The financial markets are in tatters, the economy is much softer than I ever thought it would be now, we're on the verge of a war that all of Washington seems to want but which I'm convinced well less than half of Main Street actually wants, we're in a time when radicals of every stripe want to eliminate civil liberties, when apologists condone human rights violations without remorse, particularly if they are violations of the rights of women, when politics has been reduced to a choice between misguided corporateocracy and misguided chic warmed-over radicalism, we're in a time when one camp seems to want to ignore international cooperation on some misguided cowboy mission, and the other side seems to want to ignore international terrorism in pursuit of ostrich-ism, when our food banks and homeless shelters are exploding in short order, when nobody dreams of holding our current government responsible for any of its many economic errors, when a tax cut combined with a war effort has weakened our ability to respond, in a time when as men are led away in handcuffs, people lose their retirement, in a time when people drive the ratings up on programs that focus entirely on crime against children, yet we cannot fund enough domestic abuse programs to protect the children who are routinely abused in less new-worthy ways, when our prison population is at an all time high, yet the streets in the inner cities still don't feel safe, when we finally see the positive effects of those environmental laws we have, and yet intense lobbying to trim them back is in full session, when everyone in Washington seems hopelessly out of touch, but the only real organized effort to deal with this stops at bashing windows out of Starbucks--it's just much more hip to wear cool outfits and listen to cool music and reject the system and marginalize oneself than it is to change anything. In my life, a lot of sea changes have happened--the shooting of Kennedy, Kennedy and King, the moon walk, the Nixon resignation, the Berlin Wall falling, Tianamen Square, the Gulf War, 9/11...but this moment in history feels very dynamic, very unpredictable. I'm not much of a gloom and doomer, and my life is happy now. But what an odd time.
