The world is a fucked up place.
Everywhere you look you’ve got dictators and wanna be autocrats trying to rule over the peasants. A lot of them are spending time making more serfs just so they can rule over them.
There isn’t one singular source of this rise of totalitarianism. There are some major ones. But a lot of it is death by a thousand paper cuts. I can point to tax cuts under Reagan as a driving force behind the techno-billionaires today, and the wage gap they crave. I can point at Newt and the ‘Moral Majority’ for Congress’s inability to legislate. Citizen’s United for the rise of bribery. Gerrymandering for the inability to hold elected officials responsible. The erosion of the Glass-Steagall Act leads directly to the issues in our banking / investment system. I can point to 9/11 as a force behind the anti-immigrant sentiment. I can point to Obama for the rise of Christian Nationalism. That’s just in the US. The rest of the world has it’s own problems (and a ton of those were gifted to them by America) but I don’t have time to dig into the things that led to all of them.
If you take a step back and wonder how we got here, it’s easy to trace everything back. And I’ll be honest, a lot of that goes back much further than I said. I just brought up recent inflection points. Some of them can be followed back to mistakes before this country even existed.
It exhausting. I see so many things that are moving in the wrong direction. The tragedy is that the solutions are so simple. I know that’s one of the signs that the solution is wrong, but I have to feel that some of this stuff has legitimately easy answers.
Of course you can’t erase racism in a day. And some of the other problems would take years to actually correct. But is the solution really that difficult to identify? Not really. Limits on political leaders. Restrictions on bribes. Restrictions on billionaire income. Radical revamping of the education and financial system. A lot of them are easy wins for anyone with the will to do it.
So why don’t we do it? Money and power. Haters want to hate. Players want to play. Motherfuckers want to motherfuck all day.
Politically leaders have to have their dead hands pried from the levers of power. They’ve already place their thumbs on the scales so they can’t lose an election. Oligarchs never see any consequences for their money grubbing ways. Bribery, lawsuits, blackmail and slander are their tools of trade.
The ultimate ‘I got mine’ attitude.
I used to scream at the wind a lot more. But I’ll be honest. My throats sore, no one in power cares, and those of us not in power are either impotent or ignorant. By choice or by circumstance no one has stood up to tear down the wall. I don’t like to admit that I’m tired. It’s easier to escape. Ignore. Detach.
Historically, patterns say it will get worse. We haven’t reached a tipping point yet. There is still time to right the ship. But not much. If we don’t, things will get violent. And nothing will be the same.