A participating member at DemocraticUnderground.com posted a truthful, and, yes, haunting essay on his frustration with the current state of affairs in the United States.

He asks the question:

Anyone else just utterly exhausted, beyond frustrated, and at a total loss?

Of course the answer is – absolutely! You are not alone.

The trick, I guess, is not to get lost in the despair. The prolific DU-er fears “we are being dragged backwards to dark times”. It would appear so, but, again, we cannot become lost.

~

As the song reminds us:

So now you’d better stop
And rebuild all your ruins
For peace and trust can win the day
Despite of all your losing

~~

I’ve posted very little here lately because, truthfully, I can’t even form thoughts about the insanity we’ve been witnessing for a long time. We don’t watch TV at all, so the only news I absorb is that which is brought here to DU, and on Slate, TPM and a bit of the NYT (though their Op Ed section is just drowning in bothsideserim and false equivalence).

From a court/justice system that seems rigged, bizarre beliefs in everything BUT science (all to own the libs, apparently), a nearly completely ineffective media that is either getting totally played by the right wing noise machine or just doing the bigging of their right wing, corporate owners, to a press and way too much of the public that is in the throes of TFG – they can’t quit him (likely because of the income generated) – and this is before I even turn my brain to what we (our species, not just the US) are doing to the world/environment.

In my 65 years, I can’t remember such a moment – when up is down, when lies are more accepted than truth – hell, when truth has become completely devalued. I just feel like those of us that are sane, that have empathy and common sense, that can understand things beyond 2 or 3 word memes or slogans, that can deal with the genuine complexity of issues – are becoming marginalized – shrunk – at rapid speed before our very eyes.

Try as I might, I can’t really see a way through this, because unpunished crimes in broad daylight and the fallout from them are moving at a far faster rate than the slow grinding of (what we are all hoping would be) justice. Things are being broken far faster than they are getting fixed. We simply don’t seem to have a way – an effective messaging system, effective political processes – to reverse this feeling of complete FUBAR. It feels like “they” are getting their way must more effectively than “we” are – and hell, we won the presidency and have the senate and house. I did NOT foresee this at all.

So – had to get that off my chest, because my typically optimistic self is finding it hard to be typically optimistic. The lunatics are running the asylum. Norms are being broken and modified – we are being dragged backwards to dark times – in fact, to some times that have only existed in the imaginations of those dragging us back.

Rant over…for now. DU.com

The Immigrant Song    /    Led Zeppelin