I follow Robert Reich’s Inequality Media newsletters as well as his Berkley lectures on Wealth and Inequality. Today, I listened to his Coffee Klatch chat, and it struck a resonant chord. I had been reflecting on my mood of late and concluded that it was a blend of boredom and dysphoria. Permit me to explain.
The boredom is largely the result of living a virtual rather than actual life – a price of the COVID apocalypse and our feckless national and global attempts to deal with it. The dysphoria is the result of a convergence of bad news.
The bad news includes the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the unspeakable war crimes committed there, and the intent of the SCOTUS majority to gut the right to privacy despite the protections of the Ninth Amendment. Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey are just the first in a line of personal freedoms that may fall – next may be contraception, protections against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual preference, and the right to same-sex marriage. If the textualist/originalist SCOTUS majority follows its worst instincts, then the loss of voting rights for women and the reinstitution of slavery may be on the table, I think. After all, both have a well-established history in America, and it is history that is the textualists’ North Star.
Then there’s a market that has recently wiped trillions of dollars from the savings and 401-K balances of many fellow citizens. The only schadenfreude that I can salvage from the market carnage is that the billionaire class has suffered staggering financial losses, and that Elon Musk seems to be crying uncle over his planned hostile takeover of Twitter. These are small consolations. The billionaire class will be fine despite this adverse blip of market interruptus. The rest of us are, most likely, fucked unless we can lash ourselves to the mast and weather the storm.