The Nightmare Continues

The United States certainly wasn't in great shape before 2015, but I feel like since then we have been in one long, unmitigated crisis. That was the year Trump came down the escalator, but that wasn't the only harbinger of doom. The same summer brought the white supremacist massacre in Charleston. Both were expressions of white male anger, the one cloaked in politics, the other naked violence that politics barely concealed. 

We have become so used to this violence that the white supremacist terror attack in Buffalo hardly seemed to register with most people. I was dismayed when a week later nobody online seemed to be talking about it. The Uvalde massacre happened soon after, and the sight of another classroom of elementary school kids being slaughtered temporarily shocked the country out of its torpor. 

After a few days of rage, I feel like most people upset by the shooting and by law enforcement's incompetence and lying have started to quiet down. Deep down we know that nothing can change. Hell, the Senate Majority leader let that body go into recess rather than keep people there to solve the problem. Schumer knows as much as anyone else the stasis we are in. Without a repeal of the filibuster, Republicans will block any action.

The fact that members of the ostensible progressive party are prioritizing a procedural rule enacted to protect slavery over the lives of this country's children really says it all. Nobody really believes in the future anymore. Nobody thinks the status quo can be altered. Progressives put their "In this house we believe..." signs on their lawns knowing that proclaiming their ideas in such a way is the extent of what they can do. We put up our signs, wave our flags, and do absolutely nothing. 

Cities are unaffordable, but we don't build housing. The earth is warming, and we give out gas tax refunds to reward pollution. The reactionaries are a bunch of horrible crypto-fascists, but the people who are supposed to be fighting them are basically worthless. I guess I could include myself in that, too.

All the while, the crisis never ends. Gerald Ford called Watergate "our long national nightmare" but that lasted for only a year and a half. We have been in this crisis state for seven years now, and while progressives have been ineffectual, the fascists have been confident despite losing bad in the last election. This crisis cannot last forever, and despite the hopes of the weak liberals out there, it will not simply go away. I said in 2020 that it could end only in a new birth of freedom. That doesn't look like it's happening, which makes it increasingly likely that this can only end in a new birth of fascism. Get your passports in order, folks.