Even as someone who was well old enough to remember 1968, I can’t shake the feeling that this … today … is worse. And that drift toward fatalism isn’t helped when Dr. Michael Osterholm predicts “another 12 to 14 months” before we’ll begin to feel true relief from the pandemic.
There’s a psychological fragility in the air that I’ve never felt before. 1968 was a terrible year. But even with 400 or more GIs being killed a week in Vietnam, (i.e. less than half of one day of this pandemic), even with the assassinations, the street protests and riots it was still possible to grasp The Silent Majority’s rationale for supporting the war, for supporting Lyndon Johnson (until they didn’t) and eventually Richard Nixon. The Commies were bad. We couldn’t let them win … no matter how much damage we did to ourselves.
It didn’t make a lot of sense. But it made some sense.
As much as we loathed Johnson, Nixon, Curtis LeMay and all the establishment warriors of that era, in retrospect at least we regarded them as fact-based characters. Rational but seriously misguided.
Today though, and without question, our fate, is in the hands of utter fools. Fools lacking even a waving relationship to scholarship, honesty and the basic efforts of their job decriptions. Fools being given stalwart legal support by deeply cynical (i.e. Nixon-like) characters, but fools none the less.
The combination of an eight-month old pandemic for which the government still has no plan, and against which our president long ago decided not to bother fighting, racial tension as bad as 1967 and a truly apocalyptic wildfire season out west, a scene long predicted by Osterholm-level climatologists and regularly mocked as a “hoax” by fools creates a cocktail of despair unlike anything in my lifetime.
I was a big fan of “Game of Thrones”, but the “Winter is coming” jokes have lost their gallows humor punch.
Write it off as the congenital mental weakness of elitist libtards, but I am struck by how often and unbidden friends and neighbors are saying, “God, I’m dreading this winter.” And how could a rational person not?
We have an election marked by utter stupidity and “viciousness”. An election we know with near total certainty will end in a culture war battle royale no matter who wins.
Plus, we have an unmitigated pandemic that is almost certain to regain deadly strength as we seal ourselves back indoors and cut off what limited physical contact we’ve been able to enjoy with others. And, as I say, all that plays against terrifying, conclusive proof that scientists have been right all along about both virus and climate … and yet the fools are still mocking both. So yes, the ingredients are there for a season of extraordinary psychological pain.
Facing this, every trite homily will encourage us to practice saintly quantities of patience toward each other. Some might even advise that each of us has to take heightened responsibility for our own sanity and stability … in order to be of any value to others. But the larger question is, “What percentage of us are prepared to reflect on our responsibilities to the culture at large?”
And will that percentage be enough?
Even if Donald Trump is dragged out of office, his army of self-pitying fools, catalyzed by their grievances, their sense of humiliation or their anachronistic genetics far more than any policy, will continue to resist and obstruct any science-based plan to restore “normal order.”
So yeah. If you have a new, stronger prescription for rose-colored glasses, you know where to find me.
