Truth is that I am very concerned about what is happening in our country but I’m not very interested in political activism at this point in my life. I voted for Trump based on the obnoxious gun control and some of the more extreme environmental views on the left and let’s be honest some of the financial liberties and lack of personal responsibility professed to on the left. Truth is Trump kind of at one level represents that freedom I want at my off-grid cabin, the kind that the liberals want to restrict by banning things like guns and burn barrels in favor of plastics recycling, electric perfect temperature heat-pump climate control, and cars full of enormous colorful screens that remind us how much fuel we are saving in theory.
Things had just gotten rather unsettling during the President Biden years. While he was a decent man, he didn’t inspire hope and he didn’t seemed rather not up to the job. Inflation was bad, especially gas prices, but everything else just seemed to push upward during his years. The economy was good in all years but 2022, but while paper values went up, things in life seemed to stagnate, and it always seemed we were one step away from the next big recession. Truth is it seems like the left just wants to leave us numb in comforts wrapped in plastic, in denial about the real world that is full of problems.
Looking at my replacement for Big Red, I can’t help but reflect back on the malease that set in post-COVID time period. Not certainly all Joe Biden’s fault, indeed many of the policies that have made cars (and all other societal institutions) so bad came decades earlier – the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and subsequent tightening of safety and fuel economy standards in 2010s – and the high tech revolution brought forward by touch screens and powerful microprocessors. All things that have dramatically inflated vehicle costs and forced technology which at least in my mind is very suspect like turbocharged very small block engine to overcome pumping loses. Maybe I reject technology but I also feel like things are getting more complicated and worse for relatively non-existance fuel improvements. And it’s not just cars that have gotten bad – houses have many of the regulatory-generated flaws of modern cars, zoning and codes are just insane. They’ve made houses too expensive, too comfortable, and in reality too safe and waste generating. Conservatives might not have the answers, but liberals in their effort to keep people safe and green have done such harm to society.
Maybe because I am more of a low-information voter, despite being a Democratic political insider, I was unaware of the most awful things Trump said and did on his rise back to power in 2024. Honestly though, politicians say a lot of things, but don’t really mean it. And even the worse behavior in office is tampered down by the diverse sources of political power in our government. Trump is a maximalist, as his critics and supporters point out, not afraid to use power as he says fit. But somebody will start to apply the brakes to him, it’s going to happen. I could be angry, activated, but I choose to be another passive victim of the times we all live in. I am just stuck in the malease. Skeptical as hell. But Trump does do a good job into tapping into how broken American is today, how government rarely serves the people as it comes up with yet another mandate to make our air cleaner and our lives safer in theory, even when the practice leaves people to dubious to say the least. Maybe the motto of the decade is, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions”.
I do read the NY Times and lots of news magazines from the library. And I do read and listen to audiobooks about contemporary topics like climate change, pollution, and waste. And poverty. Maybe the books on poverty are what I am most fearful of, as I feel so poor even if I know I could live a much more prosperous life but I am frugal in search of owning my own land and that off-grid cabin. And apparently another big truck. But I also enjoy getting away from such things, reading about cabins and goat farming and homesteading more general. Something reading about cattle diseases or electrical wiring is somewhat removed from today’s bigger urban problems that are so disturbing, maybe because I realize I could fall so far.
I think my parents have attended some of those anti-Trump rallies. Myself I shrug it off, I don’t love the President but I can’t keep thinking what is alternative? More gun control, more badly broken safety and pollution controls on cars and houses? Just whining, pretending to make things better, and more colorful dashboards? More plastics recycling! That will solve the problem we are told! Not owning a television, I don’t see the orange man blasted into my apartment in high-resolution color, spewing hatred and xenophobia. I don’t keep up on the latest TV shows, I like seeing real off-gridders and dairymen on Youtube rather then some made for TV production. And just learning how real systems work in reality, and not the colorful screens that everybody is trying to force down our throats with enormous full color views of the President in all his most problematic views.