Politics, feh,

I am increasingly paying less and less attention to the news and politics right now. Partly because I've been following politics obsessively since, well, 9-11 I suppose. So I need a break. I'm starting to get a little numb. Plus, it's just so damn depressing right now. The BP oil spill, the bizarre and inexplicable hostility to the merest idea that we could be dumping enough carbon into the atmosphere to induce a climate change . . . really I'm just feeling like there's a certain fucked-upedness that isn't going to go away. Ten years from now we're still going to have the wealthy shitting on the rest of us, we'll still have tea partyish ignorance shouting down anything that challenges their world view, and we're still going to have them (whoever THEY are) cutting corners poisoning and impoverishing the rest of us and skating away from it responsibility-free. I'll be genuinely surprised if BP isn't, in ten years, going to be basically pursuing profit with the same reckless disregard for safety it displayed up until the oil spill. The banksters who nearly toppled the economy a year ago have apparently learned nothing, and have funneled all the money they nearly lost and had the tax-payer repay into schemes of nearly identical insanity. I don't know where they will be in ten years, but I imagine still finding a way to screw the rest of us over for massive personal gain.

I just have a general pessimism about where things are going right now. This may be due to other crap going in my life but I think it's true that right now I need to focus less on the negative and more on the positive. And since politics and environmental issues seem overwhelmingly negative to me right now I should probably take a break from them. So I'm going to try. But can I make it even a single day without obsessively checking the political blogs I have been reading more or less daily for 9 years? We shall see.

H