Disclaimer: I’m in a mood so I’m just going to rant here and not worry about trying to provide examples or citations to support any of my opinions. Just know that I am a middle-aged female who has been paying way too close attention to the news since around 2016, and I am heartsick and tired. Here goes:
People these days think that conceiving of outlandish, grandiose, horrible, unthinkable things isn’t enough, but they must make these things happen, must bring them about, to prove that they can enact their horrific visions, have total agency over their lives, the rest of humanity be damned. Being told that you can do anything you want, be anyone you want, is the greatest fallacy of western civilization; it has raised up some petulant, spoiled ass children. They forgot to teach the other side of the coin, that if you can do anything, so can everyone, so one must consider that you live in a world with other people who might have competing viewpoints/interests/needs/wants.
Case in point, Elon Musk. He wants to be the world’s first trillionaire, and it’s not enough to merely think of it, he must now bring it about, no matter that it means he is indirectly causing incontrovertible environmental, planetary, and human damage. One person hoarding most of the world’s wealth, that is not how it should be; just because it can be told in a fairy tale, does not mean that one should work to bring it about ‘just to see’ what it’s like. And yet, here we are. And there are so many other examples. The ‘inevitability’ of an AI take over, allowing everyone to access guns everywhere, building huge resource-sucking data centers, expunging immigrants from the country like rats. All of this ugliness, we’ve been here before as a species, but we don’t remember, so it must not have been that bad. Right?
That brings me to the point: we don’t remember things. Information and learning are generational; every 20-40 years there is a turnover of cultural memory, and it’s no surprise that, ultimately, no one cares about the lessons of the past. I remember learning history, and not giving a fig about it, because I didn’t ‘feel’ the reality of what the struggle was for the people at the time; I naively thought ‘whew, thank goodness we solved all of those problems back then.’ And now I’m living through ‘unprecedented times’ myself, unable to really give voice to the experience as I’m living it. Those of us alive and under 80 today, we didn’t live through the world wars, we weren’t there when Jim Crow was real, when women were only allowed to be wives and couldn’t vote, when children died from diseases…other, braver, more patient people were there, and they made changes that took YEARS to bear fruit, and yet they did it anyway.
We learned those things in school because at some point as a civilization we must have decided that we had to teach future generations about the gains of the past so that we didn’t waste time recreating the wheel, or reinventing refrigeration; we were supposed to be building on the knowledge of our forefathers and foremothers to make an even greater human society for all. But we lost our way somewhere in there (maybe in the 1970s), and now it’s almost like we naively want to go back to those before times just to “see what it was like” for ourselves, like some kind of living diorama Disney ride.
Someone is making money on all of this, I guarantee you, they are burning Rome for profit, but we are the ones suffering; they’re building bunkers for themselves and their progeny, knowing that ultimately it will come down to the last rich person alive atop an ash heap of bones, and they just want it to be them, the the Amazing Race for billionaires. They don’t give the rest of us or the earth another thought; they are products of this brave new society as well, with little education and zero empathy, but all of the money behind them. And because their money insulates them now, they assume it will continue to insulate them into a dystopian future, and fail to see how their actions are bringing about the end times. Never mind of course that there might not be much use for their money if there’s no clean water, trees, vegetation, animals, or other people to tend to those things.
Only now it’s worse because a few people in power are choosing this new backward/bizarro reality for the rest of us, all for greed and control, not because they’re holy crusaders (don’t be fooled, although I guess one could argue it has always been a ‘few’ people in power making these sorts of decisions for the ‘rest of us’). The people in power now know that most people, like themselves, are easily fooled, don’t have a chewy moral center, don’t have a sense of history, don’t have empathy for their neighbors. I worry that, not only will we be forced to relive those harsh realities again, but also that we will get stuck there this time. We, like Marty McFly, won’t make it back to the future, because they will have ripped up the picture showing that it existed.
Listen, we won’t get a do-over because people won’t see a need to escape this brave new luxe world, they won’t have the patience and endurance to change it again by degrees for all of human history. In the 21st century we are an impatient people, raised on immediate gratification, television and the internet; we don’t know what it means to stand up for something, and we don’t have a soul anymore. Those of us who don’t like this new upside-down medieval reality, the ‘woke’ leftists, will either be imprisoned or put to death (if these people have their way), leaving behind these crooked and morally bankrupt demons to run things and rewrite human history. Spoiler: this time the corporations will really win.
And here’s the thing: I’m also impatient for the future I was promised that is being summarily demolished before my eyes, daily, and on fast-forward for the last one and a half years. All I can do is grieve what I will never have, because now that I’m 50, I’m running out of time to ‘get mine’, to ever know what retirement could have been. The Boomers were the first and last generation to have and be able to take proper retirement. From now on, it’s the haves and have-nots in extremis; people who have money will be fine; the rest of us are so screwed because they are destroying what little hard-won social safety net there was. They’d better legalize physician-assisted suicide again because that will be the only human way to opt out of this insipid reality when you’re no longer able to be a contributor to it. We won’t be allowed to go gentle into that good night.
To recap, we can conceive of impossible-seeming things without giving a thought to the consequences of those things (like ginormous data centers and detention centers), and bring these awful, unimaginable things about, consequences be damned, just because we thought of it and because it makes someone money. That coupled with the fact that modern society also lacks a moral center and has cultural amnesia, I’d say we are primed for the tangible end of humanity. After all the hard-won victories over injustice throughout human history, it’s not enough that we have made amazing progress beyond dirt-floor dwellings and can have fruit out of season; no, we must start repealing hard-fought laws that people died for, because we don’t remember why we had those laws in the first place.
“Rule of law? Who needs that when we can have chaos and rape and pillage whenever we want! Only the powerful/those with the most guns rule! Surely women and minorities were exaggerating about how bad it was back then; after all, didn’t people like chattel slavery and women liked wifely servanthood and dying in childbirth? Sure it was rampant with disease and death, but but did you SEE those plantations? People knew their place. That was true luxury.” –Some MAGAt somewhere
Lack of social/cultural memory, overactive imaginations without consequences—it’s like we’re being run by giant toddlers who never developed a super ego to teach them to do unto others, etc.
I especially grieve for the future generations, our children, whom we are raising to be active participants in democracy, not to passively believe that politicians and governments would protect us. The US exists in a world where other, more civilized countries can and do provide health care to their citizens, but the US persists in thinking it is the wealthiest, most enviable nation because it war-mongers and makes money for its capitalists. Corporations are individuals now, and their needs must be considered before the needs of the people, because jobs, jobs being quickly overtaken by AI and ever-escalating greed.
Life should be about more than what labor can be extracted from you; life is meant to be lived and enjoyed; if we were careful custodians of it, the Earth would provide for us all. But the people of the US have long been brainwashed into thinking this is the best of all possible countries, while every lesson we didn’t learn in history class screams the opposite. The good guys don’t win in the end, heaven help us all.
Chicken Stew 