Surely the Second Coming is at hand
I decided to revisit Yeats last night. I guess this is what you do on a Saturday night when you're in your 30s. It's getting more relatable as the gyre widens.
The strange thing about being alive at this time in human history is that I feel like I've been waiting a decade for things to start getting bad for me personally. Things have been getting worse for a while now. I am very aware that as the meme going around puts it we are already about three lines deep into the Niemoller poem and it's not that long of a poem. But still I like, get up and go to work and go hang out with my friends and write my little blog posts. I am still going about my life as I wait for the other shoe to drop. I think about seven years ago I was at a rooftop party somewhere in Brooklyn and talking about the rise of authoritarianism across the globe and I likened it to fiddling while Rome burns and then grabbed another White Claw and continued about my business. Here we are still fiddling.
The thing about history that wasn't apparent when I was learning it is that while you are living through it you just have to keep living for the most part. Even while they were dropping bombs on London I guess the English still kept a stiff upper lip and went back to the office the next day as long as it wasn't a crater.
The thing that seems to be happening in slow motion right now is the effect of tariffs. Because of the way supply chains work it's only now really starting to affect us but by every indicator it's going to be pretty bad. It just feels bizarre to have spent the past two months knowing that we are headed straight off a stupid and avoidable cliff and yet here we are finally about to go over it. And still we go about our day as usual. A bunch of lemmings absolutely certain that someone's going to build a road by the time we get to the edge. Here we are and no they haven't. See you at the bottom.
Some rough beast is going to be born out of this, I reckon. We may not be quite at World War levels of things not being normal but it's getting worse every day and we've got three and a half years to get there. Besides if anything was going to shake Americans out of whatever stupor we've been in I figure it'd be a treat shortage. They can start disappearing our friends and neighbors without a peep from us but if we can't get next-day delivery on shoddily-made household goods from Guangzhou people will be out in the streets. Did it all feel this stupid when Yeats was going through it?