Coping with the current General State of Things™ certainly isn’t made easier when you have a degree in history, and not just because it lets you pervert Santayana for effect.

Beyond the whole “plaugues of the xx20s” thing that’s going around the internets, the stock market fluctuating wildly then tanking (which is mostly due to panic, but our entire financial system really does hinge on the superstitious nature of a few twitchy elites), and the usual senior Executive branch incompetence (stuff I encounter directly, but especially I read about in the news), it’s hard to feel confident about where we’re going as a civilization, and more specifically a nation.

I’ve kind of given up getting excited about blips of goodness I see; cynicism and low expectations are, frankly, easier. I’ve watched over the past year or so a wildly diverse, progressive, and effective crop of Democratic Presidential candidates get whittled down to a couple of sunsetting white guys to run against another sunsetting white guy, only more inept and fascist. I visit the grocery store to find empty shelves (and not *just* toilet paper, but damned near everything) and people (nearly, most of the time) getting into physical confrontations over bottles of hand sanitizer. I’m watching the Government, who claims they can’t possibly afford to set up a functional national healthcare solution toss $1.5 BILLION dollars (a number of a kind with what it would cost to get every American’s basic health care needs covered) at the financial industry last week because it panicked. I see conservative polticians and evangelical religious groups ignoring good advice about “flattening the curve” so our rickety healthcare system might have a chance at keeping pace with the needs of the most vulnerable Americans, threatening to “lick the floors” to own the libs rather than doing the smart thing.

I’m struggling to cope with it all. Right now there’s so much uncertainty (I can work from my office right now, but who knows when they’re going to kick me out to work from home? Who knows when my kids will get to go back to school?), as well as uncomfortable parallels from history. I think it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better, and right now, at least at the moment, I’m finding it hard to see much good in the world, no matter how much better I have it than most people.

One of the first headlines I read this morning was about how apparently the White House has finally, maybe started to take this business seriously instead of whatever he’s been doing, which has mostly been mucking around with appearances and denying there’s anything wrong. These couple of execerpts really hit me in my inner history major:

“Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin drew a parallel from today to the Great Depression in the early 1930s, when President Herbert Hoover was so lacking in leadership and unwilling to commit federal aid to help those suffering that it fell to governors to protect their citizens. That was when a New York governor named Franklin D. Roosevelt rose to national prominence by talking about the government’s responsibility to lift up society and launched the first public works programs for unemployed citizens. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932…”

“…Why is it that most of the presidents we remember the best had moments of crisis, whether it’s George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt? It’s because they were able to communicate to the people what the crisis was, to make the people feel inspired to be part of working it out through empathy, taking responsibility and setting an example, and then to mobilize every resource in the country.”

It’s looking awfully familiar, and it’s not exactly comforting. Worse, even if we do manage to overcome the advantages of incumbency and vote out the current administration in November, it’s likely to be too little, too late; I don’t dislike either of the guys still in the race, though I’m relatively sure we’ve already eliminated our best chance at another FDR, no matter how many of her plans are incorporated into the eventual party platform; I just don’t think either of them have the charisma, drive, or ovaries.

Well, we’ll just manage the best we can day to day. We might even come out okay on the other side of this. But right now, at this moment, I’m struggling to find the upside.