this is possibly too pessimistic, but I'm very tired

[chocolatepot]

While Biden's showing in the debate did make me happy, the idea some have that the US needs to be basically the UN exhausts and depresses me. I am eagerly awaiting the moment the US stops being ~the superpower~ and falls like Rome and hoping that the moment is now because it would at least be interesting to live through it.

I started being interested in politics when I was about seventeen and basically it has taught me so far that there's no point to anything, you can hope as much as you want but even when the good things happen something will (want to) tear them down, so everything is bleak. Also I have a year left on my dad's health insurance and if we don't have proper socialized medicine then I don't know what I'll do.

I don't wish I were an actual Baby Boomer because I would not want to live through the 1970s and 1980s, but fuck I wish I could come of age in a time when I thought people could make the world better. Be a part of the two generations that saw people frequently be more successful than their parents, which made then decide it was OBVIOUSLY meant to be a constant in America and everyone should count on it.

(It must be mentioned that this has cheered me up enormously, though.)

Part of me wants to go read HP for some emotional comfort, part of me wants to read HP fic where everything is still terrible after DH and it takes them nineteen years to get to the point where all is well, damn it, for catharsis. Instead I'm reading a fic that's technically well written and centers on Teddy (yay) but has a bad tendency to epithet "the other man"/"the man" CONSTANTLY, as well as "the Gryffindor"/"the Slytherin".

ERIN. COMFORT ME.

Comments

[lliira]

People do make the world better. We have a black president and a female secretary of state. We have birth control. I'm living with a man out of wedlock and not one person has tried to shame me for it -- not even online! (Maybe I am scary?) My mother even told me to live with a man before marrying him. Hell, look at us all reading and writing here, having opinions our fathers didn't tell us to have, choosing to marry people our fathers didn't choose for us.

Sometimes things go backward temporarily, and during the Bush administration, some things went backward, particularly regarding women. But we have a fair pay act now. It is now the law that we do not pay more for health insurance than men.

My mother and my dad's girlfriend have some horror stories about being a working woman during the 70s and early 80s. As a lawyer, my dad's girlfriend repeatedly ran into male lawyers who expected her to have sex with them as the price of her job. (She didn't, and it hurt her career.) That surely still happens, but it's actually against the law now, as it wasn't until very, very recently.

I'm going to get back surgery. You know all about my pain and disability. I would have likely had that pain and disability for the rest of my life if not for the black president the United States elected. It's possible that the back surgery won't solve everything, but it will most definitely help. And just looking at science -- I would not have survived my first hours without scientific progress, and I wouldn't be able to have this surgery without it, either. Stuff's getting better.

Having lived through the 80s -- trust me, you do not want to be there. People did not in general think things could get better, it was a hellishly depressing time when the rich kept getting richer and the poor kept getting poorer, and no one at all seemed to care. The Soviets were gonna drop a bomb on us any day, so what did it matter? I'm not exaggerating. As a child, I really and truly believed -- as did all of my friends and, as far as I could tell, all the adults -- that none of us would live to see 1990.

[chocolatepot]

This is very comforting, thanks. I just get so frustrated at the outright lying (like turning "we're figuring out how to get the same amount of Medicare for less money" into "they're taking money away from Medicare!", or pretending that Obama never tried to be bipartisan and ignoring that the Republicans in congress outright said they'd never go with him on anything) and I don't trust a lot of people to think critically and not just go with what they're told. Sigh.