Governing Is Hard
The horse race of American politics is a massive waste of time and energy. I don't care who's winning, who's losing, who is losing or growing their lead.
Finding someone you believe in, someone who represents you, that's important. Find someone who cares about people and can make clear headed decisions in those people's interest and not their own. That's tremendously difficult, and modern mega-corp news media doesn't help.
But our populist, pandering leaders have no vision, or rather, they just borrow our's. We demand to be pandered to for someone to get our vote. We demand specific policies because we can't admit our own ignorance. We get exactly what we ask for, and, like an evil genie, they have turned on us.
Slightly.
Because, honestly, the system is still mostly good. Not everyone is tortured. The security of surveillance data is taken seriously by those who ward it. It's merely a flurry of disappointments, caused by a failure by us, as citizens, to handle the politics of power responsibly.
Now We're All Sons Of Bitches
Sometimes I think of that quote, in the aftermath of the first nuclear explosions. But asking how future generations will remember us may be too optimistic.
Let's take some time with Van Buren, a President more emblematic of the agony of being forgotten than most. How can we regret our lack of place in history when we haven't earned one? If we don't have vision, if we're completely rudderless, our hopes can't be dashed; they never existed in the first place.
Bookmarket?
Spending just a moment of your time will give you the awesome influence of Van Buren following you to other websites, seeing in strange and disgusting glory the largely successful mess we've made.
Here's the way to reproduce the fun peeking van Buren you've been seeing as you read. It's a Bookmarket -- you can use it after you drag it up to your bookmarks bar.
If that doesn't work, add it to your bookmarks manually. Control/right click the link and copy the URL. In Chrome, go to your bookmark manager, and right click on folder to choose to add the link. Firefox users can hit the link above, it'll prompt them to make a bookmark, so that's even easier, but Firefox doesn't handle bookmarklets quite as well.