Current events: Lynzy Lab, "A Scary Time"

Blogs serve many functions. Online diaries, citizen journalism, street level history, and many more. I've been using mine mostly to document my own life, and I've been ignoring most of the large-scale things going on around me.

There is so much going on. Donald Trump. Mass shootings and their aftermath. Voter registration, voter suppression, and voting rights. Record setting storm after record setting storm. Jamal Khashoggi, an exiled Saudi Arabian journalist living as a a permanent resident in the United States and working as a columnist for the Washington Post who was frequently critical of the current Saudi rulership, entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and was allegedly murdered and dismembered by an organized hit squad. Numerous critics of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin have been found dead - the most recent, Nikolai Glushkov, strangled with a dog leash in London. Viktoria Marinova, a journalist investigating corruption in Bulgaria, was found raped and murdered.

Brett Kavanaugh, a beer-drinking, whiny, arrogant, entitled frat boy accused of sexual assault when he was seventeen (and very drunk) and she was fifteen, was approved to the Supreme Court over the objections and concerns of many people who had known him well but were not included in his background check. The fight was blistering, with hours of testimony by his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and Kavanaugh responding by having a meltdown while reading from prepared remarks and engaging in conduct that demonstrated his lack of judicial temperament. After his second, ceremonial swearing-in, Donald Trump apologized to Brett Kavanaugh for everything he had been put through. He referred to Dr. Ford's testimony as a "hoax set up by the Democrats," and, noting the current climate of intolerance of sexual assault and unwillingness of women to lay back and take it without complaining (or reporting), Trump stated that this is a "very scary time for young men in America."

On Sunday, October 7, Lynzy Lab (@mercedeslynz on Twitter) released a song called "A Scary Time" that tries to capture the feeling of the time.It went instantly viral on Twitter. Tonight she will be performing it on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Here it is from YouTube (https://youtu.be/N34hehRgw9g):

 

Someday historians will try to make sense of what happened in and to the United States in the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I can't offer them any shortcuts. All I can say is: pay attention to everything. This time is a mess, and the explanations may be in the details. And...we're sorry. We're sorry we couldn't stop all this from happening. We tried. We failed.

We should have tried harder.