Told By An Idiot

There's a strong recency bias or maybe an availability heuristic at play in people proclaiming that this is the most divided the U.S. has ever been as a nation. Start with the fact that there was a period in history where we were actually physically divided as a nation, where both of those sides were engaged in active warfare one against the other resulting in over 600,000 deaths, and it already can't be true. At first I meant this to be a somewhat soothing comparison to help put the present crisis into some perspective, but there, now all I've done is remind myself just how had it can possibly get.

It's a common phenomenon of the Trump Era: the constant reassessing of the state of affairs with a bemused/terrified "oh, this is not the bottom? We can go lower? Really?" And then we do.

It's a status quo where the intentional driving over of civilians by a deranged ideologue is only terrorism when it's done by a Muslim. When it's done by an American Nazi (two words that should never have been put together again since we straightened that asshole Charles Lindbergh out back in '41) and the victim is someone who maybe wouldn't vote for Trump ever, well, hey, sometimes shit gets crazy, man, what can you do?

I'm not here to say don't worry. Probably worry. I'm not here to say lay out, don't fight it, it will pass. Stand up, kick, struggle. There's a somnambulant, narcotic effect to history in too broad a scope, where things either work themselves out one way or another OR the effects on the ground become statistical white noise, a trivia of scattered and conflicting false narratives signifying nothing.

Dozens of people died in the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. The Army sent out tanks in the streets of Washington, D.C., to face down not only American citizens by World War I veterans specifically in 1932. And you know, there was the thing I said before, with the 600,000 dead people, only half of whom were traitors to their country, but it's easy to track which was which because of all the fucking statues.

So the perspective part isn't to say just wait, the moment will pass. Because the danger is that it is true, the moment will pass, but what it looks like on the other side is still undetermined. Looking at historical examples of human action hopefully emphasizes that this is not the time for paralysis of thought or action because it's all so overwhelmingly awful, we'd all rather anesthetize ourselves with Netflix and Honey Bunches of Oats. No, time marches forward because time is a property of, like, quantum something or other bound by the laws of an objective physical universe speeding inevitably toward entropic heat death. History is the independent cluster of recordable human actions that take place within the framework of time, but it doesn't move forward on its own. It has to be dragged on, usually against its will in a sweaty, straining struggle against the clawing inertia of How It's Always Been. But it is malleable, permeable, shapeable. Trend arrows can be flicked at their pointy ends from slightly downward to slightly upward. There shouldn't be any such thing as hopeless people* because there's no such thing as a hopeless situation.** Somebody just has to be willing to do the work. And somebody usually is. Maybe that's you? Fuck this blog-reading shit, man, go be Harriet Tubman. Best case scenario, some day you get to knock a genocidal racist off some currency.

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*Unless you're clinically depressed, in which case I'm not judging you in any way. Hang in there. You're a trooper and I love you.

**Maybe looking up at the edge of a cliff you've already fallen off of, I guess. Look, these pronouncements aren't absolute.