I've had a number of people coming to me with questions about what's going to happen, uneasily counting the hours of every day, realizing as we all do that something big will happen before January 20th.
I honestly don't know what I could say that can reassure people except that on politics, I'm currently the only calm person in America. I seem to be the only person who came to believe that much worse than this was all foreordained a long time ago, and if anything I'm surprised it took this long for armed protests to reach us.
There are armed protests coming to all across America on exactly January 16th. We already know this. They probably won't be all that much more lethal than what happened on the 6th, if they're lethal at all. But even if a hundred people or more die this time (and they probably won't...), millions of us won't suddenly die Saturday. The only reason it should trouble people is if they think: "This is America, things like this don't happen here." Why not? It happens everywhere else, and it's only fifty-or-so years since it used to happen here all the time.
Like so much about this era, what's deeply troubling is precisely the opposite of how explosive it is. I seriously doubt all that many more people will die on Saturday, but last Wednesday was just the beginning. These moments of low-level civic threat at government's heart so common around the world are no longer an aberration here. It is, as the cliche goes, a feature now, not a bug. We've had people going to town hall meetings with firearms for years now. We just experienced an election that brought firearms to polling stations. Now they're going to routinely bring them into places of government: the Capitol, state houses, probably civil services before long. The arms are rarely used, but the implied threat of a weapon's presence is always there: 'Do as I want or cross me.'
This is life now. There's no going back. America's every moment operating under the barrel of a gun did not happen overnight, it happened piece by piece, very gradually over fifty years, but if you didn't see it coming, it's your own fault. In many ways, guns themselves and their easier ability to acquire than daily welfare stamps are the very culprit. I've said it many many times on this page before, but the one statistic of American life that bears more repeating than any other is that there are at least 270 million privately held firearms in this country. That does not include unregistered or black market arms, that doesn't include arms held by law enforcement or soldiers, and that doesn't include alternative sorts of weapons. If there is at least one gun in this country for every person here, then at some point, the life of every person in this country becomes at terrible risk.
And that's only the smaller problem. The bigger problem is that, as ever, when you have an irrational public who is unwittingly acting in the interests of a few rich overlords who have no problem keeping them in mental squalor and no desire to liberate them, the pressure for cooler response falls entirely on the progressive side. This is what Obama understood that many of his most fervent devotees and successors do not. One side willing to use violence results in injustice, two sides willing to use violence results in war. In every society, conservatism is the establishment, the status quo, the force that represses progress to force things to remain exactly as they are. And in pursuit of that use of force, they have the power, influence, and resources to believe far more irrational things than we do. And most unjustly of all, most people see these two sides of an argument as morally equivalent to one another. "Liberal or conservative, it's all the same irrational partisanship - isn't the truth somewhere in the middle?" Well, technically, yes it is, but consensus usually weighs their perception of truth far to the right of where the real truth lays.
Republicans are not the enemy, but politically speaking, they're not friends either. Like the governments of China and Russia, they are vicious competitors, and potentially lethal threats to us all. That's the way we have to deal with them, and their proximity to us makes the matter more urgent. You don't compromise with a potential enemy without conditions they will find extremely distasteful, but you don't go to war with them except as a last resort because what we all stand to lose in a war is too horrible for contemplation. The way to deal with them is 'carrots and sticks.' Substanital rewards for doing what we ask of them, harsh punishment for not doing it, and assurances over time that we entirely mean what we say to them in either direction. The details of that are for another post.
In the meantime, the way to stop thinking about all this is simple. Try to do what I'm trying to do. STOP POSTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA! STOP SCROLLING! You can still post and scroll, but minimally, and don't do either every day. Do not let a piece of technology the world doesn't understand yet control your time. When mass-printed writing was first introduced by Gutenberg, the world turned so inflamed that it brought two-hundred years of war between Protestants and Catholics and witch burnings in every town. We are still in the first generation of the internet, we have no idea yet how this technology affects our brains over the course of a lifetime and there is not enough research yet about how to adjust the content to do minimal damage to our psyches. Whomever we thought we were before we 'came online', those people are practically dead, and they're only dead because we've killed them. Every moment we spend on this thing is a moment we could devote to things which give us satisfaction. Social media is a hive, and each of us its unwitting drones. The hive mind is a collective, and the collective mind is an uncontrollable id. Its mission is to strengthen itself without barriers. the hive mind makes us part o its hive by making us think every moment in our lives a maximal existential crisis, which in turn makes maximal existential crises much more likely. A functional society's job is to be the source of our superego, that tells us 'maybe you shouldn't do that.' But when revolutionary technology turns the way we all interact upside down, society itself becomes the destructive force egging us on, and it's up to our own impulses to tell ourselves 'that's inadvisable.' When we control our internet consumption rather than our internet consumption controlling us, life becomes so much slower, and so much calmer. Every moment doesn't seem like doom, and there are even enjoyable moments along the way to armageddon.
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