the decline of democracy doomscroll
When I was 19 or 20, I checked out a public library copy of James Michener's chronicle of the Kent State tragedy. I was at an age where I was pretty sure I was going to keep studying English Lit and planning loosely on a teaching career, though I would change my mind later when I realized I didn't have the patience and nurturing temperament that teaching (well GOOD teaching) required. For a moment, though, in the summer of 1993, things opened a little, granting some much needed optimism after the Gulf War and a sense of hope and progress. Clinton had just been elected and the world seemed to be righting itself, even though I hadn't been all that cognizant of the Reagan/Bush eras of my childhood and teen years.
That summer, I idly considered doing a double major in Political Science or History and making a try for law school. My parents loved this idea, since my ability to argue was one of my strong points I was particularly interested in First Amendment law, which seemed the cornerstone of things in a true democracy. By the end of the summer, I realized that usually that kind of law meant you'd be helping the worst of the worst who used language and freedom as a weapon. I did not foresee, at all, where we are now. I was wrong.
The Michener Book formed my ideas of what I surely thought we'd never, as a country regress to. For one, the sort of violence that occurred should not happen when the world was watching far more, be it the availability of news coverage, the internet, social media. People would not be prone to propaganda and state messaging as they were when there were less news outlet to cover things and more incentive to toe the line. I was wrong, In fact, it seems almost miraculous that I could BE so wrong.
So I spent my twenties and thirties in the world I thought we were building toward. The Bush years were a back step, but one that could surely be erased by the steps forward when Obama was elected. I thought, that night in November 2016, we'd be celebrating the first female president. I was wrong, but hope flicked again in 2020 when Biden was elected. Finally, we could get back on the right path. Once, again. Wrong.
At this point, any foray into the comments section of pretty much any post/article on anything social or political unveils the trolls. I have since decided most of these are bots, which is probably true in part, but I feel like I HAVE to tell myself they're bots/fake accounts. Surely, this many people could not be so hateful, bigoted, and terrible. Right? Surely there are not that many who are in line with this (I tell myself this despite having distanced myself from family members on my mom's side that are also racists who removed their shapeshifter skins and revealed themselves in the summer of 2020 amid the unrest.) So they do exist, though likely not in the numbers the bad ones swarming the comments section would have you think.
Another thing I think about is how it didn't have to be this way. Obviously, elections could have gone other ways. But also, most importantly, if they did, there did not need to be instant capitulations. By retailers. By media conglomerates. By courts. For every favorable court case in defiance to be neither followed nor really consequences enforced. That even if there is the flicker of hope for justice for people harassed on the street, gutted in terms of social programs, or shot in the face at 9am after dropping a kid off at school.
There are times when I feel like both my parents being gone is at least a relief, as in two more good people who did not have to see this world and what it is becoming. Did not have to navigate the uncertainty and decline as vulnerable populations--already strapped retirees living off social security and my dad's government postal-worker pension. On the other hand, I would appreciate their perspective as people who lived through mostly prosperous times (as late silent gen/early boomers) what may have been harsher times (though not as hard as generations preceding them.)
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