Look around. Our society is deteriorating into racial, class and sectarian violence. We are awash in guns, and those guns are increasingly being used to commit grotesque mass murders. Our system - a breakthrough in democratic self-governance in the late 18th Century - is now an obsolete, crippled debacle, exploited by every illiberal, authoritarian and greedy impulse that humans carry. It's too late to mitigate Climate Change, but at least it is our children that will pay that bill when we are gone. Nuclear weapons are proliferating, and yet we are walking away from treaties that protected us from them for decades.
Will it get better? That's hard to see. We can vote out Trump, but the Republicans will just shift back into obstruction mode and nothing will be done. Meanwhile, the worst authoritarian misogynist dominionist bigots have been appointed to key judicial seats across the nation, serving to prevent even the most limited rollback of the Trumpist project under Democratic leadership.
Are you hopeful? I've spent the last 32 months thinking that if we could just weather the storm we could all make it out the other side and start to repair the damage. But after this week, well, I can't find a way to see it that way. In my personal life, in our nation, in the world the situation is in deep decline. The fear I feel is real and immediate, and where I used to find hope in my soul I now see nothing but darkness.
There's no path out of this forest, and the creatures are all ravenous....
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