News this morning that pirates have taken over large portions of the San Francisco Bay Area, and are now routinely stealing boats, ransacking them, and then grounding them in weird places to make their getaways. Not a surprise at all, given the abysmal conditions that have existed in and around Oakland for decades, but it did give me a moment to reflect on important decisions that must be made to survive the age of deconstruction. To wit: embracing the chaos, what I have previous called the Han Solo option, is more important than ever.
One of the bigger challenges, moving forward, is to avoid getting caught flat-footed by the ever-changing environment around us. And I don’t mean the weather. I mean the vagaries of politics which we have seen, in the last five years, can change overnight and render much of what we thought we knew about things irrelevant, shunned, or simply cancelled. Politics, which many of us have had the luxury of largely avoiding inside the shell of a mostly adult post WWII American hegemony, now saturate everything from food to travel arrangements. Politicians, by the way, are not to blame for this. They are only doing what politicians have always done. We are to blame, because we forgot the lessons of the founders, the very reasons our country exists, and have left them alone and unsupervised in the candy shop for far too long.
And so we have arrived at this place, polarized on every measure, faith in our institutions collapsing faster than Nancy Pelosi kills a bottle of vodka, our discourse unrecognizable and filled with anger, if not real hatred, on topics across the board. We are in gridlock, virtually vapor locked like Mitch McConnell at a podium, and a point in time when we can least afford it.
We do not have to accept this as inevitable, particularly if, like me, you have no natural political home. The Republicans are idiots on many levels, which is why they will lose a second time to Joseph Biden in an election they should—in a more rational state of affairs—win by a landslide.
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