Every time I read one of your recent Long Memo posts I have to sit with it for awhile. The reality of the content makes me profoundly sad. I feel powerless to effect any change because the rot is so diffuse and deep and baked into the system now.
My life’s work was understanding an individual’s perception of the world, the way they interpreted what they observed and to assist them in considering the idea that there could be other ways to see or interpret that world. That is very subjective and I was always mindful of not imposing any of my assumptions upon the process. This past 10 years has been a mind mess for me. Watching all that has happened in the USA since the 1980’s then seeing the rapid slide into chaos of the two notmypresident’s terms has turned me hopeless, helpless, and bitter. Then on top of that trying to assist those around me to make their own sense of things makes it all seem futile.
I don’t know if being in my 70’s makes this any easier than it would have been if I were in my 20’s or 30’s or 40’s. I could choose to do a retirement visa outside the USA and live a quieter life, but then need to deal with distance from family and friends, loss of healthcare for rare medical illnesses, expensive private health insurance outside the USA (which is priced upward by age after 60YO), language challenges and the stresses of another international move. On and on. And our son and our niece have resisted exploring international options I think primarily due to inertia and a hope that the government will just come to its senses and snap back to normal.
Thank you for continuing to point out the signals. It is now time for me to return to learning more Italian.
lol yes. I got carried away. I’ll have to revise it. The plane was half a billion not half a trillion. :) a billion here a billion there … pretty soon it becomes real money.
When I worked in Washington from the mid 80s to the early 90s, it’s still kind of worked. And it always felt like progress has to be incremental because things move slowly because of norms, laws and the constitution. Trump has taught us that things can go really fast when you have a plan – 2025 – and you don’t care about the norms when you obliterate the Post Watergate reforms and you clearly don’t care about the law and the constitution…everything can move very quickly that’s what’s scary. I think we all completely underestimated the speed with which it could fall apart as it is right now.
Ok, so you’re saying that things have changed and we just have to accept and adapt. We shouldn’t have any expectations that things will ever return to normal. Short of burning down the whole system, there’s no way to fix it.
I think it was Jefferson that said, “once a political system is corrupted, it can’t be saved.”
Every time I read one of your recent Long Memo posts I have to sit with it for awhile. The reality of the content makes me profoundly sad. I feel powerless to effect any change because the rot is so diffuse and deep and baked into the system now.
My life’s work was understanding an individual’s perception of the world, the way they interpreted what they observed and to assist them in considering the idea that there could be other ways to see or interpret that world. That is very subjective and I was always mindful of not imposing any of my assumptions upon the process. This past 10 years has been a mind mess for me. Watching all that has happened in the USA since the 1980’s then seeing the rapid slide into chaos of the two notmypresident’s terms has turned me hopeless, helpless, and bitter. Then on top of that trying to assist those around me to make their own sense of things makes it all seem futile.
I don’t know if being in my 70’s makes this any easier than it would have been if I were in my 20’s or 30’s or 40’s. I could choose to do a retirement visa outside the USA and live a quieter life, but then need to deal with distance from family and friends, loss of healthcare for rare medical illnesses, expensive private health insurance outside the USA (which is priced upward by age after 60YO), language challenges and the stresses of another international move. On and on. And our son and our niece have resisted exploring international options I think primarily due to inertia and a hope that the government will just come to its senses and snap back to normal.
Thank you for continuing to point out the signals. It is now time for me to return to learning more Italian.
"The President accepted a four-hundred-billion-dollar aircraft from a foreign government.".
Do you mean 400 million? Surely that aircraft cannot be four hundred billion right? What am I missing here?
lol yes. I got carried away. I’ll have to revise it. The plane was half a billion not half a trillion. :) a billion here a billion there … pretty soon it becomes real money.
Wow, imagine a plane costing that much -- have to be an interstellar vehicle taking the human race to a new planet
Jumped from collecting the weekly envelope all the way to aircraft. Crime apparently pays.
Beat me to it ... lol
When I worked in Washington from the mid 80s to the early 90s, it’s still kind of worked. And it always felt like progress has to be incremental because things move slowly because of norms, laws and the constitution. Trump has taught us that things can go really fast when you have a plan – 2025 – and you don’t care about the norms when you obliterate the Post Watergate reforms and you clearly don’t care about the law and the constitution…everything can move very quickly that’s what’s scary. I think we all completely underestimated the speed with which it could fall apart as it is right now.
Jim, I’m not religious but AMEN to what you just said.
Ok, so you’re saying that things have changed and we just have to accept and adapt. We shouldn’t have any expectations that things will ever return to normal. Short of burning down the whole system, there’s no way to fix it.
I think it was Jefferson that said, “once a political system is corrupted, it can’t be saved.”