Ever since the courts forced McSorley’s to start serving women in 1970, straight men have been trying to figure out how to build a bar no woman will ever set foot inside. And now it exists.
They went to war with Iran (which nobody in America was asking for) so they could conjure an excuse to allow ICE to keep murdering Americans and teargassing schools here at home with impunity (which nobody in America was asking for).
Our world is run by the most abhorrent individuals. The most crooked, depraved, sick, soulless individuals who keep squeezing every little bit of life and humanity out of this world. Because that’s what the game incentivizes. That’s what wins in this world (shocker).
There was a blip in time where *some* (not all were afforded this opportunity) could work hard, actually produce value to society and others, house a loving family, and live a life of relative peace. But that is becoming exponentially more difficult.
Everyday you witness the further moral erosion of society. Exhaustion and apathy increase. You’re conditioned to resent your neighbors, and those around you…. People with similar dreams, aspirations, and values as yourself.
All this for a few horrible people at the top. That’s it. And it’s a ladder of selling out to those people, and then those people selling out to those people, and so forth.
You step on the toes of others to preserve the dreams of your own. And when you get that, you pull the ladder up.
It’s a game of BS, and it’s a game of BS with increasing less reward, and a game people are quite frankly so damn tired of pretending of wanting to play.
People are tired of their intelligence being continually insulted, their humanity being stripped, and continually being undignified.
Much of the mourning for the late great @washingtonpost has rightly focused on how democracy dies in darkness at the national level, which is hugely important. But the evisceration of Metro coverage is every bit as devastating because there is no comparable news outlet keeping local governments and institutions honest.
Eight of my 20 years at the Post were spent on Metro, which was the heart and soul of the Post under the legendary @dongrahamdc1. The undertakers now running the paper have all but wiped out the metro staff, leaving just 12 reporters, according to reports, to cover a region of 6.5 million people.
We had twice that many journalists in Fairfax alone back in the day. And it mattered. Reporters are the eyes and ears of the community, keeping tabs on people in power. We were there for every supervisors meeting, every school board meeting. We pored through planning commission documents and campaign filings.
When county officials wasted taxpayer money, raised taxes on overstretched homeowners, gave sweetheart zoning deals to developers who filled their election coffers, we were there. When teachers who sexually abused students were quietly transferred to other schools to do it all over again, we were there.
We were there for the more uplifting stories too, the cops who broke a cold case, the educators who turned around a struggling school, the residents who rallied to help neighbors in trouble, the student athletes who won the big game, the entrepreneurs who started something new.
Our friend @SariHorwitz who has won more Pulitzers than I can count, wrote so movingly online about the Post (https://t.co/lxame7tiSF). To recognize how indispensable local coverage is, you need only look at her holy-shit investigations of a broken child welfare system, rampant police shootings and the corporate-fed opioid crisis, stories that opened eyes and led to change.
Democracy is not just what happens at the White House and the Capitol but in our own backyards. The Post has just turned the lights down at home too.