Do things need to get worse before they can get better?

[glowingfish]

 A lot going on, some of which I will talk about later...

 

But of course, for a lot of you, the war might be on your mind.

So here is one thing, for people inside and outside the US, and also for younger people: right now everything feels shitty. And it feels shitty in so many ways. Not just the current war, but in that everything is more difficult, and it seems the prospects for the future. Like everything feels dark. I am 46 years old, and I can't remember a time when things just felt so...grey and disappointing. Even our simple, guilty pleasures aren't as good anymore. Like, cheap microwaved dinners are...more expensive, and taste worse?

But here is the thing: things seem so bad, and people are pessimistic, that it might actually make social or political change harder. Because people aren't thinking "What do I want out of life?" or "How do we live in a better society?" or even "I want better pizza!", people are just accepting that the base level of the world is terrible. And that if world civilization and economy aren't actually, 100% destroyed, then that is tolerable.

And maybe one day we (collectively) will wake up and not think of the world in terms of shitty versus shittier.

Also, incidentally, this is part of the double standard of American politics. Any serious plan for a beneficial program will be criticized as unrealistic, and people advocating for it will be very careful about any backlash it could cause. If a politician went out and said "lets add 5 cents per gallon of gas to pay for major mass transit projects", they would be criticized for living in a fairy tale and harming small businesses...but when Trump has driven up costs by so much more, across the board, it is just something people have to live with. Apparently. 

Comments

[glowingfish]

Part of what I remember about the 1990s and 2000s was Portland-specific.
I started community college in winter of 1996, 16 years old, and paid with bills for my tuition.
The biggest growth in expenses I saw was in education, housing, and health care. Also in the formality and difficulty of housing. But for my late teens and early twenties, I could still glide into those things. And other things were still cheap, if we were thrifty: this was the age of used book stores and record stores, and thrift stores, where you could still walk in with a handful of silver and get clothing and books. And through the 2000s, I was working/volunteering at Free Geek, where people would come in every day and dump literally tons of computers and home electronics every day. And if you knew the right places and people, you could get discounted things. So even though there was background anxiety about that, there was always fun things and things to do.

But yeah, right now, like you said, even our small comforts seem to be disappearing.