No notes.
The establishment has failed us and I think that is why we are were we are now. “Everyone Who Was Supposed to Protect You From This Failed Miserably” so sure they failed but we failed as well. Democracy is supposed to be driven from the bottom up, but instead we the people collectively do not pay attention and take responsibility for our our system.
Part of the problem is the will of the people has been superseded by decades of corporate and politicial interests (e.g. Citizens United, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bush v Gore, etc etc).
Perhaps we should have been fighting back, but this is decades in the making.
Some of us never even had a chance to fight back. This battle was lost before I was born. Bush v Gore was more than 24 years ago, I was barely a child. I wasn’t even alive for Reagan. What can I do now, 40 years too late?
I was running my college newsroom for the 2000 election. I called up an editorial cartoonist at 2 a.m., having already blown deadline by two hours (it would be four by the time we got the flats to the printer), to provide the main art for A1. It remains the only time I have run an editorial cartoon out front.
As these things go, the art I requested was of Gore holding up a paper with a hed of “Bush Wins” (because we were upstyle back in the Dewey/Truman days). Then went with a dek of “Florida holds the Keys” … we finally put the paper to bed at 4 a.m., went out to a 24-hour diner, as was customary, and when we got back to the U-District, the major papers were out.
USA Today (McNews) went with “Florida holds the key,” completely missing how to use that reference. That was the morning I decided to drop out of college and fix this shit. Oh, the irony that I’d later work in automation for Gannett against their wishes (you can’t tell my team that they suddenly need to produce 33% more pages per hour and expect me to not start coding).
Now that I’ve vomited irrelevant verbal diarrhea, the answer is we never had a chance. The system doesn’t like people enjoying their lives, it’s just rent-seeking.
Saying that’s part of the problem is akin to saying the asteroid was part of the problem for dinosaurs. All you’re really missing is the gutting of critical thinking in public education under Reagan.
The system was designed from the ground up to make sure only the right kind of people had an actual say in it. The people at the top make damn sure that the people at the bottom have as little freedom to act on their right to vote as possible.
