Another Wild Week
A meme featuring characters from “The Adventures of Tintin” lamenting that it’s only Wednesday. Image taken from a Xitter thumbnail.
For those of you who may have already forgotten (or more likely, hadn’t heard to begin with), my birthday was last week. I turned 25. And I actually wrote a deeply existential essay about it in order to celebrate this milestone.
As it turns out, that essay would end up being appropriate for more reasons than one.
In the early hours of June 12, a plane crashed in India. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, operating as Air India Flight 171, was from Ahmedabad and was flying to London-Gatwick. At least, it was supposed to fly there before crashing into a medical school’s residence hall. There was only one survivor on the plane, and I can’t imagine how much going through something like that must fuck with you.
I mean, this man literally saw well over two hundred people die suddenly and violently right before his eyes. And he jumped out of a window to escape it. I don’t know how you live through that without permanent psychological scarring.
For a world already questioning the safety of air travel in the last few months, this is only likely to ignite further speculation. For the record, I don’t know definitively how much Donald Trump is to blame for all these aviation incidents the news is reporting on. I simply don’t, and I think we should be honest about that.
However, what I’m pretty damn sure about is that if a Democrat were President right now (as cliché as that saying has become), the GOP would never let them hear the end of it. Indeed, I shudder to think of what they’d be doing to Biden if he were still in the White House. More on that later.
The following day, June 13, Israel launched missiles at Iran. Apparently Trump gave Netanyahu permission to do this, which makes it even more infuriating to me. “Harris the Hawk, Donald the Dove”...what a joke. The “Genocide Joe” crowd seems awfully silent now, and why shouldn’t they be? They should be ashamed of themselves! I certainly would be if I were responsible for Trump being back in the White House.
For the last several days, Iran and Israel have been trading missile attacks back and forth. Because we’ve been helping Israel shoot down the missiles headed for Tel Aviv, and because the Israeli attacks on Iran (unlike the ones on Gaza) have mostly hit military targets, civilian casualties have thus far not been very high. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still an enormous impact.
A map of live air traffic as of about 24 hours ago, courtesy of r/MapPorn.
Take a look at this map. Planes can’t fly over much of the Middle East because Iraq and Jordan closed their airspace. They also can’t fly over Ukraine for obvious fucking reasons, and haven’t been able to for several years. And of course, they’ve never been able to fly over Tibet due to the risk of depressurization and the fact that if the plane needed to descend to 10,000 feet, it would end up in the ground, as would everyone on it.
I feel horrible for air traffic controllers in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan at this point. They’re probably quite overwhelmed, and who knows how long we have until there’s a crash in the Caucasus thanks to this? We can put the blame at least partly on Trump’s hands if this does happen.
This war is sure to divide the world. Personally, I hate the governments of both Iran and Israel, but I just feel horrible for the civilians on both sides who are going to suffer (and in some cases die) for their governments’ genocidal ambitions. I don’t understand why that’s such a controversial take.
And then, in the early hours of June 14, we received the news that a state legislative leader had been assassinated in Minnesota, along with her husband. They’d been shot dead in their own house. To those who are afraid to go out for fear of being caught in a mass shooting, well, you’re not any safer at home. At least not if you’re a public figure.
Now, politically-motivated gun violence is not new in this country. Quite a few mass shootings have been classified as terrorism (which is a strategy, not an ideology). But this is the first time in a very long time that the victims have been elected officials, and I honestly wonder if the Democrats need to invest greatly in security for their candidates and representatives. This truly feels like a “crossing the Rubicon” moment.
And I’m being deadly serious. How many people who might otherwise have been bright, promising Democratic leaders will now rule out entering politics for fear that something like this might happen to them or their families? I’d imagine it’s more than any of us think right now, and that number’s only going to grow as the situation in this country deteriorates.
In the immediate aftermath of this assassination (because let’s call it what it is, an assassination), Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Bernie Moreno of Ohio literally mocked it on Xitter. While Russ Feingold to Ron Johnson was probably the biggest Senate downgrade of the 21st century, it’s hard for me not to see Sherrod Brown to Bernie Moreno being a strong contender for the number two spot. I could make a naughty joke here, but I’m not going to, because this is no laughing matter.
Senators Lee and Moreno should resign. And if they refuse to resign, they should be expelled. At least, that’s what I would be saying if we lived in a sane country!
In reality, if Lee or Moreno were expelled (which will never ever happen, because their Republican colleagues probably all agree with them that this is funny), they’d both more than likely be replaced with people just as awful. And if anything, that might galvanize Republican voters more ahead of the midterms. I hate to say that, but it’s true. And I really don’t know how we’re going to deradicalize people in this country.
And then Trump had the military parade that same evening. I didn’t watch it; I didn’t want to contribute to its ratings, and quite frankly, I liked seeing him triggered. Images circulated online of Trump sitting at the parade looking exhausted and dejected. Honestly, those are hilarious. They say that only about forty thousand people (splitting the difference here) attended the parade, whereas millions went to “No Kings” protests. (Confession time: I chickened out of attending my local protest.)
Donald Trump looking disappointed. Image taken from the Hollywood Reporter.
In the midst of everything I’ve mentioned, there are still riots in Los Angeles. There’s still a war in Ukraine. There was still the recent G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies at which Donald Trump humiliated the nation he represented once again. On the bright side, Trump mentioned trying for a trade deal with Canada. And I don’t want to be a Pollyanna about anything, but if I was level 10 concerned about the United States invading its former ally before, I might be level 7 concerned now.
That’s still way too high, of course. And the fact that everyone’s reaction isn’t “Of course we’re not invading Canada, what the hell are you talking about?!” speaks volumes about where we’re at.
And then, of course, there’s the heat advisory in interior Alaska. People are saying that it’s the first-ever heat advisory for Alaska, which is true but misleading. This is the first year that the Juneau and Fairbanks weather stations were able to declare heat advisories, so it’s not surprising that this week’s warning would be the first.
That being said, it’s still pretty alarming. Not only does it serve as further evidence, as if it were needed, that America is failing the whole world through our climate denial and resulting ecocide, but it’s a big problem for Alaskans right now. Temperatures are reaching the low 30s Celsius, or upper 80s Fahrenheit, this week.
Where I live in Massachusetts, a temperature like that is not crazy during the hottest part of summer, even if it’s slightly above average. But as we learned during the 2022 UK heat wave, places are built for a certain climate - Alaska’s homes are meant to keep the heat in. If we’re ever going to meaningfully adapt to the climate crisis, we’ll have to upgrade current housing at northern latitudes to more sustainably cool itself. (Will that ever happen here? Probably not. I know this.)
I honestly don’t know how I stay sane given everything crumbling around me. The craziest part is that in my day to day life, everything looks fairly normal. I don’t live in Los Angeles, admittedly. And I’m a white guy born in the USA, so ICE hasn’t come knocking on my door yet. I’ve traveled abroad twice since Trump took office again and had no problems getting back in, yet.
That’s the eerie thing. Amidst all this turmoil, so many Americans barely know any of it is going on, because to many, everyday life seems normal. To some extent, I don’t blame people for tuning it out.
Whether you’re religious, superstitious, spiritual, or none of the above, I think we can all agree. On a philosophical level, humans were not meant to contend with this much chaotic news at any given time. Perhaps social media truly has broken our brains. Like Icarus, we have flown too close to the sun.
