
This is exactly it. For Westerners just feeling the weight of the military-industrial complex, this feels unbelievable. The reality is, we were ignorant. Maybe we knew that Bush invaded Iraq, and had seen the pictures of Obama’s drone strikes in Yemen, but seeing those events could never match the daily toll of knowing you’re being targeted every single day. The few times that these crises bled onto US soil (Kent State, killings of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, police brutality at BLM protests, Jan 6th insurrection) it felt like an unbelievable atrocity, but this was what the anti-war movement was trying to highlight.
I thought I understood what was being said because I knew the facts. Trump’s reelection showed me how wrong I was.
“We were just minding our own business invading other countries for oil.”