Currently, I feel as though I’ve landed in the Way Back When Machine. It’s the 1960s again, and I trust nothing that comes out of our Federal Government. If the White House predicts blue skies, I check websites belonging to the BBC, CBC, and The New York Times to see if it will rain instead. If they say white collar crime is up, I check NPR, The Independent, and Marketplace to see if it is blue collar crime. I have a few others too, but those are the ones I’ll check first. Each gets its turn at critique and analysis.
History
Sometime after we shed Tricky Dicky Nixon, my trust in the government was, if not totally restored, allowed to expand. We seemed to generally have a competent, if sometimes bumbling, bureaucratic system that operated competently most of the time. Despite persistent stupidities, it wasn’t blatantly awful. I was even part of it for several years, and came to appreciate how dedicated GS employees tried to strike a balance. I was a GS 12 stroke something and learned firsthand how hard it was to get it right all the time.
Then came the results of the last Presidential election. Like many the dismantlement of that system that I had come to respect, if not totally trust, was hard to watch. It’s been replaced by sycophants that I can neither trust nor respect. Where I might have once merely read a bit of commentary, I am now forced to investigate.
No, wait. In truth, much of the time, there is no need for investigation. Much of the drivel coming out of the current administration is prima facie idiotic drool dripping out of the mouths of incompetent idiots. So you see, I am right back to the 1960s. And feel that I have somehow tumbled into a science fiction novel’s Wayback Time Travel Machine.
The 1960s. Oy! It was bad enough the first time around.
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History is no longer just repeating itself, I think it is becoming a whirlpool……
…sucking us down, down, down.
‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ – Not! Maybe Bob could start another movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90WD_ats6eE
Most likely it happened in the Sixties, too. We just nmever knew about it.
I just go, “It’s a persistent, scary shit-show. I’m going out with a dog.”
A sane response to a crazy situation.
Yep. So is my journey to Math World. And this blog. 😀
Those of us who were around in the 60s managed to survive them, as did the USA. I’m a lot older now and I am not sure if I’ll survive the 2020s. Or if America will either.
Or if we survive it’ll be in a form we can stand.
FYI – the bots hit me last week, and yesterday I had an absolutely useless interlude with the “happiness” engineers that made no sense. The bots were American. We’ll see how long it lasts till enough people complain that WP is forced to do something.
That’s why I went private. My blog got more than 2,500 views on Friday, most from the USA, but a lot from Chile and Bangladesh, too.
We miss you!
Though I may not have been around in the ’60’s it definitely had an impact on my life and how I view and approach things. I learned a lot by watching people from the era’s like the ’60’s and ’70’s, listening to them and so on. So I kind of feel like I’m stuck in that era also.
I accidentally learned this trick when I was being fancy about 12 years ago. I started signing up for news podcasts, and signed up for everything that looked good. I picked NPR, APM, BBC, and this great program called “Mosaic,” which was a collection of broadcasters (like Al Jazeera) that focused on issues in the Middle East. I’d listen to everything as it came along. Then I started noticing that I could get one single story of something that happened in Iraq, let’s say, from four different sources, and every single story was completely different, with different information, making a different point. “Oh, duh, that should have been obvious,” I thought to myself. But finally realized that it’s so important to gather my news from multiple sources. Oh, if only I could take this brain and start again at age 20, and do it all over again. What an amazingly different life I could have led.
Well, you are not the only one who had the thunderbolt hit them late. Lots of us did.