I made it clear after the US presidential election that I think Donald Trump is a very bad pick. That is putting it mildly. I'm the kind of person who needs to get to work in a crisis, because if not I'm going to go crazy. My childhood was as short as everyone else's, but I will never forget how much I chased at the lack of agency. Now that I've got it, I'm going to use it.
But I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel some despair afterward, and for so many reasons. Climate. Pollution. Human rights. Racism. Sexism. Education. Health. Inequality. Everything. I was going to do the work, but I didn't feel any optimism.
Now I do.
I am so happy that Bashar al Assad, the butcher of Syria, is gone. I did not think I would see the day. It was hard to find news of the Syrian resistance for a good few years; the last I could find, they had been confined to one area. But I did see that much of the Arab world was trying to normalize relations with Assad. All of them, evidently, had made the assessment that it was easier to work with him than against Iran and Russia. Once again, screw the Syrian people.
But a funny thing happened while politicos and pundits were playing 4D chess amongst themselves so they could arrive at doing exactly nothing: the Syrian resistance refused to die, and as soon as they saw that Russian and Iranian assets were being moved out of Syria, they moved. And they won.
I have no delusions about HTS (Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham). No, I don't care about the "Islamist" label, but they have been credibly accused of violating people's rights on occasion, and they are almost certainly receiving support from Turkey, which has been aggressive toward the Kurds in Syria, particularly in Rojava. But I don't need HTS to be perfect; I just need then to be not as monstrous as Assad. Shockingly they've met that low bar, so I'm happy to celebrate with the Syrian people.
But because it pours when it rains, I am also proud as hell to be Korean. God damn.
Let's back up: I take no pride in the fact that President Yoon Suk Yeol, one of the moat unpopular elected presidents ever--anywhere--declared martial law. He's not wrong to call out the opposition, the Democratic Party, for being obstructionist, but you don't mean obstruction with martial law--and especially not in South Korea after the decades they laborer under it.
And I'm not the only Korean who said so. The South Korean citizenry came out into the streets immediately. This was not their first rodeo, and they knew that you have to stop a would be dictator immediately. There's a measure of luck--Yoon, clearly, doesn't know how to plan a self-coup, because anyone could have told him it won't work without the military under control--but this would not have ended so decisively if South Koreans weren't willing to stand in below freezing temperatures for over a week to make it clear that Yoon was done. Say what you will about us, but we know when we're being bs'ed, and we'll have none of it.
Syria, South Korea, and OG resistance as well as straight up bad assery out of Ukraine give me hope. Donald Trump would very much like to be a dictator, but even now, he's getting pushback from within his own party, some members of which still, shockingly, have either their pride or some standards. (Or maybe they just really didn't like Matt Gaetz.) And most interestingly of all, Trump seems to smell the rot on Putin and is distancing himself. (I suspect that may be the result of pressure from our own corporate interests, but it's only a guess.) There's still plenty of damage they can inflict on millions of people without being the Joker and Penguin in some kind of tag team from hell, but it's a glimmer of hope if they're not ride or die.
I can do my work--I was going to any way--but now I see a glimpse of what this might end up looking like. It just might be a future worthy of the Syrians, Ukranians, and South Koreans.
Deb in the City
