Thoughts

January 20, 2017 Redux

On this day 8 years ago I wrote It’s Time to Pay Attention. Reflecting back, and as someone said on social media elsewhere the other day, we didn’t resist enough from 2017-2021. We failed to hold Trump accountable after January 6th. Somehow South Korea managed to imprison their president after a coup attempt but ours is going unpunished. Good times! But that post from January 20, 2017, much of it still holds. There are some journalists I would not put up there any longer because they showed their true colors and are grifters. But most of them I would still recommend, especially the Cassandra of them all, Sarah Kendzior. She was right. She is right. She was right all along. Read and subscribe to her newsletter. Do it. You are going to need it. And do what she says, document your life now and as it was in 2017-2021, and compare it to the Biden years. Document it from the Before Times. I’ve been watching older movies lately and realizing how much we’ve lost. We’re going to lose so much more in the next four years, and who knows about what comes after that.

I don’t have much else to say but will instead share some music to get your through the next few years. I first came across Bella Ciao a few years ago while watching the Spanish Netflix show Money Heist and learned its rich cultural history as an Italian resistance/partisan song from WW2. I’m particularly fond of the cover by the British band Chumbawamba—yes, the band we all remember from the late 90s with the song Tubthumping—well, turns out they are actually an anarcho-punk band and have some seriously relevant music from the 80s and 90s of social issues we are still dealing with today. So, I’m sharing their Bella Ciao cover but also their original song The Day the Nazi Died, about the death of Nazi Rudolf Hess and how it spurred Neo-Nazis to come out of the woodwork and reveal how entrenched they already were in society—which, hey, still relevant today!

And lastly, words from AOC:

Oh, one last item: I recently re-read Fahrenheit 451. You might want to pick it up (again) and read it.

Welcome to the Oligarchy.

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