So Easy, So Backlash

These two tweets appeared close together in the past 24 hours, and after I liked them, they ended up next to each other in my profile:

The U.S. is missing such an opportunity to easily kick arse in the world economy and be a good force. All we need to do:

1/ keep working on being less racist, more liberal, to be a hopeful multicultural example,
2/ keep up big immigration to stay young, growing and tech successful
3/ build housing like mad, when many countries aren't
4/ use our huge economy and global $ trust to fund and speed clean technology transition,  equity and universal programs domestically and internationally, spending on anything that yields ROI in 20 years.

So easy, so beneficial
@kar_nels

Liberal democracy is the most revolutionary movement in human history and is forever under threat from counterrevolutionary forces.
@LesserFrederick

The second tweet was from this morning, around the time the IPCC latest report came out, it was announced Viktor Orban was reelected in Hungary, and news was more clearly forming about Russia's atrocities in Ukraine. (And of course in the U.S., Republicans have continued passing bills everywhere to repress LGBTQ people, take away bodily autonomy, and gut voting rights or make them meaningless.)

But the first tweet is correct: it shouldn't be hard to do the four things listed. What is keeping us (us, broadly construed) from it? We've seen evidence of all of those things working, and that they made things better for more people.

The only thing that explains the reality we see in the second tweet is the entrenched economic interest of a small number of people who have way too much power. In the U.S., they constantly use their money to build more power through media, think tanks, lobbying, and other mechanisms.

Now, to reset just a bit of that distress, here's a photo of snowdrops, which are finally blooming in Saint Paul, close to a month later than last year.