Horrors

 This post began as a diary entry, but for some reason I feel the need to post it here. So here it is.

May 18, 2023

 

It’s gotten to the point where I can’t listen to the news anymore. All you get is report of horror after horror. The horror of Ron DeSantis. He represents the horror of the Republicans’ attack on the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies. The horror of the Republicans’ denial of the reality of minority gender identifications. The horror of the Republicans’ attempt to keep schoolchildren from learning other realities of human sexuality. The horror of the Republicans’ attempt to keep American school children from learning real American history. In sum, the horror of the Republican Party turning fascist. There’s the horror of immigration at our southern border. The horror of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The horror that I might lose the Social Security money I paid for my entire working life (and continue to pay for through self-employment tax), at least for a while, because the Republicans won’t vote to increase the debt limit unless we eviscerate our pathetic social safety network and harm millions of vulnerable people, myself possibly included. The horror named Donald Trump. The horror of American racism. The horror of climate change and the disasters it brings around the world. The horror of the rise in the world of the totalitarian Chinese government, which is grossly increase its country’s military power. The horror of Vladimir Putin turning Russia, a place I have spent years studying and even lived in for a brief time, into a fascist dictatorship. It’s nothing but horror after horror after horror. There are horrors that rarely make the news, like the homelessness crisis. The somewhat related horror of our massive failure to deal with mental illness in any constructive way. The horror of Americans’ pathology about guns and the consequent frequency of mass shootings among us. There are horrors that most people don’t think are horrors like the obscene amount of money we spend on the killing machine we call the US military. The horror of the way essentially every one of this country’s systems benefits the wealthy not the people. The list of horrors just never ends.

And there’s not a God-damned thing I can do about it. Not about any of it. I can’t get fucking Ron DeSantis out of office. I can’t solve the immigration issue. I can’t get the Russian military out of Ukraine. I can’t reverse global warming. I can’t house homeless people. I can’t provide mental health care for anyone. There truly is not one God-damned thing I can do about any of it. So why do I even listen to reports of it? It just upsets and depresses me. My whole life I’ve thought I needed to keep up on the news. Now, maybe not. It feels like more than I can bear. I’m old. I won’t have to deal with it all for very many more years, if years is even the right time measure for me to use. But still. It’s overwhelming. Old age is supposed to be a time of peace, or at least ideally it is. The news gives me no peace. So to hell with it.