Roadtrip to Hades

There are things you can control, and things you can’t. About 98% of things go in the second column. As someone who used to try to manage or predict how other people were going to feel, and as someone who believed I could keep myself safe if I continuously scanned the environment for danger - I’ve given this a lot of thought.

There are really only two things you can control - the way you respond to whatever is happening around you, and what you decide to focus on.

Here in the states, everyone I know is having to employ a certain amount of intentional cognitive dissonance to get through the day. Intentional Cognitive Dissonance feels like a thing that is uniquely 2025. It’s not the old skool simple cognitive dissonance of yore - the kind of thing that happened outside of someone’s awareness, enabling them to be a pot calling a kettle black. No, friends, it is a survival tool for this particular moment in history. It’s what makes it possible to go grocery shopping while your government is attacking its own citizens. It’s bonkers, I know!

You have to be able to turn away from all of the anxiety, outrage, fear and despair sometimes, or you won’t make it. Also, you don’t want to allow these people who could not care less about you and your worries and your kids and your family and your neighbors and the things that keep you up at night - like the fact that you have no idea how you’re going to afford health insurance in January (not normal!) - rob you of your joy, your poetry, your music, your magic.

Maybe someday historians will study the unthinkable times we’re living through, and there will be a chapter about ICD. I’d feel certain historians would study this moment in time - because god knows we have made some wild choices - but who knows if we’ll have historians in the future? Maybe AI will be handling the archives, whitewashing history, running code to get rid of the more horrific things we’ve done. There are a lot, and now there are a whole lot more.

For all our technological advances, and for all their money, the people in charge are morally and ethically bankrupt. The Supreme Court has decided corporations deserve the same rights as human beings. Corporations are certainly protected in our legal system with a lot more fervor than children or women. Come to think of it, so are guns.

The knights of the round table are all pale white billionaires who kiss the ring and normalize an authoritarian who wears more makeup than Tammy Faye Baker, nominates a dangerous, unqualified, anti-science grifter as the HHS director, intimidates Republican senators to make sure he gets confirmed - and then questions his decision to make Covid vaccines harder to get, and says Florida should probably keep some vaccine mandates for school kids. Like polio. Ya think?

It’s like he had nothing to do with the horror show he has rained down upon us - and people are going to die because of it. These awful people in the highest levels of our government are angry, vindictive, weak little men - and the women who carry water for them. Now we just blow up boats in international waters and say there were drugs present with no proof. Dang, skippy! Now this administration tries to deport children in the middle of the night over Labor Day Weekend. Now the president sends the National Guard to blue states he hates with governors who threaten him because he’s a child with too much power. Constitution be damned.

These people don’t want to be regulated. The rules don’t apply to them. They want everything privatized because it’s never enough money. While inflation goes up and job numbers go down, while they gut Medicaid and the ACA and SNAP benefits and free lunches at school - the potus and his family get richer and richer, and so do all our billionaires. If you aren’t a billionaire, I don’t know why you like this. Do you?

But you get to choose your own adventure, or you did, anyway. I’m not really sure what’s going to happen here. Maps are being redrawn, laws are being broken, the Constitution is being violated every day, and yes, there are some court cases being won, but there are a lot being lost, too.

Maybe you want to be in a world full of humanoids and AI, where only these pathetic cosplaying tough guys have rights and women stay home churning butter, programmed for agreeability in every room of the house. It’s a choice, I’ll give you that. But it’s a really strange one. It’s the kind of thing that makes our kids wonder if they want to bring children into this world.

You can’t control what other people do, but you can control the way you respond. You can decide who you want to be in the face of all this madness and how hard you want to fight for something different - and so much better - than the direction we’re heading. You can focus on all the beautiful people in your life, and all the things that bring you joy, and I hope you do, but I also hope you focus on how you can get your head and your heart in this battle. Who you want to be right now - and if you do have grandkids one day - what you want to tell them you did when awful people took over your government like a virus.

We’re the cure, or we aren’t. Choose your adventure.

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If you missed the longer form essay this week, you can find it here…