by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It’s self-evident that not enough people remember how much war really is hell. Over two generations of Americans have gone without the fear of a draft. As such, we’ve grown too fat and sassy.
We quibble about the stupidest shit. The Left, rather than making common cause with Liberals and NeverTrumpers to defeat the rise of fascism in America are willing to die on the hill of TERFs, pronouns and transgender kids. (Not that those aren’t all valid things to be concerned about in the modern world, but we do have honest-to-God fascists to deal with at the moment.)
My point is — woke culture is a luxury provided by decades of living in a stable, peaceful liberal democratic nation. The moment things grow existential for people in the center-Left, be it because we turn into a civil war or we transition into autocracy, all of the more annoying elements of being woke will simply burn off.
I keep thinking about how we seem to be at the end of an era. While I’m still not convinced that the Fourth Turning is a real thing — seems like a reversed engineered pseudoscience to me — we definitely are running on fumes as a nation. And that sense of running on fumes applies to both culture and politics. We’re at the end of one era (Turning?) and just about to begin another.
As such, it would make a lot of sense for everything to change one way or another between now and January 2025. If we turn into an autocracy, then there’s a good chance that Hollywood will decamp, en masse to Great Britain or Australia. I keep saying — Perth would be perfect for New Hollywood. It is in the middle of nowhere, but everyone I’ve ever met from Perth was extremely creative and interesting, just the type of creative pool of people that a moved Hollywood want to tap into.
And, God forbid we have a Second American Civil War, everything really would be thrown into the air. The nightmare endgame is the country doesn’t re-unite and we just bomb ourselves into the Stone Age for no damn reason other than Traditionalists are afraid of losing political power to secularists, scary brown people and economically liberated women.
Anyway. I just don’t see the Woke Era lasting beyond 2025. Something’s gotta give. When you’re worried about ICE blowing your head off or a race war because a civil war has broken out and WMD are being used, then, well, the issue of pronouns won’t be QUITE so urgent.
