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2024: Bureaucracy, Decay, and Upheaval
There’s nowhere to begin or end summing up a year like this one. But I hear the crows outside my window. The sky is gray. The world is ripped apart by wars that grow and spread each and every day. This is the Era of American Rage. Yes, we are in the midst of a rage that strangely coincides with apathy to form a grotesque paradox.
Syria’s Assad Regime toppled overnight, and Israel has found opportunity in the power vacuum, hence breaking the 1974 ceasefire agreement between the two countries. Nobody knows what any of this means in the long run, but Israel appears keen on expanding its borders north. On the home front, we witnessed two, possibly three, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, as well as his re-election. And last week, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated by alleged suspect Luigi Mangione. Some consider him a hero, others a cold-blooded killer. I think the answer is far more complicated in a world that is neither black nor white, but tenaciously gray.
The system under which we live has become a flabby, shapeless, faceless, and nameless Leviathan that almost nobody can be satisfied with. With an incompetent government that fosters division and so much wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, we are a society suffering from a decadent paralysis. How does a society break down into decay? The first step is to control the…
