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Hopeful Delusions
Making the best of a bad hand
Hope feels good. Depending on the definition of hope, we have had very little of it in this century.
The last optimistic hope was Obama’s election, which was very thin with partially expanded healthcare but an endless repetition of the traditional excuses for inaction on structural change.
The only form of hope has been preventing the destruction of the remaining vestiges of representative government and getting Donald Trump into prison. Unfortunately, the fascist opportunists are like a hybrid termite and cockroach; for everyone you see, hundreds are hiding in the walls, destroying our cultural framework.
Many of us dealing with cultural, economic, political, and climate collapse have realized in the last few years that any hopeful future must follow that collapse. That realization may have been earlier for some with a more robust scientific background.
The core of that brutal reality is our inability to implement anything like the levels of change needed to slow, let alone stop, the slide into planetary catastrophe. For those of us living in America, this has been growing helplessness and guilt in the face of our political system’s failure to deal with the absurdity of late-stage radical capitalism that defines the American empire and our current reality.
The absurdity of a national election entirely focused on failed systems represented by two increasingly senile candidates, one a convicted felon and the other a conservative spear carrier, eliminated all remaining hope. Acknowledging this produced anger and depression among those politically active, with overwhelming apathy for the majority of the population.
This is the well-known breeding ground for fascist opportunists that have appeared on schedule. While a minority in the nations of the American empire and in America itself have fallen into the clutches of opportunists and tribalists, most people gave up. Much of life is financially difficult, making no sense, so why struggle?
The replacement of Biden, the only legitimate candidate, not that this matters officially, by his functional and much younger vice president surprisingly failed to follow American political rules, creating confusion and chaos. Chaos and…
