I’ve avoided talking about politics lately; both on my blog and in real life. There’s a time to ramble and a time to shut up and pay attention. Now is the time to concentrate on watching and listening. We need that to remember. What matters most to me is that, in the days and years to come, I remember. I hope you sense how much your memory will matter too?
In the days and years to come, we will be told so many lies. It will be hard to stand firm. What I see is what I saw. What I feel is what felt. Yet, I will be tempted, nudged, pushed, and ordered to forget. I will be under lifelong pressure to remember some different sanitized, molded, spun, concocted substitute. My memory of 2024 is going to be all I’ve got. This is true of you as well. Regardless of what future world emerges, vast herds of simpletons will remember a false story.
Today is a good time to prepare the foundation upon which tomorrow you will stand.
Even now, “the forgetting” is happening. Twenty-four days ago candidate Donald Trump’s head exploded on live TV… or rather it didn’t. People are working hard to change the experience in their mind. It was a setup. It was a fake blood pack. Trump was struck by fragments not a bullet. Folks who’ve never fired a shot discuss ballistics like children wondering what their parents really do at the office. Corey Comperatore was flat out murdered and y’all saw it happen. But hey, lets talk about the AR15 and the sloped roof. Trump roared like a lion, so lets censor it from Google.
See what I mean? A straight up assassination attempt is fading inside of a month.
In a year, maybe more or maybe less, the whole world will have forgotten. It will carefully and deliberately deny the old timey days of 2024. Sooner or later Epstein really did kill himself. At some point Wakanda really is a nation in Africa. Hamilton was definitely black. Lincoln, or Julius Caesar, or <insert name here> was gay, and everything he said was irrelevant because he was a white guy anyway. You will someday live in an America that is a foreign nation, and you alone will remember the earlier condition.
Future literature searches will confirm that Biden really was sharp as a tack. Every source will record that nobody saw the economy teetering.
Denial happens fast. Do you remember Obama telling you your insurance premiums would go down $2,500 a year? Why not? It was only 2010. What did you do with the $25,000 you saved? New car? Yearly vacations? Oh that’s right, it was bullshit. But do you remember the bullshit?
Think of what you weren’t told. Nobody told me Stalin was Uncle Joe. Nobody told me Hawaii’s electoral votes were switched from Nixon to Kennedy in 1960. Right now astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore are stuck in space. They’re on the second month of a 10 day trip. You aren’t being told the Boeing Starliner is a mess. You’re busy watching weirdos in Paris. The universe of what is deliberately obfuscated is huge. Remember all you can.
Your memories will have a hint of humor, of cynicism, a feeling of the weight of time. You’ll remember things nobody else thought about. When my grandfather told me about the first sales tax he was all about toilet paper: “It was supposed to be for ‘non-essential luxuries’ and the first thing they taxed was toilet paper!”
You are here. Future generations aren’t. All they’ll ever have is whatever memories you provide. I once had a discussion with an elderly woman who told me of her life as a little girl. How she stepped around dead bodies in Berlin, after the Americans came. A lifetime later she ran a restaurant in rural America. I am and will always be thankful for the wisdom she shared. All the Ancient Aliens crap on History Channel will never rise to the importance of an old woman telling me about the fall of Berlin.
My ruminations sound dire but I don’t mean them to be. Change is, of itself, neither good nor bad. It feels bad, but that’s just your normalcy bias getting severed. Maybe it has to be this way. Sometimes the can is worn out. Sometimes there’s no more road left to kick it down. Change is sometimes inevitable.
(I can sense a hundred fingers leaning into a hundred keyboards desperate to tell me that this moment, right damn now, is the most hopeless of all moments. Keep that black pill to yourself. Stuff it way down deep and focus on thriving as best you can. You do no good indulging in despair. You do society no good imploring everyone to lose hope.)
I think about other moments when change happened. In times of import, there’s a certain “feel” in the air. I feel it now. I wasn’t there for the French Revolution or Fort Sumter. I don’t know what that felt like. But I watched vote counts at 2:00 am in 2020 and I know what that felt like. I saw the would be assassination of 24 days ago. I saw Reagan take a bullet in 1981. I remember my earlier naïve ideas. I remember thinking we’d get to the bottom of things once Epstein was safely locked up. I remember the cold war and mutually assured destruction. I remember the miracle on ice. I reflect on the difference between that and last week’s Paris Olympics’ ceremonial spaz fest. I remember when normal Americans could use a clutch. I remember when if you couldn’t find a fact in the library, you simply didn’t know.
Now is not the time for despair. No time is the right time for despair.
If you must indulge in a little cynicism, allow yourself small quantities only. Cynicism is nothing new. Take a small hit if you must but then put the bottle down. That shit’s addictive.
In honor of cynicism, I present to you Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”. The song was written in 1988. It was played in the movie “Pump Up The Volume” in 1990. Give yourself a few minutes and really listen. It’s worth it. Don’t hum it while you’re fixing breakfast. Pretend you’re GenX and it’s the old days when you listened to an LP; like the music actually mattered.
There’s nothing more Gen X than Leonard Cohen’s lyrics. The nation’s ignored rounding error of latchkey kids came of age with all the pain of any other generation. Boomers called them “Slackers” and mocked their cynicism. Advice from 1950 pushed GenX off a cliff into the messed up and utterly different workforce of 1990. GenX knew the dice were loaded. Every new crop of teenagers learns very quickly “the fix is in”. The fix is always in.
GenX, yours truly among them, cares but won’t coddle. We commiserate over subsequent generations; driven mad by social media. Their suffering is real. Their mental illnesses have got to hurt. But it happens. That’s where I’m going with all this. Part of the misery of change is the false feeling that your unease is unique. It is not. The only way to know, is to experience it, and then remember.
Whatever the fuck is going on in 2024, it’s going to happen. Learn from it. Make yourself strong. Good luck.