There was another school shooting yesterday in Minneapolis, the streets are militarizing, and election integrity is actively eroding thanks to a 2020 election denier being handed the keys to a senior DHS post overseeing elections. Things remain pretty bleak in the United States.
It’s less like a storm on the horizon and more like mold in the walls. Slow, steady, spreading until the whole house reeks.
On Monday, I wrote about the last amendment to the Constitution, a pitiful addendum about congressional salaries that somehow wandered out of 1789 and crashed our modern party in 1992. That was the last gasp of amendment fever, and it said more about our drought of imagination than it did about paychecks. On Tuesday, I argued that the end stage of empire looks like being sunburnt in Florida, which is probably the most American metaphor I’ll ever write. Yesterday I wrote about Baltimore City as a civic oddity, an independent municipality adrift in a sea of counties.
But today, I’m reflecting on the headlines. A stew of the week’s disasters.
There are always more headlines. You can reach into the pot blindfolded and come back with another morsel of doom. Starting your day with the news is like pouring black coffee straight into your eyes. I don’t suggest it. Unless, of course, you’re one of those peculiar souls who can’t look away from history’s grease fire as it burns in real time. If so, welcome, pull up a chair.
The shooting in Minneapolis is another grotesque rerun, the kind of rerun that should’ve been canceled seasons ago but somehow keeps getting renewed. Kids today are being raised in environments soaked with emotional abuse, wired biases, and stripped of the public spaces that once gave communities air. Childhood has become a battlefield. Each time it happens, we watch young survivors give press conferences that sound like dispatches from the Battle of Verdun.
America, land of the free, home of the body armor. We live in a country where there are more guns than people, and more grievances than solutions. That’s a hell of a cocktail to hand to a teenager.
And then there’s the matter of our streets. Still militarized. Federal agents in full kit, hauling people off for petty offenses, or moonlighting as rangers because the Park Service can’t make payroll. We’ve seen this movie before.
The Quartering Act.
Reconstruction troops.
Soldiers escorting Black children into White schools while mobs spat on them.
We dress it differently each time, but fatigues on American streets always tell the same story: liberty on leave, grievance on parade. Ans so the cycle repeats with a lone man’s vanity or vendetta metastasizes into presidential fiat, and the rest of us wake up in Fantasyland After Dark™ every damn day.
And just when you thought the bowl was full, ProPublica drops its report. A woman who has made a career out of strangling voter eligibility and gaming the courts is now promoted to help “protect” our elections.
Protect. Like putting an arsonist in charge of fire codes.
It’s all wrapped in bureaucratic doublespeak, which would be funny if it weren’t the opening act for something Orwell warned us about. Democracy becomes a sugary mash of Cheerios, Lucky Charms, and Froot Loops: colorful, chaotic, and destined for a crash. The sugar high of “freedom,” followed by the crash of authoritarianism and diabetes of the body politic.
And so the next election looms, promising to be a doozy. Militarization, mass shootings, conspiracy theories baked into policy, but here’s the thing, these aren’t the bugs, they’re the features. This is the American zeitgeist now.
This is why I don’t like writing about the news cycle anymore. It feels like standing at the world’s worst buffet, staring down trays of lukewarm despair. But here I am, plate in hand, going back for seconds. Maybe that makes me a masochist.
Or maybe it just makes me an American.
After all, we haven’t managed a meaningful amendment in three decades. The tree of democracy isn’t being watered; it’s just being carved into new furniture for whichever faction holds the lease. The drought persists, the mold spreads, and the rest of us continue to breathe it in.
I am envious, of the way you write. Definitely should write a book Stew.