Post #41984 by EchotaBaaa on the US Policy board

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The damage being done today, the scope of the global cruelty and tragedy, is hard to take in. It is the sort of stain that should be remembered. Will it be?

For decades, U.S. aid in Africa—in HIV prevention and treatment, in vaccines, in clean water and food—has been a lifeline for millions. Now that aid has simply vanished, and experts estimate that, if Trump stays the course, millions may die within a year. There will be some news cycles, some indignant punditry, probably some harrowing Pulitzer-grade photojournalism. And then, a slow hardening into the new normal. The victims’ surviving families will remember them. Will we? Will our children?

For two years, the United States has spent millions tracking one of Russia’s vilest war crimes: The abduction of tens of thousands Ukrainian children into Russia for forced adoption by Russian families. The Conflict Observatory, a group funded by the State Department, had assembled a trove of data on missing children—crucial information for any future attempt to reunite them with relatives at home. But the State Department has now terminated their contract, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers fear that it may even have carelessly deleted the database. How many children’s best chance of seeing their families again may have vanished, just like that? Their families will remember, if they survive the war. So will the kids, the ones who are old enough. Will we?

We humans are master rationalizers; we adopt the new normal faster than we realize. Donald Trump rode a wave of forgetting back to the White House in 2024. His love affair with foreign dictators, his mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, his attempt to steal the 2020 election—all were washed away, in the minds of many voters. They were overshadowed by the irritations of the moment: the price of groceries, the price of rent. And he prevailed in no small part thanks to shocking strength with young voters who had no memory of a time before he dragged our politics down to his own base, amoral, post-truth level.

So Trump and his allies know that, as they work to build a future that is smaller and crueller, more paranoid and more violent, human nature is on their side. We rationalize the current, block out the past, and imagine something brighter can emerge in the future.

These days, those who don’t back Trump like to talk about “touching the stove.” If the American public couldn’t be talked out of its complacent, decadent willingness to give the guy another spin at the wheel, maybe they can at least be shocked out of it. Maybe veterans will turn on him once they see the cuts to the VA, or retirees will revolt when they can’t get a person on the line to help with their Social Security payments.

But even if this does happen, that doesn’t mean putting things back together will be simple. Whether it will even be possible remains to be seen.

The philosopher Roger Scruton said that conservatism starts in “the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” America as formerly constituted—warts and all—was a good thing. Its current demolitionists claim they’re trying to go back to that good thing. But really, they’re in the game of destruction, not reclamation. They go about their work cheerfully, glibly shouting that anything they break by accident, they’ll get around to unbreaking eventually. If only it were so simple, even if they really wanted to.

Getting out of this starts with remembering. It was good to be a country that cared about babies born with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, that was willing to save their lives for pennies a day. It was good to be a country that cared about Ukrainian children torn from their families by a hostile power, that strove toward a future that saw them home. Maybe someday we can claw our way there again—if we remember.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/we-wont...

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Is there enough of a "We" left in your country?

If so, please let me know when they show up.

:)

Tribalism.

Culture.

Digital life run amok.

Boom.

Seriously, where is the "We"? When did "We" do to Trump after 1/6? Shun him or elect him?

And on and on and on.

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