Monday, January 3, 2022

The problems of 2021 are still here

     Why do they call this a “new” year? There’s nothing new about it. We’re still the same old people, dragging the same old problems after us.
     A flash of fresh energy and hope, as if the clockwork arrival of a new digit — a 2 instead of a 1 — is going to make it all somehow work, and the world become better, kinder, thinner.
     Yes, that’s what the problem was: 2021, the numeral. Changing to “2022” will fix everything!
     Then a few hours pass, maybe a day or two. We get hungry, and our old selves come loping back, like extras in a low-rent zombie movie. “Hi! Didja miss us?”
     The COVID we grappled with all through 2021 is right where we left it, in its supercharged Omicron form. Filling the hospitals with those who won’t take the free vaccine, for the same reason a toddler won’t eat his pureed peas. “I don’t want to! You can’t make me!”
     Yet they still show up at the hospital when they can’t breathe. So the same doctors whose advice they mocked a week earlier can stick a tube down their throats.
     And the same old Jan. 6 insurrection, whose first anniversary is Thursday, sits there and ticks. I guess it’s my job to Explain What It All Means, though, honestly, my heart isn’t in it.
     Really, for whom is explanation necessary? Either you understood all too well long ago or you never will. Among the many myths that liberals embrace — we can delude ourselves, too — a key delusion is that reason will prevail, truth reign triumphant, and at some point Trumpsters will slap their foreheads and go, “Ohhh, wait. We’re dupes swallowing lies spewed by a traitor! That’s so embarrassing!”
     It’ll never happen. Seventy percent of Russians today think Stalin was good for their country (Sigh, historians consider him responsible for the deaths of 20 million Russians, between his forced collectivization and gulags. Not to forget his non-aggression pact with Hitler).

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7 comments:

  1. Actually, not all Americans believed the attack on Pearl Harbor happened.
    The most infamous was Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, the sole vote against the Declaration of War against Japan, who said the attack was made up.
    She also voted against declaring war in 1917, in her other term in Congress.
    She was easily defeated in 1942.

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    1. My reading of Jeannette Rankin's vote against WWII was not that she questioned the attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather that Roosevelt had provoked the attack, a view espoused by quite a few Republicans long after the event. Her reason for the anti-war vote was unassailable though unpersuasive of course, "“As a woman, I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.” If it was wrong, it was still extraordinarily courageous and 100% honest.

      john

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    2. My reading of Jeannette Rankin's vote against WWII was not that she questioned the attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather that Roosevelt had provoked the attack, a view espoused by quite a few Republicans long after the event. Her reason for the anti-war vote was unassailable though unpersuasive of course, "“As a woman, I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.” If it was wrong, it was still extraordinarily courageous and 100% honest.

      john

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    3. That's not what the contemporaneous articles said about her vote.

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  2. It finally occurred to me why Trump supporters ignore the truth. They don't care about democracy or laws or decency as long as their agenda is pushed forward.
    Their agenda of course is white supremacy in the name of freedom.
    If this course continues they will get white supremacy but will lose the very thing they say they are fighting for… freedom. Then, everybody loses except for the ruling class.
    Joseph Heller had it right when he observed that all great civilizations eventually self destruct.
    But enough of the negativity. In spite of it all, I’m going to have a good day… one day at a time.

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  3. Trump should be in prison already.But he isn't. And because the Democrats have wussed out, he probably won't be going there. The only hope we have now is that maybe one day soon, Orangy Boy will drop dead. But even then, what are we going to get? A Trump Lite...someone a lot younger and less abrasive and with a lot more charisma, but who's still a Fascist. And he'll get even more votes, mainly because he's not Trump.

    But what the hell...it's a new year, and the one becoming a two is like the number on an odometer turning over inside me. It's been in there ever since I was a kid. And the miles are piling up. Trying to stay in good shape is like trying to keep a car from becoming a beater and giving up the ghost. One thing after another goes wrong, and after a while, it never stops. Maybe this is the year the odometer stops, at that last two, and I don't have to live in fear and dread of what's ahead in '23 and '24 and '25.

    Why have so many of the good folks just thrown up their hands in surrender and despair, or rolled over and played dead? Soon a lot of us may be surrendering for real, and not just playing at being dead. People are asleep, all over America, and the real nightmare hasn't started yet.

    What state will be the first domino that topples and knocks over the rest? Texas? Oklahoma? Georgia? My own benighted Ohio? And what will I even be able to do about it? Do I want to stay on board for the train wreck...or is it better if I get booted off by the Conductor at the next station?

    My outlook changes by the day...
    Even by the hour sometimes.
    Golden years, my ass...

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    1. I hear ya, and the "in what way is my body annoying me today" game is not a fun one, Grizz. On the other hand, here's (perhaps) some encouragement. You may not appreciate it, and it may be overly optimistic, but some ways in which "2021 WAS AN EXCELLENT YEAR"...

      https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1477201662238461953.html

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