A Perpetual Crisis Is All In Your Mind

Let's see how the folks at Reactormag are dealing with the recent US election.

I’ve been trying to write a new column for three weeks. I’m pretty sure you can guess what’s been holding things up, distracting me, sending my attention off in approximately 97 directions at once, each more upsetting than the last.

No, I can't really...oh, wait. It's the election, isn't it? 

I’m not going to harp on the looming state of affairs in this country, but I am going to acknowledge that people are scared, worried, angry, concerned, furious, fired up. And distracted.

Nice excuse for slacking on the job, I suppose.  

One bit of advice I keep seeing is to find our lanes. To acknowledge that no one person can do everything, or try to help fix everything at once.

What exactly is there to 'fix'? Trump won. He's there for another term. It's what the rest of the country wanted. What horrors do you think are going to unfold, anyway? 

Book bans aren’t going away. Companies’ obsession with what they like to call “AI” isn’t going away. Authors aren’t swimming in new and exciting (and affordable) ways to promote their work. Tired arguments about the role of politics in art, alas, aren’t going away either.

Probably because you're the ones keeping them alive.... 

Authors write about attempts being made to ban their books; they write about books they love by their peers and friends; they write about the reality of being an artist in these times.

Not exactly starving in a garret is it? 

Are there author events in your town? If it’s safe and comfortable for you to do so, go to them. (It would really be nice if more event hosts so much as encouraged attendees to mask, but they probably won’t. That doesn’t mean you can’t still do it.)

It's no surprise that the blue-haired anti-Trump contingent are still wearing the useless masks, is it, Reader?  

I have a little bit of a hard time with suggesting things that involve public events, these days, because it usually means telling people to go to indoor spaces in which people are often pretending covid is over. (I just had covid last month. It’s not over.)

Of course it's not. It's here to stay, just like all the other flu-based viruses.  

It is an obvious statement, but I am not afraid of being obvious. I am not going to give you any of those treacly, trite, and all too often untrue statements about how books will keep us alive or bring us together or save the day or make us better people. But I am going to say that books, or the stories within them, are art; that we need art, and we need stories, and it’s cool if some of those stories are about better ways for the world to be and for us to live in it.

I very much dounbt that your 'better world' matches mine....