Not the B-plot

Calling it a song of my youth certainly dates me, but there it is.

There are times
When you need someone (yeah)
I will be by your side (For sure, for sure)

I can't quite bring myself to socialize at this queer board game night event at my favorite bar. I don't exactly know why. Everyone seems lovely and the walk was more effort than it will be in the next few months. The snow is oblivious or possibly defiant of the fact it is technically spring.

Trudging out here in the snow was part of an effort to get me out of a funk brought on by a persistent lifetime affliction: following the news.

There is a light that shines
Special for you and me

Common was invited to the Obama Whitehouse to read poetry in 2011. Given this was literally any action by Barack Obama (that wasn't part of the fully bipartisan endless bloodletting in the Middle East, of course) Fox News was quick to manufacture a scandal. The insufferable Jon Stewart-Bill O'Reilly debate on the topic is almost worth watching, given how well it reflects the political spectrum of 2008-2016.

O'Reilly asserting that, obviously, Obama hugs and kisses cop-killers while Stewart patiently and carefully tries to produce a nuanced defense with endless attempts at getting a laugh from his ideological opponent. I doubt Jon Stewart would openly describe O'Reilly as an opponent - maybe not even now. In the moment, he wants to make him laugh and them to get along. Bill knows better. For him, the left had already gone too far. Why, Obama was a communist! Eventually, he would also be Muslim. And not even born here.

The slowly emerging hard-right fascist movement needs enemies, even if said enemies are too stupid to recognize this is a struggle with real teeth and blood.

Ten years before any of that, I am in the Student Union Building of Green River Community College. The Playlist for the recreational area was probably a more permanent fixture than the paint on the walls; Common - The Light and, of course, Shaggy - It Wasn't Me. Even more permanent than the Japanese giant robot fighting arcade game named something like Virtual On, which was rewarded for its popularity by the group of nerds I hung out with to have been wired to dispense free credits with a hidden button.

Getting good at that game seemed very important at the time. A desire for peer acceptance? A fixation born of an initial frustration that channeled a deep, but eventually successfully suppressed, generational anger issue? Or maybe the simple need for something attainable, achievable. Achievement was very important. It was the motivating factor that led me to con my way into taking college classes and getting dual credit for them. But I still managed get a great deal of slacking done, with a mere 15 credits total necessary per quarter.

Green River was where I was driving when I first noticed it. There was almost no traffic. I pulled my 1980 Chevrolet LUV light pickup truck - a vehicle neither expected nor intended to last very long in the hands of a teenager - up to the school. No cars in the parking lot.

The Student Union Building, where a did quite a bit of my slacking, was nearly abandoned. For the first time, The Playlist is gone. Instead, a newscast echoed through the expanse.

My mother had daringly, ill advisedly, opened the door to the bedroom of her oldest teenage son without a knock. "A plane hit the World Trade Center" she said before hurrying off to her job without pause. I had imagined an accident with a light aircraft, a Cessna or something, and had blithely continued my daily routine.

To say that the birth of my political consciousness occurred at this late moment is not nearly as embarrassing as the forms it initially took. A truly shocking amount of time was required to go from "well, the government knows more information I do so we should trus-" to a kind of liberal-with-libertarian tendencies (shout out to a pre-insane Glenn Greenwald for How Would A Patriot Act) to, finally, today.

Years of reluctant but sustained political education, not so much sought out but having it forced upon you, can leave a person with little option but to conclude the systems that feeds them and keeps them largely safe but leaves so many more in misery cannot be reconciled with a basic sense of justice and empathy.

It takes a staggering amount of effort, ideology, and propaganda to counter this innate sense. Even vampire bats practice reciprocity. But the really load bearing part is the lived reality of a person in the polities with the power to maintain those systems. And that's where the cracks that became visible at the beginning of the millennium have started to widen into grand, yawning chasms.

Given who I follow on social media and the circles I run in, it isn't a long wait in between the instances where the following quote from September 17 2001 appears:

The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what is coming now. The party's over folks.

For all his talents and faults, it must be said that Hunter S. Thompson couldn't quite imagine the desire, the critical importance, of keeping the party - some party, any party - going.

The bets got bigger and always easier to make. Upselling a mark on a no-income no-job no-assets adjustable rate mortgage for a McMansion ("Oh NINJA please") generally required going into an office somewhere. A crypto rug-pull, NFT pump-and-dump, Metaverse property speculation, scam AI compliance services, or a Polymarket bet on war conditions rigged by administration insiders can be accomplished without so much as a single word to another human being.

I have a lot of sympathy for those coming of age and political consciousness today at the pace that I did, given the sheer number of bear traps laid on the path.

Some have neither the time nor interest to read and reflect on their views and place in the world. For others, it is absolutely critical to their position and place in society that they never do this.

Arguably the whole affair began with Free Real Estate; e.g., the centuries long project of murder, genocide, and expropriation that is taught today as an almost incidental side effect of the development of the United States. It was a long time ago. There were some particular bad actors like Andrew Jackson. But above all, it needs to be the B-plot. Euphemisms and passive voice is necessary. The West was "tamed".

Certainly the actors at the time knew it wasn't a sideshow, but a critical aspect of the national project. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, a response to Pontiac's Rebellion that restricted colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains, features prominently in the grievances laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

The Articles of Confederation (1777), a precursor to the United States Constitution, is largely known today for how ineffective it was. The early nation was incapable of paying its debts, raising much of an army, or managing trade. But, eye on the ball, the time when it was in effect was marked by considerable appropriations of land. The Land Ordinances of 1784, 85, and particularly the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, set up the system of admitting new states and territories. Claiming their lands had been taken by right of conquest after the Revolutionary War, settlers strong armed native peoples into lopsided treaties and kicked off a brutal conflict with those that resisted.

I waited in near-empty Student Union Building. I had received no message, but was unsurprised to discover everything had been canceled when I arrived at my first class of the day - US History. We had, in fact, just started talking about Andrew Jackson. We wouldn't be talking about him for long. He was the b-plot, after all. When I drove back home, I saw, for the first but definitely not the last time, a very large pickup truck that had an enormous American flag affixed to its bed.

Today feels a bit like that day. A little bit like 2007 as well. Something has happened that has changed everything - an inflection point in world history - but the immediate and now feels liminal. The effects take a while to play out. The other shoe hasn't dropped. Uncertainty is at a peak. The moment is contingent.

What I needed in 2001 was education. Specifically, an education not mediated by 24 hour news or university history courses that uncritically regurgitated only that which was least controversial. Reconciling what you experience and what you were told by figures of authority is certainly one way to receive a better education.

But I think we can do better than having to experience the Iraq War to learn distrust the government, to watch the economy implode and only the wealthy - those most responsible - be made whole in to order distrust capitalism, or to watch a video of a man choked to death in broad daylight to recognize the depths of systemic racism in the United States. The cacophony of the 2026 internet is thin, ephemeral, frequently insane, and increasingly artificial. Join or form a book club. Engage with people who are still early in their political awakening (at whatever age). Walk over to someone at the queer board game night and say hello.