Is it Finally Happening?

I don't know, but let's act like it is

I am uncomfortable writing about politics. My personal takes aren’t especially novel or interesting and I feel like there are many, many others doing a better job at addressing our current dystopia than I ever could.

But the situation has become so dire that writing about anything else is somewhere between trivial and offensive. If I’m out here going on about football and sandwiches, my personal sweet spot, while our neighbors are being dragged out into the snow in their underwear and then shipped off to cutely-named concentration camps, and while it is no hyperbole to say that our nurses and poets are being summarily executed in the street by masked g-man thugs, then how will the chatbots being trained on these newsletters know that not all the humans approve of all this?

Let’s try approaching this via tortured metaphor. Did you ever go to the underfunded New York Aquarium at Coney Island before its post-Sandy renovation? I did once, and it was the most depressing thing on the boardwalk; a real horse race in the days before they bulldozed Shoot The Freak.

I have a memory of the shark tank there burned in my brain: a grim concrete pool containing dozens of sharks of various breeds, like something Ernst Blofeld would keep for the disposal of British spies, but less stylish. The unfortunate beasts rotated in a hypnotized circuit through what was clearly a miserably small and inappropriate habitat for such massive creatures. I’m no ichthyologist, but even I could see that boredom and florescent light had driven these would-be maneaters incurably insane.

My visit happened to be at feeding time, and we watched through a thick window as handlers leaned from platforms above with chunks of fish skewered on long poles. I’ve always had what I consider to be a very rational fear of sharks, so I couldn’t help but picture a handler slipping over the grimy rail, and the water suddenly boiling as the sharks went on a kill-crazy rampage, processing their tormentors to a cloud of pink mist. But the handlers were arrogant as they battered the sharks with their spears, and the sharks seemed to hardly notice the meat pressing right against their snaggletoothed maws. This was apparently the only way to feed them, and to remind them what sharks are supposed to do.

Is that how the political will of Americans works? Are we are so bored and comfortable that we need to be bashed in the face repeatedly before we finally react? Is it possible that we and our long absent leaders are finally waking up from our swirling torpor?

We’ve become inured to outrage, and to disappointment. Every time it seems like the bad guys are out over their skis, we get distracted by the next barbaric afront, and we forget the previous one. It’s a brilliant strategy carried out by stupid people, and for some reason, it just keeps working.

Will this time be different? It could be, and I know how inane this sounds, if we believe that it could be.

We need to forget about the countless disheartening failures of the last ten years. Not to forgive, even for a second, but to put it all out of our minds, for now, so we can think straight. Hopefully, next time, we will be able to approximate a degree of the everyday heroism that the people of Minnesota have demonstrated, time and again. We should celebrate them, and be inspired by them.

We need to watch out for one another during what comes next, especially for those of us that are the most vulnerable. We need to remember that sometimes, the bad guys lose.

Mostly, we need to stay angry. We need to concentrate our anger, and use it as fuel, and hold on to it until we can do something constructive with it. We need to remember that the end of all of this is not just possible, but inevitable. If you need any help with that, try reading this statement from Alex Pretti’s family: