It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment in my life where America started to lose the plot.
It would be easy to wallow in this mess—to doomscroll as the world washes away.
But on this anniversary of the United States of America, I believe we are not without hope. It may feel like America has been careening along the highway of enshittification since the turn of the century, but the thing about driving on highways is that you can always take an off-ramp. The truly remarkable thing about this country is its ingenious ability—through elections, immigration, freedom of speech, and economic mobility—to constantly remake itself.
We need to become makers once again, working against the rage, the despair, the grifting, and the misinformation wherever we find them. And we can. Based simply on what I’ve seen as a journalist over the last quarter century, reasons for hope remain. It can be useful once in while to gather these reasons about us as armor against despair.
Reversing his EO’s won’t raise the dead but I don’t think there will be a problem getting the experienced people back nor does their knowledge disappear simply because our mid-grade have learned over the last decade.
We should be able to put the foundation of government back together fairly quickly so domestic issues will likely be resolved quickly, but the trust that our foreign policy is built on has been scrapped for decades
First order of business has to be legislation to keep this from ever happening again.
No more felons in the white-house…or congress for that matter. No more moneymaking by people who get a government paycheck. Period. If you make 175K/year, that is the top limit of what you should be allowed to earn over the course of your time in government…
if you’re there to make money, nope.