Feeling good feels like a luxury

I am not someone who gets depressed. Frankly, I resented that for years--I was surrounded by people who couldn't get or keep their lives together, and I had to pick up for them while everyone (sometimes including them) were scolding me for not having a better life of my own. Not being able to do something sounded like a luxury.

I understand depression a little more now, and I am grateful that I have been spared. When something terrible happens, I don't retreat, I get motivated. 

So I don't get depressed, but boy, was I devastated this week when that horrible budget bill was passed. That hit me worse than the election, and it's not like I was skipping through a field of flowers for that. It's not that I can't believe a bill which condemns the most vulnerable among us to destitution and death passed, it's that I can't believe we've been watching this slow-rolling disaster for months and NO ONE has a plan. No, do not say "the 2026 midterms". That is not a plan, that is a delay, and if that's the best you can do, that is you saying that you are fine with people dying before that. How can that be the best that anyone can do?

I am not the expert--please believe me, you don't want me to devise a work around for our medical system and housing availability--but the best bet we have seems to be a general strike. Nope, sorry, we can't wait until 2028, as some proposed previously. We do not have time for that. 

I'm very concerned that the media wants to see something like a general strike--you know, for the drama--but they are unwilling to do their part, which is truthfully report events. I take this personally; my uncle risked his safety as a reporter and then editor in South Korea to tell important stories. I don't see our press doing the same thing. In the prestige media, I see a lot of capitulation, and it makes me ill.

Someone on an episode of Tech Won't Save Us earlier this year advised that the platform decay (aka enshittification) of media and social media sites means we need to go back to smaller scale communication and distribution. We need newsletters--though, please, not ones generated from all of those popups--small group chats, and blogs. This was music to my ears in an otherwise depressing episode, because those are all things I've been enjoying. I hate the internet, but since Cory Doctorow recommended using an RSS reader, I've hated it a little less. Progress!...?

A few days ago, I stumbled onto a website called good internet. The writers are young enough to be my children, but it actually makes me feel better to know 1) that people that young feel the same way I do about the internet and 2) that they see a way out. Spoiler alert: it's about making the internet smaller and more interactive again, as opposed to the hellscape our tech overlords have been shoving down our throats. I'm enjoying it, and I recommend it, almost to the point that I feel guilty feeling so cheered by it.

But if we're going to get out from these fascists, we need to have a dream of what the world should look like. That, maybe, is part of my plan.

Deb in the City