For 20 years, Wahabi insurgents condemned the "cosmic enemy" of the Great Satan across the Atlantic. The United States was a handy rhetorical punching bag for radicals of all stripes, many of whom ended up on the American payroll, often wittingly. Some tried and failed to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 and the country slumbered through it. Then in 2001 they succeeded and in doing so, launched an existential war that set back Islamic relations with the west by a century. Support for a total abortion ban has dropped from 21% to 13% since 1976 while unrestricted legality has climbed from 22% to 35% and yet, the laws conservatives have run on are Orwellian in scope. The very same interstate commerce clause that the Roberts court used to uphold Obamacare strikes down most of the laws about to come in force, yet for votes, the conservatives doubled down on their cosmic enemy. It's gonna be ugly. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the US and Japan had an uneasy trade dispute in which mainstream Japan figured American embargoes would end shortly after a sneak attack. After Pearl Harbor, the "deep state" of Japan knew the war was already lost while the Americans edged closer and closer to genocide. But Japan was never going to win. Everyone knew it. The only question was how bloody it was going to be, and whether the Japanese could hang on long enough to force a stalemate that didn't result in their utter cultural extinction. I'm fuckin' tired of living through history, man.
I keep trying to remind my pessimistic friends that things are going to get better not worse, and that we’re living through the transition. Predicting when it’s going to get better is about as easy as timing the market except way slower. Could be 5 years or 50, and that’s not a great consolation.
The idea that things have to or will always eventually improve is not really something we should be so bold in assuming anymore. Might've been a "boomers and before" thing.
There’s a general and a specific response I have to you. The specific: W got re-elected largely by pushing a wave of anti gay marriage state constitution amendments in 2004 that brought the creeps out to vote. DOMA had passed Congress with veto-proof majorities a mere 8 years previous and was signed into law by Clinton. Not even Obama thought gay marriage was a good idea until Sleepy Joe forced him to say so. The backlash was swift and punishing against the bigots. People like me who has never really even thought about the issue before were suddenly steadfastly opposers to any and all politicians who were anti-gay bigots, and a mere two election cycles after W’s reelection, Obergefel (sp?) was the law of the land. My point is that they can awaken beasts they want no part of awakening. It has happened before and will happen again. We’ve never seen the Court strip away a previously granted right. We’re in uncharted waters and it may get ugly, but the side of humanism will win. The general: “This time is different” has been the refrain since the day Jesus emerged from behind the rock and promised to return. Malthusian thinking is not new and is also perpetual. Eventually there will come a day when this time will, in fact, be different. But every generation thinks that time is now and has so since the beginning of time. I am, admittedly, a betting man, and I like betting on solid favorites. Takes a lot for me to take an underdog. The reason is that everyone wants an underdog to win and everyone thinks he’s smarter than the market, so the value is usually on the favorite. Same here. We have a cognitive bias toward the here and now, but past is prologue, and there’s no actual reason to suspect this time is different. We’ve come a long way in a short period of time with respect to individual rights and respect for each other. In the 90s when I went to high school “fag” was the #1 insult and “nigger” wasn’t exactly rare. As a result there were like 2 openly gay people in my 2500 person high school. That was <25 years ago. Try to see the forest for the trees. This is a backlash. And it hurts and it sucks. No doubt. And it’s going to affect a lot of innocent people. But the arc of history is bending toward Justice at an incredible pace.
Fuck, dude, my posse belted out Charlie Daniels' "Uneasy Rider '88" around the camp fire. The last time I hung out with Pete he trashed a convenience store and beat the shit out of the cashier because "he was coming onto me." There were zero openly gay students; when the humanities class brought in two HIV-positive homosexuals to talk about their life experiences, the school board had the humanities class canceled. Chris brought a gun to school and threatened to kill his girlfriend; he was expelled but not charged with anything and resoundingly mocked for only being able to scrape up a .22. My daughter, who is nine, has three transgender friends.
(citation needed) I'm... probably four hundred history books in, dawg. Optimist, pessimist, liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist. From the discovery of fire to January 6. And here's what I'm saying: anyone who attempts to espouse perspective is getting shouted down right now. You're doing it. You don't know a tenth what I know about this shit and you're firmly at "my feefees are strong tho". Look - America isn't forever. But the massive hockey stick of progress in this here green world of ours? That's the wonder-twin powers of capitalism and democracy and it so overpowers every other system that it wiped out two entire fucking continents. Fits'n'starts, yeah, and the center of the world moves around but fundamentally, cultures with upward mobility have dominated their spheres of influence since the Sumerians. If we were sitting in Russia? Going "oh holy shit I guess the populace just prefers kings?" Well, Thing 1 I'da been outta there like fuckin' Dunkirk and I hope you woulda been too but Thing 2? Yeah. That's it. Experiment with democracy is fully done. But we're not. We're sitting in a country where half the population is coming to grips with the fact that the tiny splinter faction that believes in kings absolutely wants to take the country backward. You know, we had an amendment to ban booze. And then sixteen years later we had an amendment to ban the amendment to ban booze. In between we gave women the right to vote and moved the transition schedule. Now - are we in a place where we get four amendments in sixteen years? Abso-fuckin'-lutely not. And now? Now a big part of the country is about to go "and why is that exactly." Look, fucker. I got employees who trained up in delivering abortions ahead of this. I got money all over the country. You? You're at I-me-mine. And you're in Texas and for some reason, hell-bent on staying there. My sister got pissed off at the school board - now she is the school board. You want things to change? Fucking change things, don't insist that anyone attempting to assess the situation with clear eyes isn't panicking enough.
Yeah I keep getting shouted at for going "this is definitely bad, and as a provider of reproductive services it matters more to me than it does to you, but it is not the end of life as we know it because the overwhelming majority of the country disagrees with this decision." There's a real tedious liberal defeatism that requires beating up anyone who isn't as fully committed to screaming of the utter downfall of humanity at every fucking thing we predicted the Trump administration would do in 20-fucking-16. Mother Jones is fundraising off of some unnamed lobbyist who told the editor "people are going to feel scared and helpless, you should be a part of the solution" but from all I see? "The solution" is beat the shit out of everyone who tries to look at the situation with clear eyes.