A blasphemous moon rises in anticlimatic

I feel like there is an old familiar moon rising in my life after a long hiatus. Maybe others feel something similar? What with the days getting brighter, the snow getting lower, and the Covid-era fog of fear and uncertainty yielding, at last, to the coming spring. Not quite there yet, but closer now to it than to winter onset last year. Almost feels like a different era, now- than just last Christmas. This year feels like it will be different, finally. Brighter. Some kind of a return, to some kind of hope and harmony- two things long missed these long two years of madness isolation and loss.

Life is so hard, it’s actually unbelievable. It’s easy to ignore this fact, or luck into circumstances that don’t force the reminder, but it really is. Accomplishing anything is a savage, and brutal business. Privilege is relative, and often balanced in ways impossible to discern with a corresponding weakness. Nobody has it easy. We all need help, and we all need to help. It works out kind of well for us, as a species, this fact.

I miss political debates with peers that didn’t end with someone getting banned/segregated/ejected into space. The discussions I used to have are not discussions that are had anymore, though. Right wingers have been consistently retarded going back as far as I can remember, back to the Toby Keith Team America days of Bush’s post 9/11 Freedom Crusade- incidentally occurring during my college years. They haven’t gotten any brighter, and in fact their “music” (pop country) has actually gotten several times worse somehow in the interim, but weirdly enough they have been joined by many of the types of people I used to enjoy debates with- old school libs, like my former college professors way back in the day- and many of the boomer aged former hippie types, or just upper middle class educated types of at least a certain age and experience level.

Lefties seem to have kind of split off in one of two directions. Either they eject themselves into this weird sort of categorical purgatory that is neither left wing or right wing, or they go woke. I have many friends going back many years that were of an almost identical left wing mold at some point in the past, and have now diverged. One of my closest friends over the years, who works in academia, went full woke. It almost prevents us from being friends at all, which depresses me a bit. I deliberately avoid discussing politics, but I don’t think wokeness is political. It feels much more religious, at least from the outside. I don’t understand the inside at all, or where it comes from exactly, but I think it’s the universities. They must have changed since I’ve been there…but that was back when people still prayed to god, unironically, in major Hollywood films. Now that we are more culturally secular (something I assumed would be a good thing) I think we have actually become much less secular, only with less self awareness. I think colleges have become de facto churches, if participants don’t have a different church to attend- and lets be honest, anyone who has any church to attend is probably attending a private church-centric college that doesn’t have the kind of weird religious woke framework surrounding all of its subjects.

It isn’t interested in discussion, or debate. It’s not interested in sharing the world with different points of view. It’s all or nothing, and so long as it’s all or nothing it’s doomed to ultimately be nothing- because it sure as fuck is never going to be all. Ultimately, it can either die of natural causes that way, or moderate and rejoin society as a group entity less hostile than it used to be, and more in the business of persuasion than attempted force.

I much prefer games of persuasion and seduction than games of force and power.