Nothing is entirely new. Everything has some instructive connection to past events. Nor is anything really eternal or inevitable. If we have the references, we remember that past catastrophes have been survived, overcome, and even exploited. Then the present seems less shocking, and the future more open. The possibilities are more numerous than

Sadopopulism normalizes oligarchy. If I am comfortable with stagnation because others are drowning, my attitude to the highfliers will be one of supplication.

If our concept of freedom is negative, then the truth seems frustrating, just one more barrier to our impulses. If we lose track of the difference between “it is true” and “it feels right,” we are not free; forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right.

We feel that we must act immediately and that the choice is binary. Can we flee, or should we fight? We feel that we must act right now.

The politics of inevitability sucks the life from values as well as facts, then presses the dry shells together. It abolishes the difference between what is and what should be: the world as it is supposedly brings the world as it should be.

The tiny group of “have yachts” are more politically coherent and powerful than the enormous mass of “have-nots,” and they will act to keep it that way.

But for Black people and for Latinos, who tend to live in cities and who together comprise the majority of the imprisoned, the logic of the situation is clear. Their imprisoned bodies are converted into someone else’s right to elect people who build more prisons.

A big lie is an untruth that is too big to fail.

The internet cannot report. It can only repeat.