Now What Will People Say

Yesterday, Wednesday December 18, 2024, the US House of Representatives voted to shut down the government this Friday. Why? Because an un-elected member of our government, a man who will not be able to get full security clearance because of his drug habits, a man who, apparently only sleeps a couple of hours a night, who is, maybe the richest person in the world, this man tweeted to the Republicans who were going to vote for the bill, that he would fund primary's against them if they did. They complied, so currently, today, this Thursday, there is no bill being passed that will keep the US government open past Friday December 20, 2024. Oh my.
I reckon, now the Repubs and Dems will be working furiously to see what can be cobbled together in the next 36 hours. The Republicans have done this before, but this time, instead of it being a blackmail ploy by the House itself, often posturing to keep their more conservative voters appeased, this time it is driven by the owner of a car company who uses a social media app to threaten others. And he also uses his social media app to send out not only distortions of the truth, but often complete fabrications, which his 207 million subscribers believe and further disseminate.
I have just re-read Sheri Tepper’s Gibbons’s Decline and Fall 1, a novel set in the US where a group of women meet in college and stay friends throughout their lives. The hero is a being who lives on this earth, but her species evolved differently from humans. They still live here amongst us, unseen, protecting themselves from the encroachment of humans (who have a history of killing those who look different from them). The hero helps her friends defeat the monstrous entity that threatens everyone.
So I am reading this and seeing so many parallels between what Tepper was writing about and what we are seeing now in the US. We have a group of very rich people, mostly men, who are intent on getting more, and more, and more, and have no intention of knowing the damage they are inflicting on all of us, inflicting on the population that actually allows those people to be as rich as they are.
In the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos wrote about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 2, Pestilence, War, Death, and Famine. In our time, with the appointment of someone suspicious of medicine as the head of the Department of Health; the appointment of someone who has never commanded an army to the post of Secretary of Defense; the appointment of a person supportive of Putin to be head of national intelligence; and the appointment of an immigration hard-liner as Homeland Security secretary, the four horses are galloping towards us at full speed.
When I was growing up, living in the convent, Sister Joseph, when I was misbehaving, would say to me, what she said was a Chinese curse, May You Live In Interesting Times 3. Turns out, it isn’t Chinese but was said by someone who, in the early 20th century, was a British diplomat in China. But whatever the provenance, these times are way too interesting.
1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168540.Gibbon_s_Decline_and_Fall
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse
3 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/18/live