2020 Was Just the Start
The world is ablaze, we set the fire and we're the only ones who can put it out
If it was ever cute to make quips about 2020 needing to be over already (it wasn’t), hopefully most people are done with that silliness. Individual years aren’t bad, we are.
Days on a constructed calendar aren’t cursed, we’re actively burning our world to the ground while in a daze and then looking for who to blame for the destruction. Anyone who thought that 2020 was a uniquely bad year for the world must be really confused that the curse hasn’t lifted by now.
On the sixth day of 2021, our inert savior, Washington D.C. Capitol police escorted armed White supremacists onto the Capitol grounds and in so doing assisted their attempted coup. Those terrorists, many avowed Christian fundamentalists, then took over government offices and got into an armed stand-off at the floor of the House of Representatives in an attempt to stop the 2020 Presidential election from being certified.
The mob violence and its goals of overturning our presidential election had been well-organized and planned carefully, discussed openly and promoted by President Trump. When, as promised, the armed White supremacist terrorists showed up and with Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia in tow the Secret Service facilitated Trump going down to speak to them and give their coup one last moment of incitement.
Then, the Capitol police escorted the terrorists onto the government grounds and interrupted congressional proceedings, sending Congress people fleeing in terror to bunkers. This happened on the sixth day of 2021, the year we’d been pining for, as if the number had some power.
Years aren’t bad, we are, and the world is burning on our watch. Many already have, but for the rest of us, it is time to wake up and do something.
No one cares about your “normal.” Your bar crawls, your brunches, your concerts, your movies do not matter.
We're living through the largest poverty spike in U.S. history, and had a Gilded Age-level wealth disparity (even worse is the White-Black disparity) before the pandemic made it even worse. One in six American households with children go hungry every day.
We're the only industrialized nation on earth without universal healthcare, and even though we're in a pandemic, both of our political parties refuse to give it to us.
We have more people in prison, total as well as per capita, than any other country, are the most surveilled population in human history, have a homelessness crisis at the same time as we have a housing surplus, and a hunger crisis as we throw out 30-40% of our food. We are not free, never have been, and no political party is arguing that any of the above should change to make us free.
Wages are down, personal debt is up (by design), social programs are cut by both parties while they both just agreed to give a record amount of our money to the richest corporations and people in the country, without requiring employment protection. Meanwhile, we continue to be the globe's largest purveyors of terror, occupying dozens of nations, engaged in hot wars with at least eight, killing millions of innocent poor, Brown, Black, and Yellow people with our weapons and sanctions.
Our outgoing president incited an armed coup Wednesday. Our incoming president championed all of those aforementioned wars, our domestic spying program, torture, and helped tear apart our social safety net, and created our modern-day Jim Crow carceral system.
2020 was not a uniquely bad year. If we didn’t realize that to begin with, we’re about to.
Wednesday White supremacist mobs attempted an armed coup by attacking the United States Senate and House of Representatives. On Thursday, Congress went on vacation.
Things are not going to get better this year. They'll get a lot worse unless we make sure that they don't.
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The truth is hard to swallow, but the more we deny the reality that America has always been like this, the less likely we are to enact any substantial change.