In the last few months my mind has been possessed by the nagging realization that this country has no future. Some of it is a response to immediate events. Last night as the Iowa fiasco was unfolding, a bunch of my fellow NJTransit train commuters were stranded due to a broken Amtrak train stuck in the tunnel. Combine that with an ineffectual impeachment hearing sputtering to a collapse this week. It seems that nothing works and everything is run by people who have no clue what they are doing.
But once I thought about it some more I realized all this was the most recent manifestation of what I have been seeing my entire life. America's institutions have grievously failed for decades, the rot setting in deeper and deeper. Our finance system's recklessness crashed the economy. Our universities exploit adjunct labor while turning themselves into high-priced diploma mills. Our prisons house a fearsome percentage of our population in squalid conditions. Our churches shelter the abusers of children. Our police murder innocent people with impunity.
None of this is getting fixed. These are issues that I can remember being a part of the public discourse since I was first aware of that discourse all the way back in the 1980s. There just isn't any room for any kind of future.
We can see this in our culture and built environment. We have made it impossible to build new housing in our cities and suburbs in the name of "neighborhood preservation." So many of our movies and television shows are sequels and reboots, recycling the past in the name of an overweaning nostalgia. There is nothing to look forward to, so we might as well just escape into the past or throw ourselves into the neverending present.
We can see it in our policy, which drips with contempt for the young. The world is warming but we refuse to do anything about it. We deny our children pre-K childcare and access to healthcare. We see teenagers getting shot to pieces in their own schools and do nothing to limit access to guns, despite their pleas. The message our society consistently sends is that elders are planning to live until they die and to let the youth handle the consequences of the world they've left behind.
I do not see any escape from this in the political world. Conservatives are completely wedded to nostalgia ("Make America Great Again"), and even if a progressive Democrat is elected president, they will be able to do little in the face of obstruction. Progressives have a different nostalgia for a more "civil" time that never existed, and they falsely believe that they can merely turn back the clock and not reckon with the damage being done. The left purports to be the wave of the future, but they still get into fights about the legacy of the Soviet Union, for crying out loud. No one is trying to claim the future because everyone knows there isn't going to be one.
Admit it, you know that's the case. That's why when elders look upon young people protesting gun control and climate change and they smile and say "The children are going to save us" I get so unbelievably mad. It's a way of deflecting their responsibility for having given the youth a huge bag of shit. We all know the gun issue isn't going to change. Those rifle-bearing militia members in Kentucky and Virginia are telling us the blood will flow if guns are regulated. Fossil fuel companies have a stranglehold on our politics and I am beginning to think our country's decision in the 20th century to be a sprawled-out auto culture is irreversible. We are prisoners of the past in more ways than one.
As bad as things are now, they are going to get a whole lot worse. Dying empires are never fun places to be.
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