yes. 25 years and we still have not learned a damned thing....

 But the good news is that the Talking Dog (Unlike our f''in liar of a president, the Dog was in Manhattan close to the twin towers at the time of the attack) is back with his annual post. You can read the whole post here. Here is a snippet:

And we talked about the insane stupidity of it all. It was just impossible to believe that our country and the people in it could consistently learn every conceivable wrong lesson, and do the absolute stupidest and counter-productive thing at every single turn. And yet, here we are. The divisiveness of turning against the other just because they don’t look like us? Check. A pointlessly aggressive foreign policy almost calculated to create foreign enemies who might act against us? Check. A decision that we have to destroy our liberties to preserve our precious (and failing) “American way of life” to save it? Check. And that’s before we talk about the total surveillance state, or the normalization of torture or the use of concentration camps and dungeons, or of course, yet another “preemptive war” in the Middle East. This time without a “coalition of the willing.” Oh, and did I mention a weird decision (seemingly a matter of a personal bribe) to permit a certain Middle Eastern nation whose nationals constituted 15 of 19 highjack perpetrators to have the means to build nuclear weapons.

And yet. And yet people like us continue to take the time and trouble to attend these sort of events, even if it seems like hitting your heads against the wall. There are people of goodwill trying to live a life of meaning, and service to others. Even if the national (indeed, the global) “ethos” seems to be leaning ever more authoritarian, as aging failures (usually white and usually male) strike out at “the other” (often immigrants and invariably not white), and are willing to sacrifice democracy and freedom in the name of their hatreds. Sound familiar?

At the very moment that coalescing and cooperative action will be needed for challenges like, ahem, nuclear proliferation, climate change-for-the-worse), artificial stupidity (which the optimists suggest will kill us all in about three years… or are they just trying to talk up the stock price?), just to name a few… seems ever more out of reach, as parochial hatreds are propped up by the corporate media and, in the American context, “both parties” (by which I mean THE REPUBLICANS, even though Chuck Schumer and the Democrats do everything in their power to keep Republicans viable in the name of political fundraising).

And yet. It’s 25 years later, and many if not most of us are still here, and still not willing to completely give up, let alone lose hope. Indeed, some of us believe that the elections in less than two months time will brush back some of the excesses of the current President, and perhaps there will be serious change in 2028 when the entire Republican apparatus is likely thrown out. Or perhaps we are appropriately immune to this level of pollyannish talk and realize that the hope is in younger people who don’t have the hatreds and bigotries that got us to this point.

As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. I don’t know what will happen 25 years from now. I’m 63 now; the actuarial chart says that my making it to 88 is a less than even chance. You all find yourselves wherever you are on the chart. And hey… maybe that AI thing will kill us all, or climate change, or the nukes, or famine or preventable disease (in our present farcical dispensation where our national “health” minister is an anti-science vaccine denier and heroin addict) will finish us off.

I don’t know. This isn’t a day I have looked forward to, nor will it be next year, or the year after, and so forth. But maybe, just maybe… there is some hope for peaceful tomorrows?

Again, read the whole post here.