I just saw an email with the subject line “Gutting the Student Loan Program” and realized that I’m tired of seeing reports about another outrageous thing done by the grifter’s regime that comes with that breathless feeling of “do you believe they’re doing this?”
Of course I believe they’re doing this. They’re out to destroy everything good about our government. They’re gutting everything you ever though was worth having, not to mention things you didn’t realize existed or realize you needed.
None of the attacks surprise me anymore and I don’t need breathless reports about the latest one. (I think this email is about firing people at the Department of Education, which the Supreme Court just permitted by overturning a stay even though it’s pretty clear that the underlying litigation should be successful.)
Much more useful is what the people at Unbreaking are doing, which is detailed reporting about the ways in which the regime is breaking the government. Looking thoroughly at each bit of destruction is much more useful than spinning outrage, especially since it can provide a way to fight back.
We’re constantly faced with “which one of these things is worse” calls every time an issue comes up. But they’re all bad.
Right now I tend to think the fact that the government employs people they claim are law enforcement agents and lets them go out with their faces covered (not for health reasons) and without badges to kidnap people off the street, coupled with the building of concentration camps and the mocking of the people they lock up in them, is the worst thing that’s going on.
But the overall destruction of good government programs – from civil rights protections to the National Weather Service – is probably just as important, if not as immediately terrifying.
We do need to know about all the different things being done, but pretending to be outraged about the latest one as if we didn’t see it coming is driving me crazy.
The other thing that’s driving me crazy are all the little bits of “good news” shared on social media and in other newsletters.
Now it’s not like I don’t go through the news, looking for signs of hope. But the trumpeting of a bunch of small victories that don’t come close to balancing out the terrible news drives me nuts.
Rebecca Solnit shows how to get the right balance of this in her newsletter Meditations in an Emergency. She often shows how the small things add up, how we’ve got huge numbers of people taking action, where this might go, but she also tells us when things are getting very bad.
But most people just list a few small successes. I agree we need to recognize when we win, but the scales are still tilted heavily in the other direction.
What I’m looking for are the changes that are going to make things shift in the right direction. I do think that’s going to happen though, like Solnit, I’m not sure what it’s going to look like.
It’s possible that the thing that tips us over the edge and back to regaining our sanity as a country may look like (and even be) a bad thing at first, such as a disaster that’s the one too many.
Or it could be something that teeters on the edge of absurdity and sounds like it was written by The Onion, like all the nonsense about Epstein or even the fight between the grifter and his former pet broligarch.
A recent piece by Bill McKibben in The New Yorker discusses the fact that renewable energy is absolutely the future and may even be successful enough in time to help improve the climate change situation. It’s adapted from his forthcoming book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.
I don’t know if that will fix anything in the United States in the short term, but it does strike me as very good news at a time when government agencies that deal with climate change are being destroyed and fossil fuel companies are getting big benefits.
Obviously we all need to keep doing something and watching out for the thing that will tip the momentum our way.
In the meantime, let’s stop with the breathless “do you believe this awful thing” stuff and being overenthusiastic about minor successes.
Just show up where you can.