Well it is more mild this time, well luckily the vaccines and this and that, well the kids can go to school, we can't do anymore aid because inflation, and well the flights must go on, follow the science and shorten the quarantines, and yeah the hospitals are overwhelmed again but lockdowns aren't possible and unity and do your part and seize freedom liberties and so on. Watch out for those droplets. Let's not talk about the air or about vitamins. Don't worry about the many secondary health problems and long covid. Don't worry about the derailing supply chain. Don't worry about the foaming at the mouth political reactionaries and the steady drumbeat of shootings and deaths of despair. We will overcome through the shredded swiss cheesed ballot box. I could go on.
The longer I look at these arguments, in search for some sort of coherence, the more I get the sense that my face is melting, along with my brain, trying to figure it all out, like a scoop of ice cream left out in the hot sun. Though this is the nature of the beast.
To put it another way, I suppose part of what makes urban decay so unattractive is the breakdown of something that presents itself as fundamentally organized. Similarly a political economy that is coming apart at the seams is forbidden by its handlers to finally break down, and iteration after iteration of propagandistic image is applied to stave off that eventuality by convincing enough people that up is down and to go on one's merry own way as a good worker regardless of facts on the ground. The acute and worsening gap between reality and image is the thing that is so difficult to get one's mind around.
I'm not sure which existence is worse: never learning and repeatedly heaving oneself headlong into one clusterfuck after the other, or understanding it all and watching it all happen again and again and being able to do absolutely nothing about it.
It becomes a rigorous discipline itself to simply take a deep breath, focus on the pertinent tasks at hand, and then wait and watch.
