Hi. Have you ever see that one optical illusions/brain trick where you focus on the spot in the middle, and the dots around it begin to disappear? Even if you’ve seen it before, check it out again…
That’s what the current news cycle feels like… Like if I give one thing my attention, I lose the sight of the other things happening around it. In my LAST POST (which is good and you should totally read), I talked about the strategy of “flooding the zone,” where we are flooded with so much awfulness that our senses are overwhelmed. Add to that the new added distraction of AI-generated fakes—along with a SEA of hope-draining bots—and it’s easy to see why so many kind of shut down. How can we ever hope to properly respond to something when there is so much corruption, injustice, & immorality shoved in your face that you can’t even keep track of what outraged you 48 hours earlier?
I don’t know… Maybe it’s my ADD. Help me out… Which awful thing do you focus on? How do you decide? Because our brains, our souls, & our consciousnesses can’t take it all in at once. Do we focus on our nation entering yet another war in the Middle East with no clear goal or exit strategy? Do you focus on how it’s illegally happening without Congressional approval? Do you focus on the more than 150 children in Iran that we & Israel killed when we bombed a girl’s primary school? Do you focus on how he’s now threatening Spain (SPAIN!)? Did you forget about him threatening Greenland? Remember him telling Canada he wanted to make them the 51st state? What about ICE killing people in Minnesota and laying siege to Minneapolis? If their goal is just to deport the people who are here illegally, why are they building so many concentration camps… Is THAT something we should be worried about? What if trump-supporting billionaires keep buying up formerly trusted news outlets and turn them into partisan spin machines? They are trying to pass laws here in Tennessee that would allow the death penalty for women who get an abortion… Do you give your attention to that? Kansas just invalidated every trans person’s drivers license in the state… Where do we put that? Military leaders are telling U.S. soldiers that trümp is anointed by god & that the war in Iran is to bring about the apocalypse. In the din of all this depravity, maybe you didn’t even hear about the blind Rohingya refugee who came here escaping genocide, was captured by ICE, released into the cold, speaking no English, miles from his home and family, who DIED OF GODDAMN EXPOSURE. And then there is the Epstein files, the horrors surrounding it, and the fact that they they are clearly trying to protect the identities of wealthy pedophiles. JESUS, CAN YOU EVEN REMEMBER THE STUFF AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS PARAGRAPH?!? And what’s more, when some new atrocity is revealed tomorrow, which of these horrors will disappear from your view?

I’ve got three kids. My mom made many sacrifices to send me to private school my whole life, but all my kids went to public school. We loved our public, relatively urban school experience. We loved the diversity of both people and thought, we honestly loved the rigor, and we very much loved the cost. If you have kids and you don’t like the school in your school district, there are a few options. You can move to a different district or county, like so many “white flight” families did when they made segregated schooling illegal (or attempted to). If you’ve got a whole lot of money, you can send your kids to private schools. If they are near you, you could send them to a resource-siphoning charter school. Or if there is a stay-at-home parent, you can homeschool… But who wants to end up with those weird little kids, amirite (I kid! Sort of…)? Regardless of the option, I think we can agree that all of these require a certain degree of privilege to which not everyone has access. Moving is expensive, and that might require changing jobs or a very long commute. Private schools are VERY expensive, they can “weed out” kids who are less gifted or less rich, they aren’t required to provide the same level of special education services, and they are allowed to discriminate based on religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Many charter schools don’t provide bussing, and getting your kid there is hard. And many families require both parents to work in order to pay the bills, making homeschooling impossible.
Or, maybe you just don’t want to pull your kids out of a struggling or lower performing school district because you believe in public schooling, and if every family with the means to leave leaves, then the only families who remain will be ones who either aren’t as privileged, or who—for a multitude of reasons—aren’t as capable of caring for their kids… Leaving the already struggling public schools with an even HIGHER concentration of students and families who are struggling. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship… climbing over the slower rats… leaving their weaker, poorer, disabled, less economically mobile counterparts to go down with the ship. There are many correlations in this to what is currently happening in America. Here is a video I watched the other day…
After trümp’s anti-immigrant policies insulted and economically affected them, this American citizen with an immigrant wife chose to move to a more welcoming country. They are able to do this because he’s married to a doctor. Who went to HARVARD. I am hearing more & more people around me dream out loud about leaving the Unites States. I mean, I get it… Other countries are building high speed rail and investing in public transportation, while we are backing out of climate treaties and getting rid of EPA regulations. The Secretary of Health & Human Services is a conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxer. But just like moving school districts, moving to another country is HARD. It takes money. And privilege. And just like a lot of private schools, there are requirements that not everyone can meet. And even though there are slack-jawed MAGA cultist who are wearing their “Murica: Love it, or leave it” T-shirts, there are going to be many who are stuck here in this failing schools system of a county…
Remember the clip from the first episode of The Newsroom (I’ll link it HERE, because for some reason, WordPress won’t let me embed it) where Jeff Daniels’ Will McAvoy dares to question American exceptionalism with the words—almost startling 14 years ago—“America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.” Now it feels almost quaint. Most countries are warning their citizens not to travel here. In an international survey of which countries were the biggest threat to world peace, the United States under trümp’s presidency was rated next to or just behind Russia as the biggest threat to peace. I mean, at least we’re beating China in something, right? In Canada, 48% of their people view the U.S. as their nation’s biggest threat… Way more even than Russia (29%).
America is broken. And much like the 2016 election, the real traumatic part is coming to terms with how many of the people around seem to be endorsing & supporting the brokenness. I say “seem,” because even though there are real people making comments everywhere celebrating selfishness & bigotry, I still don’t believe they are as prevalent as it often seems. And the remnants of the hopeful parts of me want to believe that many of the people proudly displaying their bigotry & hatred are actually bots, programed to chip away at our belief that people are a bit better than they are broken… to question our understanding that the moral arc of history actually does bends toward justice… to erode our hope for the future. When I saw those states turn red in 2016, it affected my view of human nature. I mean, I know the brokenness is there. I just think—or maybe need to believe—that it is being amplified by bad actors… Flooding the zone with shit.
This brokenness is not new. When people were fighting for the Americans with Disabilities Act, so many people (people who are CURRENTLY able-bodied) were irate at the idea of having to provide accessible entrances for their businesses. Like, how DARE you prohibit discrimination, ensure equal opportunity, and require people to provide reasonable accommodations?!? WHAT KIND OF WOKE, UNAMERICAN CRAP IS THAT? But there are similarities between their strategies for affecting government and affecting our views of human nature. People will intentionally break government to “prove” that government doesn’t work. In the same way, the philosophy that tells us democracy & freedom are better than fascism & authoritarianism is one that trusts that—in general—the majority of people will do the right thing. If they make it look like everyone around you is immoral garbage, then you probably have less trust in a democratic system that trusts those same people. In addition, if you are overwhelmed, depressed, & hopeless, you are way less likely to vote. It’s diabolical.
I’m not certain what our major malfunction is… What is the origin of America’s soul cancer? Is it a human problem, or a uniquely American one at this point in our nation’s history? I’m not sure if we—as Americans—are too stupid, or too evil, or if this obsession with “individualism” as a virtue has been so ingrained in our cultural DNA that too many can’t see the basic Goodness in taking care of each other… But I don’t think it matters. We are broken. America is broken. The world sees it. They see it every time a dementia-addled narcissistic moron takes an international stage and stumbles through self-obsessed speech. They see it every time the weakest wannabe strongman in the world defies Supreme Court rulings, and the cowardly Republican Party cheers him on instead of removing him. They see it when—four years after inciting and insurrection—instead of putting him in prison, the American electorate put him back in office… Because the other option was a Brown woman with a weird laugh. We are broken. They see it. And I see it too.
But just as the world sees our brokenness, they also see trümp’s utter incompetence. I believe the bots are part of the plan… A plan to distract us, to overwhelm us, to flood the zone to the point where we lose hope. They want the constant awfulness in the comments section to provide plausibility to a possible election win. But I believe the truth is that an overwhelming majority of people are against this corrupt president. I believe that he is nowhere near as powerful as they want us to believe. I also watched what those brave Minnesotans did—standing between an armed gestapo & their immigrant neighbors—and I believe that we are a little bit better than we are broken. I see rational, kind people all around me who refuse to give in to despair. I see crowds of thousands and millions who are taking to the streets to declare that America is still a place that has NO KINGS. And most importantly, I still believe that Love wins, and I agree with Rev. Dr. King that the moral arc of the universe still bends toward justice… Though I wish it weren’t so long.
It’s my birthday, you beautiful bastards! Share this post if you like it. Subscribe to my blog if you feel like it. If you want to support me and my writing to the tune of a couple dollars a month, you can BECOME A PATRON. If you love this particular post, and you’d like to leave a tip, you can do that ON PAYPAL or by Venmoing me at chris-boeskool. Also, you can follow along ON FACEBOOK or ON BLUESKY. Stay hopeful, drink water, and fuck ICE. I LOVE YOU!









