Say that title line the way you would intone “they were the best of times, they were the worst of times…” while thinking about these times that we are in, and the humans that populate them. You already know everything I’m going to tell you below, this is very much basic, master of the obvious stuff, but yet I must vent.
Times here are exceptional in a very American way, wouldn’t you say? We live in the cruelest times, but we also live in times when we can cure leukemia, but … oh boy, does it cost.
There are cruelties abounding, but even the poorest among us can command more energy than ancient kings; yet people still occasionally die of starvation, heat, cold, or medical neglect in our country. Meanwhile techbros jet across the world just to proclaim the latest quirk in technological invasions now dawning upon us as we speed towards Vernor Vinge’s singularity.
People are living longer, but they’ve become prey to con men able to enter their homes, their phones, their televisions, their lights, their garage door openers, and every other little thing they own. Even the simplest technology requires an account, sometimes a subscription, and an app from the web just to work, and you have to fiddle them to no end just to get them to understand what you want them to do.
Entrepreneurs steal the tiniest details of our lives as they surveil every click so they can put their price points at the highest we will bear and collect business intelligence to help them swindle more than their competition.
We are in a time when government transparency and citizen participation in our government could be the best ever achieved through technology, yet we are all in the dark about what is happening with our leadership. Trust in institutions used to be a given, but now we see them being torn down and sold for parts. ‘Non-partisan’ agencies, institutions, and units of our government are regularly manipulated for personal & political gain or vendettas, and zealous appointees parade through our news bites like a horrific clown show full of cruel intent.
We just orbited the moon again, skyscrapers rake our skies at ever higher heights, we have tunnels under the seas, but masked government goons march through our cities savaging our citizens at the unpopular behest of a madman while people of color are whisked to concentration camps, and immigrants get renditioned to authoritarian countries.
We’ve also elected the very worst leader in all of U.S. history, a 34X convicted felon, with a penchant for telling bald face lies before audiences who accept & promote those lies — while knowing they are false. Our president has been found civilly liable for rape, has admitted to sexual abuse in interviews on national television, and he’s has abused our constitution and executive powers so egregiously and often that nobody can keep full track of it.
We the people, of the United States, chose to change our leadership . It was not some simplex thing either. This change was not comprised of one driver, but instead came from a steadily worsening path way of wrong fork chosen many times; a path that led us from revered, favored country & as David Brin puts it “The least-hated Empire” ever, to ‘most reviled nation’ status right now on the world stage.
I’m assigning the blame for all of this to us: we did this. We collectively allowed things to get to this state where Trump and his crony coalition could come to power — so take some personal ownership. It doesn’t have to be this way, it really doesn’t, and every one of us should be doing things every single day to change this horrific timeline we are in. Thanks for your time while I vented, I appreciate you.
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