So today's my birthday...

This one will be a little more personal, but it seems like a good time to reflect a bit. I turned 59 today. I have spent the day, and a couple before it, sick. One of the joys of working in any level of the education sector (I'm in higher ed) is being exposed to pretty much any and every virus in circulation at any given time. It goes with the territory and I accept that. I had some hope briefly that after our shared experience with the COVID pandemic that a new work and classroom attendance culture would take hold - one a bit more forgiving for those who are really just too sick to be in class. From a health standpoint, it would be great. As long as the work gets done, I'm okay with that. There will always be a subset of colleagues who will disagree, and I accept that too. Most likely, I will be well in a day or two - knock on wood.

The last several days have been rough for us as a nation. As my kids have wished me a happy birthday, I've lamented the world they are inheriting from us. It was definitely not the future I had hoped for any of them. Yet here we are. How did we get here? I doubt there is a simple answer to that question, but there are answers, if we're willing to look, and if we're willing to face what we discover. I will suggest a few things that seem to make sense to me. Let's go back to right around the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s. What was happening around that time? In the US and the UK, there were elections that not only changed which party was governing in each respective nation, but the course of history. With Reagan and Thatcher came the era of neoliberalism - an era that would be ascendant for the remainder of 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. Neoliberalism may be waning, but it hasn't quite gone away. 

The upshot is that we got to witness, if we were willing to wake up and pay attention, the decimation of manufacturing and rural communities. Many of our high-paying skilled labor jobs were offshored. The propaganda we got at the time was that we were going to transition from being a manufacturing economy to being an information economy. The thing is that the people left behind remained left behind. There have been some festering grievances ever since. I'm reasonably certain that if anyone told these folks that the loss of their manufacturing jobs would mean that the environment would be cleaner weren't exactly impressed, and for good reason. NAFTA was the final nail in the coffin for many communities. If you wonder why a subset of working class folks have been at best ambivalent about the Democratic Party in the US, we have to remember that NAFTA was foisted upon us during Bill Clinton's first term in office. 

We also witnessed the privatization of public services. Start with the education sector. It used to be relatively inexpensive to go to a land grant college or university. There was plenty of funding from the state and federal governments. The funding started to dry up around the time that our nation was wrestling with what to do with all of these displaced workers. That made the student loan racket a lot more profitable for the banking sector. Yes, you could get a higher paying job, but not without going into debt, and these days fairly deep debt. None of that money went to your faculty or support staff, by the way. We're dealing with the consequences of that today. Don't even get me started on efforts to privatize the K-12 system. Privatizing public services meant increasing fees on any service that was nominally public. Take a look at what you pay to park at a beach parking lot in Los Angeles or Orange County in California now, and I will tell you of how the amount we paid to park in the same crappy parking lots was a fraction (even adjusted for inflation) of what it costs now. A day at the beach ain't cheap. Converting major freeways to toll roads is another example, which has made another public good expensive for those who must rely on those roads for commute to and from work. I'm merely scratching the surface. There are plenty of economists who can explain to you what happened, how it happened, and how it affected our ability to function as citizens.

Some other trends are worth noting. Forty years ago, if you watched any news on a TV, you could be rest assured that the networks had dedicated news divisions. In some of the counterculture circles I was in as a youth, we could debate whether or not that was news or propaganda. But if nothing else, the stories that were told each morning or evening were well-researched and vetted before they went on the air. There were rules in place about the role of opinion in broadcast news. Those rules went away. And then in the 1990s, news divisions got folded into entertainment divisions. If you wonder why the quality of broadcast journalism has slipped in the past several decades, trace it to that business decision made in various network and cable boardrooms. The advent of social media (something I would have never dreamed of in the mid-1980s) has also led to a pronounced tendency to "flood the zone" with misinformation and disinformation that has left folks confused and divided. That was arguably one of the worst developments in my lifetime, as it gave a larger platform and audience to any of a number of bad actors who wanted to line their pockets and seize power for themselves. And it turns out to be more effective than any Nazi or Soviet propaganda campaign could have hoped for. We're paying the price for that now as I write this.

The end of the Cold War could have been an opportunity for a long-lasting peace and an increase in prosperity for all of humanity. That opportunity was of course squandered. Instead, force-fitting free-market capitalism on whole nations, and the poverty and displacement that ensued poisoned the concept of democracy for so many in the far east of Europe and central Asia. When democracy is coupled with a mass transfer of wealth from the many to a few CEOs and some very corrupt politicians, it's no surprise that there would be some pining for the "good old days" that were long gone, even if those days had been bleak too. 

The decisions that led to this moment often seemed small and inconsequential. But over the decades, they have profoundly changed us as a people to where anyone with a reasonable amount of self-awareness and critical thinking ability can say that the country and the world we see now is essentially no longer recognizable. If you are going to pull off a heist, or even just petty looting, you need to be able to create a deflection or two. If you need to do so fast, you flood the zone with deflections and misdirects. It's easy to get folks to blame some amorphous "other" for our woes. As a young man, I was taught that we should blame the communists and the "illegals" who were supposedly stealing our jobs. The truth was some CEOs stole those jobs with a wink and a nod from our very own government. Then the blame was placed on Muslims, who were supposedly terrorists. The 9/11 attack, which was truly awful, made that particular deflection of blaming the Muslims very convenient. And by that point without any media regulation, it was easy to flood the zone with anti-Muslim propaganda and images of a "war on terror" that were presented more for entertainment value than for information. In our current social media saturated era, the goal is to blame anyone and everyone for our woes other than the real culprits who have been buying our politicians for so long now. And while that happens, the real looting and atrocities are happening, hidden in plain sight. 

I look back at the first two years of the Biden administration and am impressed with the effort to undo the damage caused by the neoliberal era. Even with some narrow margins in Congress, a lot got passed and put into law that in the long run should bring back manufacturing jobs, revitalize our public services, and require social media to put a lid on the bad actors who had gotten away with lying to us without consequence for far too long. I fear it may have been too little, too late, even if it was an impressive effort under our diminished circumstances.

I honestly don't know any more than you probably do what will happen over the remainder of this decade. If Trump and the oligarchs who purchased him have their way, there won't be much of a democracy to speak of, and the nation I was born into will have effectively ceased to exist. That's not acceptable. If democracy does survive, that will be great. But I suspect we will need to face the reality that those of us in the US will be living in a nation that is diminished and more isolated than it was at the start of this year. Picking up the pieces is a young person's sport. We'll see if the next generations are up to the task. 

I will close with this: we don't need more social media apps. We don't need Tik-Tok or an alternative. We do need to interact with other human beings, find common cause, and cooperate to regain even a modicum of what has been lost. And we will need to be patient as rebuilding a democracy and an economy that actually functions will take time. It's not the sort of thing that a single savior can do, although there are always plenty of wannabe-saviors who will talk a good game. The task ahead of us will require a lot of ordinary folks to simply put in the elbow grease. Renewal will take time and will be frustrating. But, if the will is there, and that is a big if, renewal is possible once the name Trump is out of our collective vocabulary for good.

In the meantime, happy birthday to me, I guess. I'll blow out the candles later this week when I am well enough to do so. In the meantime, hang tough. The struggle continues, and continues, and continues....