{"id":948,"date":"2003-03-20T21:50:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-20T21:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2003\/03\/20\/high_anxiety\/"},"modified":"2024-11-30T03:28:08","modified_gmt":"2024-11-30T08:28:08","slug":"high_anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2003\/03\/20\/high_anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"High Anxiety"},"content":{"rendered":"

All week long,<\/strong> I\u2019ve been filing away teeny little reminders of what I should write, but it\u2019s been difficult to summon the will to compose lucid sentences during the little free time I\u2019ve had. Italy was wonderful and rejuvenating and extraordinary (and I guess occasional stories will spill forth from time to time), but being back in the States for just a couple of days nipped all that in the bud. Once I had steady access to the media again, all that tranquility was replaced by dread and anxiety. I\u2019m a little tanner, but it seems that I\u2019ve become a fidgety, lethargic, nervous wreck.<\/p>\n

Can you guess why?<\/a> Yeah, I thought so.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not suffering from some kind of liberal, pacifistic, anti-war reflex, though. I can whip myself into an indignant frenzy when I discuss my views on this situation, but in many respects my reaction is more intellectual than visceral. Though I\u2019m grateful to be able to say this, I\u2019m also not very proud to admit that I don\u2019t really have a true sense of the scale of destruction that has been and will be occurring, one which can stir true empathy. That luxury, I think, is exactly what feeds into the thing that really is twisting me into such knots: the way our republic seems to be disintegrating around us, without much effective opposition.<\/p>\n

Every day it\u2019s getting worse, this feeling that we\u2019re on a runaway train. The start of the attacks this week just feels like the part of that nightmare where we come around the bend toward the bridge that\u2019s been washed out. We all knew it was there, but now we see it. I fiercely disagree with how our government has been been behaving. I see a concensus about Saddam Hussein being a thug, but I haven\u2019t seen enough compelling arguments to justify what we\u2019re doing about it. There\u2019s a lot of manipulation, distortion of facts, empty rhetoric, and more hypocrisy than I can shake a stick at, but not enough substantial reasoning to convince me that our nation should be behaving this way. I hear proclamations of our commitment to liberty, to freedom, to compassion, but all I see is a reality that belies those things: censorship in the name of free speech, hostility in the name of peace, persecution in the name of liberty, and self-interest in the name of patriotism. I don\u2019t really think any of this is new to America\u2019s history, but it’s getting absurd. I\u2019ve never felt so strongly that we\u2019ve already lost too much ground to make things right again. Our democracy feels all topsy-turvy: are representatives don\u2019t seem to represent us, our freedoms are selectively doled out and rigorously controlled, our corporations have more rights and privileges than our citizens. How do we keep letting this happen?<\/p>\n

What the fuck, ya know? Is anyone ever going to convince us that the emperor has no clothes?<\/p>\n

I keep saying \u201cus\u201d and \u201cwe\u201d because despite all the disagreement that I know is out there, it still feels like discourse is dead. Everyone talks or shouts but no one ever listens. Even if we disagree how things are done, though, we\u2019re still stuck in the same boat together, and it\u2019s still sinking, even if a bunch of us keep trying to do something about it. We\u2019re not really free because we\u2019re all going down the drain together, whether we like it or not.<\/p>\n

Feh. It\u2019s making me crazy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All week long, I\u2019ve been filing away teeny little reminders of what I should write, but it\u2019s been difficult to summon the will to compose lucid sentences during the little free time I\u2019ve had. Italy was wonderful and rejuvenating and extraordinary (and I guess occasional stories will spill forth from time to time), but being … Continue reading “High Anxiety”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultrapolitical"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=948"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77089,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948\/revisions\/77089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}