There is too much. July hasn’t been much of a posting month, partly because of…well, reasons, but let’s try to take out the trash before July ends:
• Boris Johnson goes, far too late. On the bright side, the Tories are at least capable of realizing they made a mistake in ways the GOP is not. But now we will see how much they are in thrall to the ERG, the DUP and the alphabet soup of reactionary assholes intent on ruining the world if they can’t stay in charge forever.
• The real pain in the ass in all this is the DUP. They are holding Northern Ireland hostage to get results they could not obtain at the ballot box – and a coalition of Sinn Fein and non-sectarian parties is being kept from office because they are not willing to endure a world in which someone else has the upper hand. This plays perfectly into Tory hands, seeking to use Northern Ireland to extort from the EU what could not be had in negotiation and hold 25 years of the peace process hostage in hopes of achieving full cake-ism and a permanent back door into the EU. To be protected but not bound, while others are bound but not protected: it’s the definition of what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century.
• We’ve been a long time getting to this point. It really began in the 80s, when Reagan and Thatcher teamed up to say that there is no such thing as society, nothing we owe to other people, and it is perfectly all right to act as if such is the case. Forty years later, with no one having ever successfully pushed back against it, we now have an entire generation or two that has internalized this as the normal state of things, and a cohort of assholes pushing ever harder in the direction of “I must never be responsible to anyone ever.” To a large extent, the internet has made this worse, especially a generation whose parents weren’t online or were misguided enough to think that the internet wasn’t the real world. Meanwhile, “I don’t have to know or care there are other people” is the driving value system of America despite never seeming to have the most votes.
• I don’t have an answer, because there isn’t one. All there is any more is trying not to think too hard about it and desperately trying not to invite tomorrow’s trouble in before today. If there’s nothing you can do to stave it off, the best thing to do is save your powder, not soak in it, and preserve your strength and sanity until you can do something about it. Which was easier in July than in June, for obvious reasons, but it didn’t hurt that I had two major life incidents along the way. Of which.