The Witness Chronicles, 1/3/24:
A pragmatic view of American politics, global issues, and climate change
Still working through my transition plans to make this newsletter a freestanding pub with its own subscriber list. I’m still working out the details. In the meantime, here we are in ‘24 with an absolutely bonkers year ahead.
We’re starting with the alarming and unpopular policies of Bibi Netanyahu in the Israel conflict, as he chooses escalation and more death in the pursuit of what I see as personal political power. An opinion of course.
In China their troubled economy has resulted in the lie flat movement where young Chinese grads choose to stay home and wait for better times. Is that lying flat movement coming to the US?
Finally, 2024 is here and democracy is endangered. American voters empowered a narcissist in 2016 by making him President, he tried to steal an election he legitimately lost in 2020, and now he is running again on a open platform of destroying the fabric of American democracy.
It’s time to stand up and undo this insanity. A good start is to talk to those he has systematically divided with his hate and fear speech.
We’re all exhausted by the news, but it is vital to pay attention right now and get active, talk to those you disagree with, listen, and stay involved. If we don’t we may lose our ability to freely speak in our own country.
Netanyahu is Escalating. The World is Watching
The West Bank is next and it’s all about power
He has made his intent clear. No Palestinian state, no de-escalation of the fighting, no compassion, only his determination to hold onto power at any cost.
This isn’t about hostages, Israel, Hamas, or anything other than blind ambition on the part of one man and his cadre of far right war-mongers who now have an excuse for enacting their greatest dreams of a dictatorship.
We know the playbook. Putin and Ukraine. Xi Jinping and Taiwan. Orban and Hungary. Trump and the American democracy. These motivations used to hide behind diplomacy, intelligence secrets, words to the contrary.
Now these desires for pure unfettered power are in the clear, unconcerned for appearances or reputation or even a place in history. Just naked power for its own sake.
But Netanyahu’s pursuit is not shared by his people or supported by a police state, not yet. He kills people to hold power, power he has not earned and killing that is wildly out of control, madness without any hope of an ending.
The world is outraged but cannot do anything because Bibi no longer cares what they think, if he ever did. When the World Health Organization (WHO) attempted to get supplies into Gaza while criticizing Israel, he simply canceled visas for any WHO workers.
Do you kill a Hamas leader by killing everything anywhere near him, even if it means hundreds of innocent deaths? This is known as the ‘kill everyone and let God sort them out’ strategy. The resort of desperate and weak men.
We are all watching it, unable to stop it without looking like we don’t support Israel. Netanyahu knows this and he counts on it. But Netanyahu is not Israel and his supporters, in their obsession, have made a deal with the devil, dragging their country along with them.
The results, terrible enough now, will get far worse. Anti-semitism, always an ugly undercurrent, is rising around the world, totally unnecessarily. After the October 7th day of Hamas atrocities, the world was one with Israel.
Bibi has single-handedly destroyed much of that sympathy, again in his need for power, a need that means sacrificing international good will towards his own people and country, along with the lives of thousands on both sides.
Hezbollah in Lebanon has an estimated 150,000 missiles capable of destroying Israeli infrastructure and crippling the country. So far they have held back but the anger grows and as it grows, it no longer cares about peace or anything else.
Bibi is flicking cigarette butts around in a room full of dynamite, not caring that when it blows it will take many lives beyond his own, the lives of his own people.
How far can a man be willing to go? Putin has lost an estimated 315,000 Russian lives for his obsession in Ukraine. China has imprisoned millions of Uighurs in Western China. In Sudan wars rage on for years and no one knows who or what is behind them.
By now we should know how far a single man can and will go for his own demented quest for power. And once again history is watching a man indiscriminately kill because he can and he has an excuse. But the excuse is wearing thin.
When does the world stop watching?
Is ‘Lying Flat’ Coming to America?
The giving up and staying home movement could be here
Are you familiar with the concept? In China, where the economy is in very rough shape, as many as 25% of college educated young people can’t find work or can’t live independently on their income. So, many are choosing to lie flat, to not even try to work and simply stay with their parents.
Sound familiar? We might find parallels in the US with many young people choosing to live at home for years beyond what was considered normal even a few years ago, often into their thirties. Quiet Quitting is one meme here that reflects that trend.
But the Chinese lying flat movement is very different. Here in the US our economy is booming, despite what the pundits on Fox would have you believe. Employers struggle to fill jobs and our society is consuming more than ever, despite having closely dodged a recession that somehow never materialized.
Many of those choosing to remain at their parents’ are working and often make very good money, sometimes more than those parents. It is an increasingly common story. The adult child who has chosen to live with little to no overhead and save money, perhaps to buy a home or to travel.
Our population is declining as many wait to have children or choose to not have them at all. Some, notably Elon Musk, think this is a major problem, which I think is just as screwy as practically everything he espouses these days. Part of the climate problem facing this society is overpopulation.
The concept of lying flat intrigues me because I see many signs that we are increasingly trying to live our lives disconnected from traditions of recent years including career paths, the requirement to become indebted to get an education, home ownership, and more.
It’s no wonder we see more people working towards creating lives that are self-directed, in the sense that we call the shots rather than working to satisfy some societal expectations.
The content creator economy, choosing trades over professions, anti-materialism, even things like choosing not to drive or own cars, are all symptoms of generational change and a deep seated discomfort with the direction of the human world.
In China, while institutional leaders are trying to encourage younger people to take initiative and stay positive, policies are making it harder and harder to do so without risking personal freedoms. The Xi Jinping government knows it needs innovation but seems to do everything it can to discourage it.
As I look to the year ahead, this difference between the two largest economies in the world, a world lie-flatters on both sides will spend most of their lives in, is stark and alarming.
One world is regressing into a militaristic and collectivist history that failed them in the past. The other wants both the fruits of capitalism and the ideals of self-determination, often only achieved by accumulating money.
And both find those who will be their future rejecting much of it.
In an odd but related development, it turns out that China’s leadership is actually encouraging youth to leave cities and go and work in the country, a strategy that resulted in the Maoist society’s utter failure.
As an older white male who has both pursued and rejected capitalism at various times in my life, I don’t see as negative these attempts by newer generations to experiment with non-traditional lifestyles. But too much of it seems to be people disconnecting without any personal vision for the future, instead choosing to ride things out on the couch.
These are times when we need stronger connections not weaker ones, when we need a more open society, not one under the iron hand of a dictator, a place where ideas are rewarded especially when they help us connect.
Idealistic? Hell yes. The lie-flatters on both sides of the world need to find ways to live and talk and resist the temptation to ignore a world they feel no control over. The only true cure for depression is action, but that action must be positive and beneficial to others.
Here in the US that is still possible, though we have our own would-be dictators seeking power. We can do well to look at China and understand that regressing into a past that failed is not the way to live a life.
It has to start by getting off the couch, getting away from a life lived on devices, and standing up and looking at the world. It’s not easy, but it is better than simply escaping because we can.
You Did It and Only You Can Undo It
If Democracy is important, act like it is
The US Constitution says government by the people and for the people. Not the MAGA people, the progressive people, the gay people, or the so-called regular (white) people. Just the people, all the people.
I don’t know anyone who is happy with the state of our government right now, whether they are left leaning or right wing or everything in between. But almost no one appears to be taking seriously how bad things are right now.
We have a dysfunctional national government with a House of Representatives, led by Republicans with a razor thin majority (no mandate), who are basically holding our democracy hostage while time runs out on the government budget clock.
They are doing nothing. Fake investigations with no proof held only for PR purposes are not governing. This is a big ass country facing a lot of huge challenges and they are holding hearings about the President’s bad boy son, who happens to be an adult that Biden is not responsible for.
What relevance does that have to the average American? There is no one reading this who doesn’t know a family with a black sheep, which is all Hunter Biden is.
If you watch the news, and no, Fox is not news, that was proven in court. If you watch the actual news, you’d think we were all tearing each other apart over Israel and Palestine. Or that we all cower in our homes in terror of migrants who came here with families seeking a better life.
The anti-immigrant outrage conveniently leaves out the part about how we have a labor shortage, particularly in jobs that only immigrants will do, like picking vegetables, working in meat packing plants, or cleaning hotels.
I can literally go on and on. I have not even mentioned the most serious issue we face, which is global climate change. But I have to go directly to the root cause of all of this.
It’s you and me.
In a Presidential election year like 2024, only days away as I write this, everything bubbles to the surface and there is a lot. We have a presumed Republican candidate who may be mentally unstable and faces multiple serious federal felony charges and civil charges, and is resorting to hate speech to distract his followers from reality.
We have a House Speaker who openly hates LGBTQ people and thinks America should be an evangelical Christian state, when the Constitution is explicit in its doctrine of separation of church and state.
Too many of the founding fathers came here to escape religious persecution and that is why having a secular government is at the core of our democracy. The United States was founded on tolerance, and where we screwed up early on with things like slavery, we eventually changed.
With much kicking and screaming, but we changed.
And we are always changing, generally for the better and towards the greater good. But there is a powerful movement in the other direction and unspeakable things like dictatorship are being discussed as though they are legitimate options.
Average Americans are not what we used to be, white, rural, Christian, and self-sufficient. The reality is that average Americans have never fit some formula because we are a country entirely composed of immigrants, with the exception of Native Americans, those who occupied these lands for millennia.
Average Americans today, in 2024, are multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and do not fit convenient descriptions spewed out by intolerant politicians. We do, however, have a common denominator: we are all humans, sharing DNA and a genome and the same needs and desires.
This is a year of change and we desperately need it. The good news is that it is easily within reach if we focus on the positive and the inclusive rather than division and fear, which are nothing more than the tools of autocrats.
We could be in good shape right now in many ways. The economy has improbably turned around and what was once a feared recession has turned into an economic upturn. We largely defeated a pandemic, after many mistakes, with science, not witchcraft, crackpot drugs, or wishful thinking.
The transition to clean, alternative energy sources, long fought by the fossil fuel industry, is now profitable. It is quite interesting how profit suddenly makes something acceptable. Capitalism at work.
In my state, New York, students can attend state colleges, many highly ranked, tuition free. This is becoming true across the country. And if you think good jobs only go to Ivy League graduates, you’d be wrong. Ask Google, who now prefers undergraduate degrees from public universities and community colleges.
Believe me they ran the numbers before they adopted that policy.
Which brings me to climate. 2023 was the hottest year since records have been kept, and by more than anyone predicted. Those who drank the oil company koolaid and pretended it wasn't real or imminent, are now finding out they can’t get insurance to replace homes destroyed by fires, storms, flooding, and other climate disasters.
A gutted home is a tough wake up call.
The world could be teetering on the edge of a global war. The early indicators are there. Conflict in the Middle East, Putin’s invasion of a sovereign country in Ukraine, militant isolationism growing in China and a massive global flow of refugees escaping conflicts we barely hear about are all things that could blow up into a new world war.
Biden, a foreign policy President, knows this and is working tirelessly to try and head it off. But foreign policy is unpopular as the right has embraced old ideas of an isolated America in its America First movements. That sort of worked when we were a months long sailing trip away from the rest of the world.
But we are now only hours away physically and instantaneously away digitally and everything we do is intimately connected with the global economy. The idea that we can separate ourselves from the rest of the planet is laughable.
Before you argue, take a look at your tv. Look at the stickers on the fruit on your counter. Ask yourself where your clothes, car, and virtually everything you own were made. You know the answer.
And btw, if you bought American with your car, remember those same American made cars sat uncompleted on company parking lots during the supply chain crisis because they couldn’t get essential parts made elsewhere.
If we don’t buy globally, our economy will be crippled. And if we don’t pursue peace in foreign conflicts, our economy will be crippled. That’s just the way it is. Choosing to believe otherwise is choosing to ignore reality.
Given all this stuff, why are a huge percentage of Americans supporting a right which is intolerant, isolationist, autocratic, and seeks a state religion intolerant of all others?
It’s entirely possible to be conservative without living in a past that never was. Our system thrives on differences of opinion, but it has also always thrived on compromise and the willingness to listen to both sides.
Compromise is not a sign of weakness, no matter what politicians tell you; it is a sign of strength and confidence and the ability to work together across artificial lines with no meaning.
As strong as my beliefs may be, I am willing to listen to those of others, unless they insist they and only they are right. The year ahead is going to be contentious on a level not seen in decades. To survive it and to survive as a democratic nation, we must start talking and listening and working together.
If the other guy is always the other guy, we’re in trouble. And we are on the brink of big trouble if we don’t start talking.
I like to end these issues with writer’s notes to try and give a glimpse behind why I write this stuff. The word ‘witness’ is in the title for a good reason. We have a responsibility to not let apathy empower autocrats across the globe, including our own homegrown one.
We’re eleven months from the most important election of the last 75 years. That time is going to go by fast and nothing is certain. Pay attention, speak up, don’t tolerate censorship and hate, and be kind. It’s the most important civil responsibility we all face.
Thank you. Please consider supporting this work by upgrading your subscription to any one of my newsletters. A few dollars a month helps me keep it going.
Thank you,
Martin
~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a weekly digest of three of my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free with a paid option to share your support. Please check them out.
If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!
Believe me, it makes my day. M
Unbelievably prescient. You just helped me to an Ah-Ha moment.