Thursday, July 4, 2019

Mixed Feelings this Fourth

I had to work today, but I usually work on Independence Day. It was a lovely day on the job, I spent the first hour with five attractive, intelligent coworkers, and I just spent a half hour watching the local fireworks display from the privacy of one of our site parking lots. Personally, I’m doing okay.

Again, though, it’s the existential angst that I can’t shake, the fact that there are concentration camps on the border, and the Orange Ogre just had a tinpot dictator-style spectacle (in which he rambled incoherently about airports during the Revolutionary War, among other gaffes). The surreal nature of this current age is disconcerting, that tension between the straight white male privileged existence, and the reports from afar of fascist rallies, child prisons, and political stagnation. I wonder how late-Imperial Romans or late Weimar Republic Germans felt... did they have an inkling of how things were getting really bad? Am I overly dramatic here?

2 comments:

StringOnAStick said...

I'm in the same boat. Everything around me is unspooling as usual and yet I can't escape from this underlying dread that we're spiraling into a hole we can't get out of

Ali Redford said...

I'm there, too.