(I Initially wrote the following as a response to AngryTeacher’s comment on Booman’s most recent Serious Question post of March 18th. It grew…plus I didn’t want to have to fuss around with possible kneejerk zero raters…so here it is as a standalone. Please go there if you want to read AngryTeacher’s whole comment. It’s a good one.)

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AngryTeacher wrote…regarding a trip that he recently took through Northern and Western VA:

What I didn’t hear was much belligerence, for or against Mr. Trump.  The overall sense was one of exhaustion with the news, exhaustion with the constant political combat.  This surprised me.  I was expecting a lot more fighting spirit, on all sides of these debates.  People just seem exhausted.

You need to go to the cities and talk with the younger people and ghetto dwellers to hear belligerence, AT. Older people…and by that I mean over about 40… generally seem only to be exhausted and worried about their future and the future of their families. And no wonder…the country has been through a lot in the previous couple of decades.

A necessarily incomplete list follows:

The unmasking of Bill Clinton as a sexually obsessed fool, liar and neoliberal seller of the U.S. down the river to globalist corporate interests instead of a well-functioning president, the theft of the two Bush II presidencies backed…or at best passively accepted…by both parties, 9/11, the Iraq War, the hope offered  by the growth of the digital info world and the taking over of that world by those same hostile, entirely self-interested globalist corporate forces, the continuing rise of wanton and mostly random violence in the country, the shipping out of much of the industrial economy to low-wage countries and the resultant economic breakdown in the late 2000s, the fall of the middle class, the decay of the country’s physical infrastructure, the shattering of thousands of years of widely accepted sexual…”preferences”…and the societies that were based on them, the unmasking of Barack Obama as a willing tool of the Permanent Government and its surveillance state instead of the fervently hoped-for “Peace President,” the rise of China as a more-than-just-competitive world power, Putin’s rise as essentially a hostile dictator controlling a serious military and nuclear arsenal and quite obviously angling for a return to power in Eastern Europe, the ongoing fracturing of the European Union, the success of terrorist tactics as societal disruptors, the whole refugee swarm that has resulted from those many factors and the societal changes that it has wrought, the changes in the climate and the threat of much worse changes to come, etc.

And then there was Trump, followed quite rapidly by the concept of false news and the misuse of social media as a propaganda weapon.

The cappers.

Talk about a “New World Order!!!”

The end result?

Sure.

Read on.
People are now mostly confused, especially people who have lived through this rapid, ongoing decline. They don’t know who to trust anymore…except of course for the Fox News addicts, who are by and large belligerent as hell in defense of Trump. At least they have something to trust, stupid though it may be. They’re stupid, too. You cannot eliminate the stupid from the human genome; you can only either attempt to control it or use it as a weapon…as has been the case with Trump and the Republican party.

And so here we jolly well are, aren’t we. Two Democratic presidents and two Republican presidents later…if of course Trump can be accurately labelled a “Republican”…still accelerating down the tubes.

It’s no wonder many people are not belligerent towards the bad actors on both sides of the UniParty aisle. They are too shell-shocked to be belligerent. Too frightened. Too fucking exhausted. Societally shell-shocked. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on a national…possibly even global…level.

He also wrote:

I was expecting to see a much greater divide between blue and red.  Instead, what I saw was a a class divide.  Those with large bank accounts and diversified portfolios were less fearful, more sanguine about the fate of the Republic.

Yup.

“More sanguine about the fate of the Republic?”

No surprise there. “Republic” is the first part of the word “Republican,” and if nothing else, the Republicans have always taken care of the upper middle and wealthy classes. As long as they remain in the catbird seat, those with large bank accounts and diversified portfolios simply have less to fear than the rest of us.

Will this situation change?

I really don’t know. I used to think that it would; I used to think that the flow of evolution which has marked the entire history of life on earth would continue the way it has gone since time immemorial.

Intelligence, ever upward.

I’m not so sure anymore.

Maybe artificial intelligence is the next step in evolution. Or maybe a blend between human intelligence and AI-assisted intelligence.

Whatever.

I do know this:

Unless we get our shit together…and quickly…there is a serious reckoning approaching. It may be economic; it may be nuclear; it may be climate-driven or it may be a combination of all of those things plus other, heretofore unforeseeable events, but we can’t keep on the way that we are going without drastic consequences.

Hunker down, AngryTeacher. There’s more right around the next news cycle.

Bet on it.

AG