First order of business: a confession. Going on Twitter was a huge mistake.
Second order of business: a contradiction. Going on Twitter was one of the best things I could’ve done.
Pandemic. “Tiger King.” George Floyd protests. Kayne West’s Birthday Party. New York City’s plague of fireworks. Kamala Harris’s Vice Presidential bid. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and imminent replacement. Endless police brutality. And constant, incessant, unrelenting ramble of, ramble about, and ramble sprouting from President Trump.
There doesn’t seem to be a necessity for me to keep up with U.S. news. Not being a U.S. citizen, I can’t vote. Many SCAD students are international. We have no say in the makeup of the U.S. government — fair enough. Given this, maybe I really should heed my own advice when, at least twice a week, I open my laptop just to close it, mumbling the popular sentiment of You-know-what-I-don’t-even-care. And maybe it is an affliction of nosiness, but as soon as I close my laptop (and even walk away, occasionally), I turn right back, open it, and read the news.
This year has seen a lot of horrible and bizarre things, and maybe an uninformed observer might feel like it was a sudden spring of the apocalypse, which, like the San Francisco’s orange sky, felt far-fetched and ludicrous until it surrounded them. But 2020 has merely been the inevitable. Because, really, what did we expect?
China’s lifting bans on wildlife trade not long after the SARS outbreak of 2003 was due to be the cause of a second disease outbreak. The FBI had been warning America for years that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement. Black Lives Matter protests have been going strong since 2017 and civil rights protests have been going on for decades, and for decades have ended in police confrontation. And President Trump — when has he ever strayed from his infamous M.O.? Children in cages, Brett Kavanaugh, rape allegations, funds misappropriations. When stories came out about ICE’s for forced sterilization of detainees, or the Trump Administration’s manipulation of the CDC reports (as well as taking $300 million from the CDC for an “ad blitz”), or Trump’s own meager federal income tax of $750 (in 2016 and 2017) — it might do for one to be outraged. It is no longer acceptable for one to be surprised. Half of the problems didn’t even start with Trump. They started with America’s long history of convenient ignorance, forced sterilization, systematic racism, corporation interference, gun violence and misogyny. The inevitable had been on the horizon for a long time. Trump, with his divisive populist rhetoric, merely accelerated the course.
And it’s not just the U.S. that is hurtling toward this point (is it of entropy or combustion, who knows?) — the past decades have seen a rise in nationalism, militarism, and totalitarianism — in short, all the -isms that have been known to cause great tumults. China, the Philippines, Belarus — these are among the countries that have gone from centrist to extreme or from extreme to living nightmare. Genocides, shady elections, terrorism. People who brand themselves Nazis, who hail the Nazi salute, who feel encouraged to adore “Mein Kampf” in public. Headlines that scream phrases like “Germany 1930s,” “beware,” and “the Reichstag is burning.” In such a world, even those who have no say have to say something. In such a world, even those who cannot vote have to pay attention, so the ones who can, will. In such a world, to take on a I-don’t-care-about-politics or the-system-is-broken-so-I’m-not-participating attitude is like being that “this is fine” meme dog, though in this case the dog is paying taxes to the house, taking orders from the house, and cannot leave the house. Such a dog isn’t nihilistically ironic. It’s willfully stupid.
And a willfully stupid dog has no right to complain when it burns down with the house.
