Usually during my morning routine of checking email, socials, and plotting out my day in terms of tasks and assignments, I will briefly consult the news--usually CNN and then the local Chicago WGN for more immediate things and weather. If I have a little lengthier time before I need to get started, I will look at the NYTimes since my subscription is currently live. Other bits filter through social feeds I will scroll through when I eating lunch or dallying. It's a regular thing, probably since my 2020 doomscrolling days, even though I once used to eschew the news entirely, after a bad stretch in the mid-aughts where every headline was a dead woman or at least something horrible happening to women or kids. Mentally I couldn't handle it. There have been necessary breaks since, but since I feel like I never know what's going on and sometimes things happen so fast, it's part of my usual routine to start the day.
I usually start to realize I should go on a news break around the time the headlines begin to look like Onion articles (cage fight, anyone?) or have really concerning things like, you know, the current SC unraveling any gains that we have made toward progress in my entire lifetime. While I grew up raised by pretty liberal parents (an older silent generation father who came out of very working-class Democratic Wisconsinites, and an early Boomer mother, who while never part of the counterculture, had much more liberal attitudes than most of her extended family) I was not unaware that the freedoms and moves toward equality were not very much new things. I was most shocked in my 20s when I discovered that women could not hold their own credit cards until 1974, the very year I was born.
I was under the mistaken conception, having come of age in the 90s, that we were on our way to a kinder, gentler world. Or at least were making steps in that way, though from other ranges I see so much that was still very much wrong beyond my field of immediate vision. Social programs and EPA regulations, loosening attitudes about sexuality, greater consideration of equality and inclusion., And everyone my generation and younger more evolved. Except we weren't.
You could have knocked me over with a feather when Bush won in 2000. I was like but how? But at least it was close. My generation were well above voting age, and though we were a small group, passionate (well as much as X-ers will ver be.) I wrote it off that we were still outnumbered by Boomers and older, by big corporate money. And then in 2004, wrote it off as fear after 9/11 and a desire to maintain the status quo. What concerned me most was a swell of conservatism, or also bad, apathy, that followed in millennials beneath me as they reached voting and workplace age. That seemed to pervade many in my own generation, both the order set born in the 60s and my own 70s cohort.
I was paying less attention to the groundswell of conservatism on the internet and in the news, but I thought it all might be okay during the Obama years, which still weren't perfect but marked a tide change. Except, yeah, it didn't. If anything it made people like my racist cousin in Oklahoma even more amenable to block-worthy rants and falling in line with someone like Trumpf. You would think by this age I would be able to gauge what the reality of the world was, but even now I continue to fail. Offer optimism and then regret it later when it proves to not be true. And in fact, perhaps true progress is more fragile now than it even was in the 80s--via social media, and dubious news networks, and just the general decay of a really bad educational system that just keeps failing.
As in, it feels like it's a rock you thought you were rolling down a hill easily through the final decades of the last century, but now it's rolling you. I am regularly infuriated by calls, usually from those with little investment, in unity, except that why would anyone ever want unity with people who do not see other people with basic human rights because of their skin color or orientation. I am also similarly disheartened by liberal friends already taking of third-party voting, because while I respect your idealism, most people can't risk it not working out and the alternative, while the Biden admin is not that great, we've seen far worse. Even outside policy-making and leadership (and the fact that we look like idiots to the rest of the world) the confidence of the worst sort of people only grows until they do things like shoot up churches and attack the Capitol when they don't get their way. I feel like the Democratic party itself, since it's a pretty wide spread, needs to show some unity for any hope that they can keep that kind of evil at bay.
Which is to say, maybe a news break is warranted when I start to get hopeless and doomspirally. I saw that one of the Republican runners was appealing to the bygone days of America, of childhood, which of course was great because you were a child and had no job or responsibilities. But also, if you peeked in the shadows under that idyllic little tree in your childhood backyard, there was all sorts of nastiness lurking just out of the sun--racism, police violence, gay bashing, misogyny, and general silence. It's all still there, but I thought we were working toward something better. But we're not. And it's only gonna get worse as the election gets closer.
Once again, we do not really have that much to celebrate, now as we crest into the 4th of July weekend filled with patting ourselves on the back and setting off fireworks. America, as a meme I saw today said. I'm not sure you deserve a party because you're awful...
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