askchapo

Slight tangent, I was having a convo along these lines with a friend yesterday who said the early 2010s were a simpler time.

I was like… were they? In the period from the turn of the century until say, second term Obama we had 9/11, GWOT, Iraq, GFC, Occupy, several waves of BLM, Euromaidan, Arab Spring, etc. etc.

But perhaps things have accelerated, contradictions collapsing upon each other more rapidly…. I’m not sure. I feel like shit just feels crazy as you’re living through it, not to mention I was not paying attention to politics in the way I have in the last 10 years or so during that time, despite living through it. I was either a kid or a young disengaged moron.

Are more things happening? I kinda think no…? Is what’s happening with ICE and immigrants worse than what was happening to arabs at Guantanamo in the first part of the century? Is the repression in LA worse than Standing Rock? Is Israel bombing Iran worse than what was done to Libya by NATO, or Russia annexing Crimea? It feels like we fall into this trap of thinking there was an “event” that got us into The Present Where Things Are Happening vs The Past Where Things Were Not Happening, that event usually being Trump or Covid I guess. Which is essentially a metaphysical way of thinking and un-dialectical.

Not to mention that westerners finally getting upset about the current development of their political systems and thinking “the world has gone to shit” clearly just weren’t paying attention to the world outside their walled garden for the last….. 500 years?

Watching a live-streamed genocide every day while the climate is in the process of collapsing is quite a mind fuck though, for sure. And feels pretty new.