There’s nothing quite like being stuck in what amounts to a burning bag of shit left on the world’s porch. At least, that’s what it feels like to be a resident of the US these days. I’m not proud of it, every reasonable person hates it and is right to do so, the US government seems intent only on malicious destruction that has the potential to spiral out of control, and no one is going to come out of this without also smelling like shit. Our goose isn’t cooked or anything like that. Things aren’t irrevocably broken yet. They are irrevocably changed, though. Whatever survives this period of awfulness is going to have to find a path forward where none has yet been made. Any attempts to “go back to how things used to be” will only cause things to get worse. The only way forward is through significant change. Exactly what that looks like or how that would work… I don’t know. The whole idea of things changing for the better feels so foreign to me at this point that I’m not sure I can actually imagine what that kind of future would look like. All my conceptions of things being better are just images of the past, glimpsed through a heady filter of nostalgia and a genuine lack of awareness of how the world worked before I knew how to see it working. Who’s to say what positive change would look like this days, following the destruction of so much of the good parts of the US–such that they were–and this process can’t even be described as breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. It feels very “conspiracy theorist” to say it, but it’s difficult not to be aware of how the US is finally breaking along lines that have been slowly chiseled deeper and deeper over the last fifty years.