When I turned fifty years of age in 2017, I had to face up to some hard truths, and ask myself some difficult questions.
This was not some clichéd "midlife crisis" thing, or maybe it was; since I don't happen to be the "get a red sports car and a girlfriend half my age" type, it just took a more mundane form. But there it was all the same. And it had actually started a few years earlier, in the spring of 2014.
Here are the broader strokes: I had been passed over for a promotion that I felt I should have gotten, and really needed for financial purposes. Completing my MBA in 2011 had not magically transformed my prospects; in fact, I now found myself on the debt hook, possibly for the rest of my life. So I was pissed about that, and growing more dissatisfied with the nature of the job I still had.
Then in October of that year, my ninety-year-old father passed away. Since his mother and grandmother had lingered into their nineties in the throes of dementia, it would have been his worst nightmare to find himself consigned to the same fate. So in that regard, he actually went the way he wanted to: peacefully, in his sleep, still lucid and aware, still walking down the hill every other day to the little general store near his house, to stretch out and have a cup of coffee and shoot the shit with some of the neighbors.
Obviously, though, no matter how "ideal" the circumstances, no matter how prepared you think you are for it, losing a parent is never easy.
Weeks after my dad passed, early in 2015, I got a call from a game show. You've heard of the show, trust me. I had been trying to get on for five years at that point, passing multiple tests and going to two auditions. So it was important to me, and it felt like things were going my way finally. Hell, maybe I could win enough to pay down my student loans, maybe even my house, maybe even quit my job and start a business doing something I wanted to do. Dare to dream, kids.
I had five weeks to prepare, so I studied hard, practiced and watched. I had this thing nailed. I didn't care about "getting rich," but the alien concept of simply being out of debt seemed like a perfectly reasonable goal that would change everything for me. Here was a golden opportunity to wipe the slate clean and get a fresh start.
Ask yourself a couple of very simple questions, and really think about them: What do you want out of your life? What would you do if you never had to worry about money? What would you do if you were simply out of debt, if you didn't have to do work you no longer liked, in order to pay creditors that you'll never even meet?
We'll return to those questions, but in the meantime, suffice it to say that while I had a very enjoyable time on the show, and the experience was cool and amazing, I did not acquire enough winnings to get out of debt, or even to chip away at it. It took me five years to get there, and twenty minutes for it all to be over with.
It sounds pathetic in retrospect, but at the time it was devastating. I would always be stuck where I was. I would never get ahead, or even back to zero. I would spend the rest of my natural life paying interest on $200 textbooks to faceless creditors, who would just set it in an endless stack with all the other suckers on the hook.
Since my late teens, I've been a drinker. Playing in rock bands for ten years out of high school accelerated that dynamic to where I developed a considerable liking and tolerance, mostly beer, tequila, and vodka. After the band years, I settled into a steady moderate weekend-warrior rhythm, but that rhythm had picked up during these late-forties doldrums. Nothing catastrophic, which in retrospect might have been part of the problem -- there was never any catalyzing incident or violent blowout to force me to change. I just kept drinking more and more, steadily.
By late 2015 heading into 2016, it was not unusual to blow through a case of beer and a handle of vodka every week or so, mostly after the family was in bed, just me out on the laptop, listening to music and writing, playing Civilization campaigns, coming up with ideas for music or short stories or whatever. I'd hit the bed at 2:00 or 3:00, get up for work at 6:30, and do it all over again.
So by early 2017, keeping at that pace, I was in bad shape: fifty pounds overweight, tired and cranky, stress-eating a lot of garbage, feeling more and more like shit every morning after. Turns out the fifty-year-old body is only about half as resilient to the rigors of self-abuse as it is at twenty-five.
The whole time I was able to just glide below the radar and not raise any issues. I never missed work, never gave anyone any reason to confront me because there was nothing visible to confront. But I gradually kept feeling worse and worse, physically and mentally.
And so hitting the milestone that year, I just started asking myself those inconvenient questions. Is this what you want the rest of your life to be like, just not caring what happens next, every day just a little worse than the last? There was no cloud-parting epiphany or anything like that, just the decision to start turning the ship around, slowly but steadily. Whether you have to get outside help for whatever your problem might be -- gambling, overeating, substance abuse -- ultimately it all comes down to you making a decision for your own sake, for your family's sake, whatever. But either way, you do have to do the work. As the man said, choosing not to decide still counts as a choice.
So I started a mile-long walking route near my work site, and hit it every morning on my break. Then in the afternoons if it wasn't too hot. You can get a lot of thinking done on a good walk. Started doing body-weight exercises at home, then lifting weights. Read a ton of books on those things, as starting up a rigorous workout plan when you're fifty and your joints and back are already in pain is something that should be done with patience and care. Stopped drinking, which was actually the easiest move of all. Oddly, since my drink of choice was usually just vodka and ginger ale (or other soda), eliminating the soda was as important as cutting back the booze. Basically a two-for-one net benefit; I realized very quickly that a major part of feeling crappy the next day was the huge amounts of sugar my body was trying to process.
Most importantly, sleep turned out to be a massive benefit. I have never been much of a sleeper, even as a kid. But basically "forcing" myself to go to bed two hours earlier, and then three hours earlier, made all the difference. Seven hours of sleep is not just three hours better than four hours' sleep -- it's an order of magnitude better for you. I read a few books on meditation and lucid dreaming, and quickly trained myself to adjust to the new sleep cycle to get even more out of it.
Another promotion came up that fall, so I applied for it, studied, did practice interviews and wrote out answers to typical questions and rehearsed them a bit, just did the extra work you do to get that edge, and got the job. That was the final key to getting out of that mental funk that was just dragging me down. That was at the end of 2017, two full years ago.
And I haven't looked back. I'm working on certifications in my new field, have dropped twenty-five pounds and kept it off, still lifting weights and replacing fat with muscle, and kept all those new habits. I have a beer or a glass of wine or a cocktail once in a while, but just the one. I took a Pro Tools audio engineering class with my daughter in 2018-19, got Pro Tools (and Reaper) last June, bought a bass guitar in August, replaced my ancient Korg keyboard in October, and have been writing and recording demos, just to recapture the fun I used to have creating music. I don't worry about whether the music is "good" so long as the next song is just a little bit better and tighter than the last, and that a consistent process develops. If I make money, great; if not, that's fine too.
Here is the point, and it is definitely not to crow about how awesome I am, nor to give you some "toughlove" sermon from my high horse. There is still work for me to do, weight to lose, songs to write, debt to kill. But progress has been made, and it was because I finally took an honest assessment of the situation and committed to doing something about it.
I might suggest that many people out there are, in a collective sense, where I found myself in the spring of 2017, when it comes to how they feel about their country or their future political prospects. It's understandable -- after all, even knowing what a hopeless clusterfuck 2020 is going to be, we still get to start it off even worse than assumed, by watching this failed casino clown derp his way into a war, while the corporate media cheer him on.
This is because too many of us have become dull, unserious people. We vote for corrupt idiots and then wonder why they suck. We consume grotesquely servile corporate media and wonder why they're all gutless toadies. We know more about Baby Yoda and Kylie Jenner and the "contestants" on the ninety-seventh iteration of The Bachelor than we do about the people who are poisoning our water and taking a wrecking ball to our elected government. We communicate in an insouciant, peevish shorthand about the wonks and nerds who stupidly think that knowing practical facts actually matters, as if the people that designed and built the complex technological infrastructure that we take for granted just sat around all day hate-watching the Cats movie and trading snark, or some bullshit like that.
We used to build and do really cool things, and we can do that again. I recently saw something from Elizabeth Warren that took me back to those fateful questions I asked myself a couple years ago: Imagine who you could be if America worked for everyone.
What would your state of mind and your life be like, if you didn't have to rely on a job you hated in order to retain health insurance that kept you in a racket that overcharges you even with insurance? What would you do to fulfill your personal purpose or mission, the passions of your very soul, if you didn't have to constantly worry about the next crumb that falls to you from the billionaires' gilded table? What if you lived in a nation where the impossibly wealthy knew when they had enough, and weren't willing to make the world burn just to avoid paying a few more percent on their billions?
What if, instead of constantly bitching about how terrible the corporate mediots are, we just shunned them all? They're not worth a shit anyway, so what's lost by avoiding their cynical daily ragebait? Information is everywhere. You're not required to get it filtered through the likes of Chuck Todd or Maggie Haberman or Bret Stephens.
We've become unserious people because we've given up, and you can see that not only in how the Republicans act, but in how the Democrats act. The fact that Joe Biden is probably going to be the Dem nominee is a sign that the Dem base has given up. They've fallen for the "conventional wisdom" -- that is, the mantra propagated by a corporate media with a clear vested interest in the outcome, as well as the journey to the outcome -- that Biden is the "most electable" one, that even though Warren and Sanders and Kamala Harris all have messages and proposals that align more closely with the voters' concerns, they have been gulled into believing that the comfortable old shoe is a better fit.
As someone with flat feet and a chronically bad back, I can tell you that there's nothing like a new pair of good shoes to put a spring back in your step, seriously. Here's a couple of salient examples:
If you think the Republicans are leading this nation in the wrong direction, should you vote for a candidate who promises to fight them, or a candidate who insists, at this ridiculous point, that he can still "work with" them, after all their treachery? Impeachment has majority support; Trump and the Republicans have majority disapproval. The lies and hypocrisy and bad faith are there for all to see. You would think this would provide a clear path for a candidate from the opposition party, but any candidate advocating for actual change gets kneecapped by a gaslighting media and a timorous populace of tribal mice seeking social acceptance.
If you're genuinely concerned about the $1.5 trillion in student debt - which impacts the whole economy, and keeps families and communities from achieving their potential, only to enrich a handful of wealthy investors - are your concerns better served by someone who has repeatedly promised to lower or eliminate that debt, and shown a clear plan to achieve that objective, or by the senator who literally helped write the law that prevents the indebted from clearing their records and getting on with their lives by declaring bankruptcy? Why do greedy, chiseling dipshits like Trump get multiple resets, but hard-working families have to send a painful chunk of their paychecks to Navient every month for the rest of their lives?
When the "OK Boomer" epithet gained traction a couple months ago, it was portrayed as the bratty, pissy sniping of spoiled punks against their wise, benevolent grandparents. That is incorrect. It should be seen for what it actually is -- the understanding of the youth that the elders are feckless, dishonest interlocutors to begin with. We can play the "not all boomers" game all day, but the fact is that the boomers in power have made it clear that they got theirs, and the kids can go fuck themselves. Here is the world we are leaving you. You're welcome. The kids have responded accordingly, and the old farts can't stand it. Rejection works. Who knew?
Australia is burning, and there are still people out there, after all the hurricanes and flash floods and wildfires and Zika outbreaks and enormous melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, who will swear on a stack of pancakes that this is all some mass media-driven hysteria morphing into a librul command orthodoxy, spearheaded by our modern Joan of Arc, a cranky Swedish teenager who has the nerve to refuse to take shit from deep, principled thinkers such as Donald Trump and Ben Shapiro. Never mind that the American government is eviscerating fuel standards and environmental conservation practices as quickly as possible, that we frack anywhere and everywhere, that people feel free to drive the biggest gas guzzlers they can find, that China continues its enviro-killing practices unabated.
If anything, the world is turning more and more illiberal, electing fascists and autocrats and climate-change deniers all over the planet, trading democracy for jackboot stability. Name one policy that has actually changed or affected anything, that was in response to Greta Thunberg's efforts. Name one climate metric that has improved since the passing of the Paris accord. Name one government policy in any country that has been changed or affected by the desire to avoid incurring the wrath of woke Twitter, or even Leonardo DiCaprio.
It is well past time to put to rest the canard that the internet complainers have anywhere near the weight to offset (or even affect) the nefarious deeds of those actually in power. I'm not sure why some folks persist in such erroneous reasoning, but none of the possibilities are good or useful.
Consider this: last year, the top 400 wealthiest people collectively made $1.3 trillion. Lord knows they deserve it. They are all so very hard-working, and totally didn't inherit their wealth, or screw over communities and competitors to acquire it. Their ceaseless hoarding and accumulation sets a fine example for all of us to study and emulate.
Consider this in comparison: climate scientists estimate that it would take approximately $300 billion to alleviate climate change dangers for maybe as long as twenty years. That is, there is a scenario where we might literally be able to buy some time, and for less than half the annual US military budget.
God forbid we should work up the sheer gall to ask our betters to contribute so much as a single shekel to this hysterical hoax. You have to see it from their perspective -- it doesn't affect them. They have insurance and financial solvency. They can take off to Telluride or New Zealand or Paraguay or whatever redoubt looks good when the shit really comes down.
What if we approached the conundrum from a different direction -- that the effort to alleviate climate change could be a genuine opportunity for the disaster capitalists? Give the fossil fuel companies tax incentives to move production resources and capital to renewable energy sourcing. Give the coal miners jobs producing solar panels and windmills, jobs that pay the same or more, and don't require them to sacrifice their backs and lungs, and die young and in pain in their mid-fifties. What might that scenario look like, where every dog, large and small, gets a scrap? There's always been enough to go around. Always. Keep that in mind at all times.
I'm really not fond of sharing personal stories in here, but I have done so a few times over the years to illustrate certain points. I went back to college in my forties because I had been laid off twice in five years, and decided that a bold commitment was the only thing that would save me from a frustrating life of scraping by on menial jobs with a high-school diploma. And as mentioned above, I got out of an increasingly bad situation because I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
The point in all that is to emphasize that I'm an ordinary person, no prettier or smarter or luckier than you. I grew up poor in a single-parent household, no big gifts or advantages or inheritances. I came up believing that the harder you work, the luckier you get, and so I worked to get myself out of these jams that I had put myself into. It takes effort and commitment and patience, but ultimately it pays off. The only thing you lose by trying is the certainty of continuing down that other path you're trying to leave. You know what happens if you do nothing; what happens if you try something else? If I can do it, just about anyone can do it. It is not a matter of ability or talent, but of desire and persistence.
This country has gotten itself into a real jam right now, and time is getting shorter, but we can work our way out of it. It's the difference between deciding that it's worth saving, and simply giving up on it. It's doing the work of paying attention, staying informed, being focused, supporting each other, conserving our energy and our anger for the things we can actually affect. Show up and vote every time. Think about where you spend your money. Don't worry about learning stupid tricks for debating your Trumpkin uncle, don't listen to Chuck Todd's lame excuses, don't complain about Bretbug Stephens' intellectual hackery and general uselessness. Just write them off, walk away. Don't engage them. Don't even give them the complaint clicks. OK Bretbug.
Are you really worried about climate change? Then recognize the part you play in it and do something about that. Consume less, find local meat and produce whenever possible, drive smaller, have fewer children. These are all things that even poor people have at least some control over. All that is required is to commit to it because it's the right thing, and not worry constantly that someone else might not be doing it as well. That's the voice of doubt and deceit that worms its way into your brain and lays eggs. Don't listen to it. Every person that you think is unjust in this world relies on people listening to that voice. That's a fact. It's literally their revenue model. It's how they convince poor working people that they have more in common with wealthy dirtbags than with their own neighbors.
I promise you, flat-out triple-dog guarantee you, not as a matter of politics but of math, that if enough people made these simple decisions, real change would occur, and quickly. The bastards would change or be gone, because the money would be gone, and money is their oxygen. They can't do this without our help, the fuckers and weasels of this rotten world. Stop helping them. If ever there was a new year resolution worth keeping, there ya go.
This was not some clichéd "midlife crisis" thing, or maybe it was; since I don't happen to be the "get a red sports car and a girlfriend half my age" type, it just took a more mundane form. But there it was all the same. And it had actually started a few years earlier, in the spring of 2014.
Here are the broader strokes: I had been passed over for a promotion that I felt I should have gotten, and really needed for financial purposes. Completing my MBA in 2011 had not magically transformed my prospects; in fact, I now found myself on the debt hook, possibly for the rest of my life. So I was pissed about that, and growing more dissatisfied with the nature of the job I still had.
Then in October of that year, my ninety-year-old father passed away. Since his mother and grandmother had lingered into their nineties in the throes of dementia, it would have been his worst nightmare to find himself consigned to the same fate. So in that regard, he actually went the way he wanted to: peacefully, in his sleep, still lucid and aware, still walking down the hill every other day to the little general store near his house, to stretch out and have a cup of coffee and shoot the shit with some of the neighbors.
Obviously, though, no matter how "ideal" the circumstances, no matter how prepared you think you are for it, losing a parent is never easy.
Weeks after my dad passed, early in 2015, I got a call from a game show. You've heard of the show, trust me. I had been trying to get on for five years at that point, passing multiple tests and going to two auditions. So it was important to me, and it felt like things were going my way finally. Hell, maybe I could win enough to pay down my student loans, maybe even my house, maybe even quit my job and start a business doing something I wanted to do. Dare to dream, kids.
I had five weeks to prepare, so I studied hard, practiced and watched. I had this thing nailed. I didn't care about "getting rich," but the alien concept of simply being out of debt seemed like a perfectly reasonable goal that would change everything for me. Here was a golden opportunity to wipe the slate clean and get a fresh start.
Ask yourself a couple of very simple questions, and really think about them: What do you want out of your life? What would you do if you never had to worry about money? What would you do if you were simply out of debt, if you didn't have to do work you no longer liked, in order to pay creditors that you'll never even meet?
We'll return to those questions, but in the meantime, suffice it to say that while I had a very enjoyable time on the show, and the experience was cool and amazing, I did not acquire enough winnings to get out of debt, or even to chip away at it. It took me five years to get there, and twenty minutes for it all to be over with.
It sounds pathetic in retrospect, but at the time it was devastating. I would always be stuck where I was. I would never get ahead, or even back to zero. I would spend the rest of my natural life paying interest on $200 textbooks to faceless creditors, who would just set it in an endless stack with all the other suckers on the hook.
Since my late teens, I've been a drinker. Playing in rock bands for ten years out of high school accelerated that dynamic to where I developed a considerable liking and tolerance, mostly beer, tequila, and vodka. After the band years, I settled into a steady moderate weekend-warrior rhythm, but that rhythm had picked up during these late-forties doldrums. Nothing catastrophic, which in retrospect might have been part of the problem -- there was never any catalyzing incident or violent blowout to force me to change. I just kept drinking more and more, steadily.
By late 2015 heading into 2016, it was not unusual to blow through a case of beer and a handle of vodka every week or so, mostly after the family was in bed, just me out on the laptop, listening to music and writing, playing Civilization campaigns, coming up with ideas for music or short stories or whatever. I'd hit the bed at 2:00 or 3:00, get up for work at 6:30, and do it all over again.
So by early 2017, keeping at that pace, I was in bad shape: fifty pounds overweight, tired and cranky, stress-eating a lot of garbage, feeling more and more like shit every morning after. Turns out the fifty-year-old body is only about half as resilient to the rigors of self-abuse as it is at twenty-five.
The whole time I was able to just glide below the radar and not raise any issues. I never missed work, never gave anyone any reason to confront me because there was nothing visible to confront. But I gradually kept feeling worse and worse, physically and mentally.
And so hitting the milestone that year, I just started asking myself those inconvenient questions. Is this what you want the rest of your life to be like, just not caring what happens next, every day just a little worse than the last? There was no cloud-parting epiphany or anything like that, just the decision to start turning the ship around, slowly but steadily. Whether you have to get outside help for whatever your problem might be -- gambling, overeating, substance abuse -- ultimately it all comes down to you making a decision for your own sake, for your family's sake, whatever. But either way, you do have to do the work. As the man said, choosing not to decide still counts as a choice.
So I started a mile-long walking route near my work site, and hit it every morning on my break. Then in the afternoons if it wasn't too hot. You can get a lot of thinking done on a good walk. Started doing body-weight exercises at home, then lifting weights. Read a ton of books on those things, as starting up a rigorous workout plan when you're fifty and your joints and back are already in pain is something that should be done with patience and care. Stopped drinking, which was actually the easiest move of all. Oddly, since my drink of choice was usually just vodka and ginger ale (or other soda), eliminating the soda was as important as cutting back the booze. Basically a two-for-one net benefit; I realized very quickly that a major part of feeling crappy the next day was the huge amounts of sugar my body was trying to process.
Most importantly, sleep turned out to be a massive benefit. I have never been much of a sleeper, even as a kid. But basically "forcing" myself to go to bed two hours earlier, and then three hours earlier, made all the difference. Seven hours of sleep is not just three hours better than four hours' sleep -- it's an order of magnitude better for you. I read a few books on meditation and lucid dreaming, and quickly trained myself to adjust to the new sleep cycle to get even more out of it.
Another promotion came up that fall, so I applied for it, studied, did practice interviews and wrote out answers to typical questions and rehearsed them a bit, just did the extra work you do to get that edge, and got the job. That was the final key to getting out of that mental funk that was just dragging me down. That was at the end of 2017, two full years ago.
And I haven't looked back. I'm working on certifications in my new field, have dropped twenty-five pounds and kept it off, still lifting weights and replacing fat with muscle, and kept all those new habits. I have a beer or a glass of wine or a cocktail once in a while, but just the one. I took a Pro Tools audio engineering class with my daughter in 2018-19, got Pro Tools (and Reaper) last June, bought a bass guitar in August, replaced my ancient Korg keyboard in October, and have been writing and recording demos, just to recapture the fun I used to have creating music. I don't worry about whether the music is "good" so long as the next song is just a little bit better and tighter than the last, and that a consistent process develops. If I make money, great; if not, that's fine too.
Here is the point, and it is definitely not to crow about how awesome I am, nor to give you some "toughlove" sermon from my high horse. There is still work for me to do, weight to lose, songs to write, debt to kill. But progress has been made, and it was because I finally took an honest assessment of the situation and committed to doing something about it.
I might suggest that many people out there are, in a collective sense, where I found myself in the spring of 2017, when it comes to how they feel about their country or their future political prospects. It's understandable -- after all, even knowing what a hopeless clusterfuck 2020 is going to be, we still get to start it off even worse than assumed, by watching this failed casino clown derp his way into a war, while the corporate media cheer him on.
This is because too many of us have become dull, unserious people. We vote for corrupt idiots and then wonder why they suck. We consume grotesquely servile corporate media and wonder why they're all gutless toadies. We know more about Baby Yoda and Kylie Jenner and the "contestants" on the ninety-seventh iteration of The Bachelor than we do about the people who are poisoning our water and taking a wrecking ball to our elected government. We communicate in an insouciant, peevish shorthand about the wonks and nerds who stupidly think that knowing practical facts actually matters, as if the people that designed and built the complex technological infrastructure that we take for granted just sat around all day hate-watching the Cats movie and trading snark, or some bullshit like that.
We used to build and do really cool things, and we can do that again. I recently saw something from Elizabeth Warren that took me back to those fateful questions I asked myself a couple years ago: Imagine who you could be if America worked for everyone.
What would your state of mind and your life be like, if you didn't have to rely on a job you hated in order to retain health insurance that kept you in a racket that overcharges you even with insurance? What would you do to fulfill your personal purpose or mission, the passions of your very soul, if you didn't have to constantly worry about the next crumb that falls to you from the billionaires' gilded table? What if you lived in a nation where the impossibly wealthy knew when they had enough, and weren't willing to make the world burn just to avoid paying a few more percent on their billions?
What if, instead of constantly bitching about how terrible the corporate mediots are, we just shunned them all? They're not worth a shit anyway, so what's lost by avoiding their cynical daily ragebait? Information is everywhere. You're not required to get it filtered through the likes of Chuck Todd or Maggie Haberman or Bret Stephens.
We've become unserious people because we've given up, and you can see that not only in how the Republicans act, but in how the Democrats act. The fact that Joe Biden is probably going to be the Dem nominee is a sign that the Dem base has given up. They've fallen for the "conventional wisdom" -- that is, the mantra propagated by a corporate media with a clear vested interest in the outcome, as well as the journey to the outcome -- that Biden is the "most electable" one, that even though Warren and Sanders and Kamala Harris all have messages and proposals that align more closely with the voters' concerns, they have been gulled into believing that the comfortable old shoe is a better fit.
As someone with flat feet and a chronically bad back, I can tell you that there's nothing like a new pair of good shoes to put a spring back in your step, seriously. Here's a couple of salient examples:
If you think the Republicans are leading this nation in the wrong direction, should you vote for a candidate who promises to fight them, or a candidate who insists, at this ridiculous point, that he can still "work with" them, after all their treachery? Impeachment has majority support; Trump and the Republicans have majority disapproval. The lies and hypocrisy and bad faith are there for all to see. You would think this would provide a clear path for a candidate from the opposition party, but any candidate advocating for actual change gets kneecapped by a gaslighting media and a timorous populace of tribal mice seeking social acceptance.
If you're genuinely concerned about the $1.5 trillion in student debt - which impacts the whole economy, and keeps families and communities from achieving their potential, only to enrich a handful of wealthy investors - are your concerns better served by someone who has repeatedly promised to lower or eliminate that debt, and shown a clear plan to achieve that objective, or by the senator who literally helped write the law that prevents the indebted from clearing their records and getting on with their lives by declaring bankruptcy? Why do greedy, chiseling dipshits like Trump get multiple resets, but hard-working families have to send a painful chunk of their paychecks to Navient every month for the rest of their lives?
When the "OK Boomer" epithet gained traction a couple months ago, it was portrayed as the bratty, pissy sniping of spoiled punks against their wise, benevolent grandparents. That is incorrect. It should be seen for what it actually is -- the understanding of the youth that the elders are feckless, dishonest interlocutors to begin with. We can play the "not all boomers" game all day, but the fact is that the boomers in power have made it clear that they got theirs, and the kids can go fuck themselves. Here is the world we are leaving you. You're welcome. The kids have responded accordingly, and the old farts can't stand it. Rejection works. Who knew?
Australia is burning, and there are still people out there, after all the hurricanes and flash floods and wildfires and Zika outbreaks and enormous melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, who will swear on a stack of pancakes that this is all some mass media-driven hysteria morphing into a librul command orthodoxy, spearheaded by our modern Joan of Arc, a cranky Swedish teenager who has the nerve to refuse to take shit from deep, principled thinkers such as Donald Trump and Ben Shapiro. Never mind that the American government is eviscerating fuel standards and environmental conservation practices as quickly as possible, that we frack anywhere and everywhere, that people feel free to drive the biggest gas guzzlers they can find, that China continues its enviro-killing practices unabated.If anything, the world is turning more and more illiberal, electing fascists and autocrats and climate-change deniers all over the planet, trading democracy for jackboot stability. Name one policy that has actually changed or affected anything, that was in response to Greta Thunberg's efforts. Name one climate metric that has improved since the passing of the Paris accord. Name one government policy in any country that has been changed or affected by the desire to avoid incurring the wrath of woke Twitter, or even Leonardo DiCaprio.
It is well past time to put to rest the canard that the internet complainers have anywhere near the weight to offset (or even affect) the nefarious deeds of those actually in power. I'm not sure why some folks persist in such erroneous reasoning, but none of the possibilities are good or useful.
Consider this: last year, the top 400 wealthiest people collectively made $1.3 trillion. Lord knows they deserve it. They are all so very hard-working, and totally didn't inherit their wealth, or screw over communities and competitors to acquire it. Their ceaseless hoarding and accumulation sets a fine example for all of us to study and emulate.
Consider this in comparison: climate scientists estimate that it would take approximately $300 billion to alleviate climate change dangers for maybe as long as twenty years. That is, there is a scenario where we might literally be able to buy some time, and for less than half the annual US military budget.
God forbid we should work up the sheer gall to ask our betters to contribute so much as a single shekel to this hysterical hoax. You have to see it from their perspective -- it doesn't affect them. They have insurance and financial solvency. They can take off to Telluride or New Zealand or Paraguay or whatever redoubt looks good when the shit really comes down.
What if we approached the conundrum from a different direction -- that the effort to alleviate climate change could be a genuine opportunity for the disaster capitalists? Give the fossil fuel companies tax incentives to move production resources and capital to renewable energy sourcing. Give the coal miners jobs producing solar panels and windmills, jobs that pay the same or more, and don't require them to sacrifice their backs and lungs, and die young and in pain in their mid-fifties. What might that scenario look like, where every dog, large and small, gets a scrap? There's always been enough to go around. Always. Keep that in mind at all times.
I'm really not fond of sharing personal stories in here, but I have done so a few times over the years to illustrate certain points. I went back to college in my forties because I had been laid off twice in five years, and decided that a bold commitment was the only thing that would save me from a frustrating life of scraping by on menial jobs with a high-school diploma. And as mentioned above, I got out of an increasingly bad situation because I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
The point in all that is to emphasize that I'm an ordinary person, no prettier or smarter or luckier than you. I grew up poor in a single-parent household, no big gifts or advantages or inheritances. I came up believing that the harder you work, the luckier you get, and so I worked to get myself out of these jams that I had put myself into. It takes effort and commitment and patience, but ultimately it pays off. The only thing you lose by trying is the certainty of continuing down that other path you're trying to leave. You know what happens if you do nothing; what happens if you try something else? If I can do it, just about anyone can do it. It is not a matter of ability or talent, but of desire and persistence.
This country has gotten itself into a real jam right now, and time is getting shorter, but we can work our way out of it. It's the difference between deciding that it's worth saving, and simply giving up on it. It's doing the work of paying attention, staying informed, being focused, supporting each other, conserving our energy and our anger for the things we can actually affect. Show up and vote every time. Think about where you spend your money. Don't worry about learning stupid tricks for debating your Trumpkin uncle, don't listen to Chuck Todd's lame excuses, don't complain about Bretbug Stephens' intellectual hackery and general uselessness. Just write them off, walk away. Don't engage them. Don't even give them the complaint clicks. OK Bretbug.
Are you really worried about climate change? Then recognize the part you play in it and do something about that. Consume less, find local meat and produce whenever possible, drive smaller, have fewer children. These are all things that even poor people have at least some control over. All that is required is to commit to it because it's the right thing, and not worry constantly that someone else might not be doing it as well. That's the voice of doubt and deceit that worms its way into your brain and lays eggs. Don't listen to it. Every person that you think is unjust in this world relies on people listening to that voice. That's a fact. It's literally their revenue model. It's how they convince poor working people that they have more in common with wealthy dirtbags than with their own neighbors.
I promise you, flat-out triple-dog guarantee you, not as a matter of politics but of math, that if enough people made these simple decisions, real change would occur, and quickly. The bastards would change or be gone, because the money would be gone, and money is their oxygen. They can't do this without our help, the fuckers and weasels of this rotten world. Stop helping them. If ever there was a new year resolution worth keeping, there ya go.
No comments:
Post a Comment