
Saturday, November 30, 2019 5:20 PM
Busy Work (2019Nov30)
Usually, when someone admits to a crime, we don’t spend six months holding hearings before sending it to ‘trial’ (in the Senate, no less). It only happens because the Office of the Presidency is so important. However, to hear the ferocious spin of the Republicans, one can’t help but think they’re furiously trying to convince themselves that Trump is innocent, while they admire him for doing it. I’m sure there’s an explanation for Republicans, but I’m also sure it’s a tawdry, tragic tale—and I don’t want to hear it.
The way Trump’s disdain for our country mirrors Putin’s aggression toward us is a warning in itself. A high-tech society can’t be populated by unseasoned illiterates with no respect for details, maintenance or nuance. The world is too complicated to be run by a stupid bully.
I would not want to be a political leader in 2020. Seven billion people is not something you want to piss off. Especially now that we’ve broken the thermostat. They’ll be cranky enough.
We all know that not all grown-ups are adults. It’s time for the real adults to get scared enough to involve themselves. The human race needs enlightened leadership to replace the ancient power-foci, to get us all working together, to take care of all of us as well as we do the best of us. We have grown too powerful and too numerous for any other avenue of long-term survival.
To see this oneself, to feel the urgency—it makes these media match-ups of Dems Vs. Reps seem like glaring negligence only slightly less onerous than the President’s and his coterie’s. Nunes’ behavior is unacceptable—never has anyone so publicly committed to his role as lapdog—except perhaps Barr.
So I am torn between exhorting my fellow beings to face the future like sci-fi protagonists and despairing of my fellow humans for so seriously indulging in the busy-work which we solemnly call ‘The Impeachment Hearings”. O, if only we could all agree that the jack-ass is guilty, and move on—it would give me hope for mankind.
But then, I’ve forgotten—I’ve given up on ‘hope’ in humanity—we really are so repulsive, sometimes. These days, I run on pure optimism, just because optimism is better for my mental health. I no longer kid myself that my acute interest in current events and my burning passion for ‘goodness’ are both eating away at everyone else’s mind, as they do me.
But that is the most important part, don’t you see? People can’t live on small farms anymore—we’ve souped the whole thing up. So now, through a largely uncoordinated effort, the Earth supplies food, water, clothes, and shelter to seven-billion people, instead of the two-million, tops, that could sustain themselves without tech.
I ask you to consider what it meant to be human, pre-tech, pre-population-explosion, pre-pollution. Those days are gone for good. (If we keep ourselves from savagery.) The placidity and comfort of a life that asks nothing more than a hard day’s work (and a shorter life-expectancy) is becoming impossible to find. We’re having trouble getting kids to look up from their phones.
When evil strikes, and we seek solutions—we now have to worry about changing what it means to be human—CRSPR-stuff, surveillance-states, corporate autonomy superceding the human-rights of employees and/or consumers, etc.
We must then face the fact that we have already changed some of the most fundamental things about being human: a walking pace, the problem of solitude, our vulnerability to nature and biology, and our assumption that the greatest number of people have the most force. There’s a big list, but I won’t get distracted by detail. And so we see that we enter an age where we will be deciding how to consciously ‘define’ humanity. And the big question is: Do you want the idle, greedy rich to make those future choices? Or would you rather we all had a say? That is what makes Democracy more important today than it has ever been.