(no subject)

[fadeaccompli]

There was something entertaining and mildly thoughtful that I was going to post about today, but damned if I can remember what it is. Between what the Texas legislature is up to and being reminded of the horrible systemic racism in the legal system, I am in more of a mood to rage against this whole country.

I second-guess my determination to continue pursuing this difficult, uncertain, high-chance-of-failure career path of academia a lot of the time. It's only recently that I've started questioning it because of the part which would lock me down into this country for so long.

And every time someone says, "Oh, well, you're only upset because you haven't been paying attention; it's been this bad all along," it makes me want to go back into denial. Because if that's true--and it probably is--what's the point in my being upset about the injustice? Why should I even try? People around me say they've been aware all this time, and these better-informed people couldn't change anything. What's the use of me even caring?

I tried to write a poem--about the way despair breeds--and got too depressed to continue it. Now that is irony, at least in the Alanis Morisette sense.

Comments

[neogrammarian]

No. You'd have to go significantly far back before you'd get this bad. We are in a terrible culmination of a developing caste system- race is absolutely part of it, but so is class. The tiny fraction of a percent of the population that controls the vast majority of the nation's wealth cannot be matched inside 100 years. I'm certainly not trying to minimize this most recent injustice, but to higlight how many ways in which we can say "never before in our nation's history n" at the moment- from educational failure to federal surveillance and corporate malefiesance- we are at a special nadir, even for us.

[fadeaccompli]

That's part of why the despair, really. I thought we were getting better. In a 'three steps forward, two steps back' sort of way, but...better. And now I really question that assumption on my part, and wonder if it's a 'two steps forward, three steps back' kind of thing where I've been so distracted by the forward motion that I didn't notice the rest.

[neogrammarian]

I think the 'getting better' model assumes a sort of linearity that simply doesn't exist in human culture of any era. "Big ball of timey wimey stuff" describes human cultural development pretty well, I think, and it doesn't do anything simply.

[fadeaccompli]

This is also true. Sort of like that saying, "The future is here, and unevenly distributed."