Like many others here who have been around on Daily KOS for several years, I’m too angry about what has happened to this country over the course of my lifetime to put into words . I’ve been threatened with banishment from this site a few times just this year alone for speaking my mind; perhaps my generation handled fascism, nepotism and gangsters differently in our day — which is to say, “going high when they go low” was for dog fighting in combat aircraft and not for dealing with treasonous bastards. But time marches on, and generations get to pay their particular prices for their own particular sins of omission.
2020 may well go down in future history books — if those books survive fascist bonfires — as a defining time in the 21st century for the human condition; did medical science and the ancient musings of John Locke
manage to ultimately save that abstract idea called “America”? That chapter has yet to be written, and both the heroes and the fools wait in the wings, ready to play it out.
As for 2021 and beyond, personally, I admit to being tapped out on that “hope-y, change-y” thing from this pandemic. A couple friends have died needlessly; a few more have been sickened; several have lost their businesses; many are unemployed, barely hanging on and fearful. From a cultural perspective here in Hawaii, what made living here especially wonderful was being able to greet friends and family with hugs and kisses in public — and and now that is gone forever, taken from us by a selfish, vicious criminal. In fact I imagine the entire personal culture and demographic of the world has undergone a horrible change for the worse because of this, and made people even more cruel and distant than normal, if such a thing is possible.
I’ve tried to think of something to offer going forward into 2021 for people to remember as we move into a new administration and hopefully begin to pick up the pieces of this country. A new election season looms large in 2022 and 2024’s clouds will be gathering on the horizon soon. The other day I was thinking of a photograph I remembered that properly depicted what the republican cabal has done to the United States of America and its people over the last 45 years… but it was taken in 1943 during the Nazis retreat from Russia, destroying the Russian railroad as they retreated. Like the Nazis, if the republicans and their corporate masters can’t control it, they destroy it. And I hope that the people here who write diaries and make comments as well as the voters in primaries and general elections realize that. This isn’t a reality teevee show or a video game; these people are playing for keeps, and they’re playing with our lives.