Good Riddance, 2025

     There is no evidence the next year will be any better -- and it could be a great deal worse -- but the past year has, I think finished undermining my faith in the essential goodness of my fellow human beings.

     Those old postcard photos of lynch mobs, grinning and unkempt, posed around the bodies of their victims, aren't an outlier.  It's who an awful lot of people are.  I no longer trust them.

     When the COVID pandemic came along, the amount of denial and misinformation surprised me.  I thought we had fewer fools than that; I thought we had fewer demagogues and fewer people who didn't understand or believe in modern medicine.  Still, we muddled through: not great, not terrible. 

        The January 6, 2021 attack on Congress and the U.S. Capitol shook me, especially with the clear evidence of the violence having been egged on by Donald Trump and his allies, and allowed to proceed for hours without effective intervention; but it did fail, and Mike Pence and Congress stepped up to complete certifying the vote, and I thought the worst was over.  Then the reframing and retconning began, and way too many people were happy to go along with it.  The impeachment effort failed, stymied by weak-kneed Republicans.

     Joe Biden came in, and I continue to think he did an okay job.  We've had some colossally bad Presidents, and he wasn't that; the pandemic response continued effectively, the economy got a little screwed up, but the United States had a faster, stronger recovery than most nations.

     The January 6 Committee got off to a slow start but finally picked up steam -- and the GOP officially refused to join in, aside from a few Congresspeople who defied their party leadership.  That's not the act of a party confident their guys did nothing wrong.  The Committee came through with facts and figures -- and the same denial and retconning kicked in, with nothing to support it but vibes and bullshit.

     Still, it seemed for a little while as if the Republican party's experiment in personality cult was over, and they were going to deny it every amounted to anything.  --And then their demagogue came roaring back, Biden's age caught up with him, and 2025 loomed.  But how bad could it be?

     It's been bad.  The dismantling of Federal agencies, the ongoing, pernicious erosion of database firewalls that have protected our freedom from government meddling into the private lives of Americans, the demonization, harassment and persecution of disfavored groups -- it's Autocratic Rule 101, and the sole saving grace has been that much of it is being done in an inept, half-assed way, with many of the worst actors focused on lining their own pockets or pursuing individual ends without overall coordination.

     This has been an awful year.  Polling suggests the voting public, having Fucked Around disastrously, may now be Finding Out.  The tide may be turning -- slowly and far too late.  The once-useful conservative party -- the third to inherit that mantle, after the Federalists and then the Whigs -- may have done their reputation irreparable harm.  The often feckless and ineffectual liberal party (historically not consistently liberal; the split between parties has had a lot of regional and economic variation) had shied away from New Deal-era anti-fascism and support for broad democracy and it remains to be seen if they can claw their way back; they're got a long history of reinvention and it might come through again.

     2026 could be worse.  I hope it won't.  I hope the broad sweep of elected politicians will manage to find their spines and replace doing whatever they can get away doing with being upright and moral, and looking to the long-established ideals of our country and the dignity of humanity.  But I've given up on optimism.  It will be what it turns out to be, and I'll do my best to get through it.

     We were supposed to have settlements on the Moon and Mars by now!  Electricity was going to be (almost) too cheap to meter! We were cleaning up the air and the water, managing the land wisely....  The future isn't what it used to be.  I just hope it won't be too calamitously bad.