Short posts till I am feeling a bit better (to be clear, not feeling bad, just fairly immobile and with mild discomfort that was challenging my pharmacological Calvinism).
First thing I’d point to is a couple of piece by an excellent writer/thinker called Jessica Wildfire. There’s her ‘urgent normality syndrome’ thing, but some other worth-reading pieces, about what the future will look like, us and diseases (all that bullshit about ‘our immune systems can cope’) and also about moral injury.
On fatigue – yeah, I am a lightweight…
And on fear – well, it’s not mine it’s the similarity of two pieces in very different mainstream media outlets. The first is by John Harris (almost always a rewarding read) in the Guardian, a centre-left newspaper. He is writing about a town in Somerset called Frome, under the headline “Britain is used to crises now. But this widespread hopelessness is new – and frightening.” Harris’s shtick is to talk to ‘ordinary people’ beyond the Westminster/metropolitan bubble, and report faithfully what they say, and then try to wrap it in some light-touch sociology and politics. It sounds simple, and he makes it look effortless, but there’s more to it than meets the eye, imo.
Here is his concluding paragraph (spoilers, obvs)
Here, I think, is the essence of the latest nightmare we may be slipping into. If any country knows what happens when fear and anxiety combine with a political vacuum, it is this one: 10 years ago, in the slipstream of a revival of the far right, it was exactly that combination that began our journey to Brexit and crises seemingly without end. Now, I hear echoes of the weariness and bafflement I used to associate with the post-industrial places whose furies took us out of the EU, but this time in our market towns and suburbs. I worry about that. I think we all should.
The second piece is in the wretched “Metro” “newspaper” – a giveaway with commuter mcnuggets as articles. I only picked it up, on the bus to the hospital, for the word puzzles. But this, in an article by one Sarah Davidson, leapt out at me. She’s writing about the consequences of the mortgage rate rises
Unfortunate renters will lose their homes and won’t find alternatives.
Very poor people will become destitute. Middle income families will get stuck in houses they can’t sell and they’ll have no choice but to get into more and more debt…. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer. But for the people who sit on the bus, the train, the Tube reading Metro on their way to work so they can look after their families – yes, it really is that bad.
I wish could say differently, but I am scared.
Shit is already real for a lot of people, and it is about to get shitty real for a lot more…
And then there’s climate change…
marchudson.net 
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