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Back in April, I wrote the following:

It feels these days like we’re living in an insane asylum, watching trump’s numbers hold steady despite his impeachment and now, his murderous mismanagement of the pandemic. The Doomsday Clock, all but forgotten after the Cold War arms race drew to a close, has now been reactivated in the minds of many and is ticking away furiously toward its appointed hour. The asylum’s Fox News-fed inhabitants clamor loudly for their God-given  right to infect not only themselves but anyone else unfortunate or ignorant enough to be in their vicinity while those socially distancing observers who correctly perceive the absurdity of the situation look on in disbelief from the safety of their homes, aghast at the prospect of their world fast becoming much like that depicted in the dystopian paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

When the smoke has cleared and the body count is finally tallied, the numbers of those felled will tell the true story of who scorned science and who ignored the warnings, of whose advice should have been heeded and whose should have been ignored. At that point, there will likely be far fewer people wearing MAGA hats and, tragically, far more families will have been destroyed. Despite the carnage, justice will probably be as elusive in holding accountable those whose corruption made a terrible situation even more so as has always held in prior instances of criminal governmental mismanagement.

Update to today: Not much has changed since I penned those words 3 months ago, unless you consider the still-rising body count; the continuing upward surge in infections across the nation; the continuing unravelling of our economy; the looming, some say catastrophic, end to the eviction moratorium coupled with the, at least for now, termination of supplemental income assistance to those already spread too thin for far too long; the rising parallel infection of the MAGA-minded with its attendant politicization of a totally apolitical virus, thanks to the mixed-messaging of our coarse, buffoonish president; the rising unrest in the streets, first over the George Floyd killing and Black Lives Matter and then in response to the dispatching of hired mercenaries posing as federal agents sent to Portland to quell a fictional uprising whose real goal was to improve the pre-election “optics” for a floundering president; our nation’s loss of respect in the eyes of the world; etc., etc., etc.

Not much has changed, and a whole lot of things have changed, all, arguably, save the president’s falling approval numbers, for the worse!

Twin crises—viral and economic, have now been compounded by ineffective management and woefully inadequate mismanagement. Put in biblical terms, scourges have been visited upon us–and we, the citizens of this once great nation, are the unfortunate “beneficiaries.”

But, beneath all the smoke and rubble lie certain clues, the investigation of which reveals patterns indicative of a theme underlying all this madness. It’s not a solution, by any means, but more like the comfort one receives from learning there’s a name for the cause of one’s symptoms. They may not be totally fixable, but at least  some comfort exists in knowing something about them, that they exist, that they have a name, and in the knowing it confirms the symptoms weren’t just a figment of one’s imagination. Small comfort, perhaps, but it’s better than being left totally in the dark.  

On the surface, it’s easy to see that corruption on the part of many public officials plays a significant role in the current state of governmental dysfunction. Upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that the state of operational error manifest in today’s governmental functioning relies upon a certain degree of ignorance, willful or otherwise, for its survival. And this ignorance is a condition that will continue to maintain so long as the plague of ignorance besetting this nation continues to thrive. For that to change, as entrenched as it has become, would take decades, or more likely generations, of enlightened leadership—something this nation has yet to prove itself capable of.

Now, imagine, if you will, that you’re an alien visitor to our world whose vantage point is not only that of detached observer but also one in which it is possible to step outside of time in order to allow a “long” view—one that makes it possible to see in an instant proceedings that, for those experiencing them, span several hundreds of years of succeeding generations of accomplishments.

Every great societal change enacted by a given generation, as seen from this perspective, is eventually viewed by a succeeding generation as lacking in certain ways that give it cause to find reasons to muck it up and change it.  Regardless of whether the resultant changes amount to improvements, or their opposite, their effects only last until another generation comes along and sets new standards for improvement that invariably dilute or otherwise alter the former gains such as to make them unrecognizable to those by whose labors they were crafted. This holds true regardless of how “improvements” or “gains” are perceived, or, to put it in partisan terms, regardless of which side you’re on. By the time the next generation comes along, the changes are often lost and remain so until a succeeding generation sees fit to revisit them.

Following several such generational attempts to re-define and enact their respective visions of what constitutes acceptable rules of conduct, the cycle, spanning those several generations, repeats itself, with all its attendant twists and turns, until it reaches completion, at which point it begins again.

Any meaningful attempts to overcome the effects of these cycles are invariably hampered by two seemingly immutable facts: a) how people define change lacks uniformity of opinion among those doing the defining, and b) our life-spans aren’t long enough for us to fully grasp the ephemeral nature of cyclical generational change. The difficulties of the former need no further explanation, while the problems posed by the latter make it nearly impossible for their implications to be perceived on a societal scale, which would be necessary if mankind ever hopes to be able to enact meaningful steps to overcome the cycles’ effects on its endeavors. In that regard, we are, basically speaking, fucked!

Yet pessimism is but one of the myriad qualities that are part of the complex soup of ingredients that define our existence. In the mastering of our passions, optimism, hope and the desire to change things for the better are also parts of the picture, even while the labors of Sisyphus cast their shadow over all our earthly endeavors.

Such, in a nutshell, is the human condition. Nobody said it was going to be easy!

Tim Konrad

August 2, 2020