What a difference a year makes
Published 09-10-2020
Just one year ago I was back in California, helping take care of my grandma who was in hospice care. I was able to pop over to the Fall Festival for a bit, enjoying the Wine & Cheese and seeing so many friends I hadn’t seen since we left to Tennessee. It was fun being on the other side of the Festival, enjoying the reunion aspect of the events without worrying if the garbage cans arrived or that we had the proper liquor licenses.
It wasn’t the easiest trip home, but one filled with so many blessings to carry back with me.
Fast forward a year, and who would have guessed that so much would be so different.
More than once this past weekend Fall Festival crossed my mind. After eight years on the committee and a lifetime of memories of time spent in Pioneer Park on Labor Day weekend, it was practically inevitable.
Seeing friends and family out and about in Newman, parade photos, volleyball and softball games, bands, carnival fun and all the food on social media helped ease much of homesickness that first year. And while my brain knew this year would be different, my heart was still bittersweet as my social media feeds were filled with memories of past festivals rather than a real time catchup of what was happening back home.
And while much of life has returned to normal here in west Tennessee, cancelled festivals and mask mandates are the reality here too.
The landscape our nation faces today is much different than the landscape just one year ago.
And as I spent my Labor Day painting our guest room rather than heading downtown to the Soybean Festival in Martin, my mind wandered to what the landscape next year could possibly be like.
It’s an interesting thought experiment. We all know 2020 has been wild, friends and I joke about what’s next on the Apocalypse Bingo Card. Murder hornets, wild fires across much of the West, locusts, Russian Cannibal Ants, cities on fire, Corona lockdowns. It’s been just crazy.
But what if, as a friend asked me the other day, 2020 is to 2021 what 2019 was to 2020?
The thoughts are both fascinating and horrifying, if I’m completely honest.
We find ourselves living in the midst of interesting times.
And often enough, it means no good for any of us.
Political power has been taken in what looks to be a coordinated fashion. There is a structure behind the unrest in cities, changing “priorities” in DAs offices in cities across the nation and public health orders controlling larger and larger portions of people’s lives.
Will those mandates and power moves be a permanent fixture in our lives? For how long?
What will mandates morph into in the name of other public health crises? Look up the list of what your state government has declared as problematic under the banner of public health. Is it a leap to think progressive governors won’t go there after all that has been done under the guise of the Corona Virus?
In a society filled with an “anything goes” mentality, pretty much anything goes.
The usual backstops against the worst excesses of this mentality have been corrupted and silenced in a quite efficient manner. It’s been a relentless onslaught across the board over decades.
The media and cultural “influencers” parrot binary narratives of revolution and reactionary, continually pushing boundaries and norms until one day you look around and the singer with the #1 hit “Wet A$$ P@$$y” is interviewing a Presidential candidate, drag shows happen at your urban local library and the newspaper of the nation’s capital is running news stories floating the idea and structure of a political and military class coup against the duly elected President.
In the current day, progressive norms include celebrating an accused rapist as a hero, the defense lobby as moral arbiters of war and the intelligence apparatus as a neutral good.
Like I said... interesting times.
I’d like to think that politicians are acting nobly, and with cause in the midst of the pandemic. But as word spills out about stunts like Pelosi and numerous other politicians getting their hair done while salons are mandated closed, of federal and city government gyms being open while private gyms remains shuttered, travel quarantines for all except those who aren’t and yes, even cancellation of outdoor festivals and gatherings... one could plausibly start to question the motives behind some of these orders.
I have many words to describe exactly what I think about current events, most of it is expletives that can’t be published.
We are watching systemic failure across the board, from the left and the right. The modern order of politics and culture has been a race to the bottom, the worst of pandering and propaganda sold to the masses for easy consumption.
We’ve gotten to the place of overabundance in society. The life of our elites is filled with policy in the abstract and theoretical outcomes where the consequences never visit their neighborhood or affect their bottom lines. It’s an endless party, jetting to Miami this week, Europe the next with pit stops in New York and Chicago before arriving home in Los Angeles or D.C. It doesn’t matter if it’s a symposium on global intelligence or a garden birthday party for 500 of their closest friends.
Social media influencers, another symptom of a unhealthy society, are called upon to disseminate approved talking points and hashtag campaigns that replace action and responsibility for what is happening in the world around you.
The deeper meaning of issues are glossed over for campaign and marketing slogans that fit easily on a bumper sticker and Congressional disbursements that enrich the consultant class while doing nothing to actually improve the issues. Solved crises don’t require ongoing expertise, more meetings and studies or a national commission.
Our system is being exploited by those who want to destroy it and remake it in their own imaginings of what an “equitable” democracy looks like.
Shockingly, it’s awfully similar to New York and California. Funnily enough, both states are doing so well, they are pondering passing legislation aptly nicknamed the Exit Tax, so as not to lose out on collecting a single penny of anyone trying to escape the claws of onerous progressive tax collectors and their social experiments.
The progression of bad decisions have compounded through the years, with layers of bad decisions papering over the previous ones. Short sighted gains, that have had disastrous consequences as the politics played out in the most predictable of ways, coupled with pride and hubris created an evil brew which we now must tolerate and swallow whole cloth if we want to keep our nation.
While a cancelled festival isn’t the end of the world, the tools used to create the conditions for it should be more than just a passing concern.
And maybe say a prayer for all of us... 2021 is right around the corner.