brendan halpin

In recent conversations with friends and acquaintances, I’ve found myself in the unaccustomed position of being optimistic. Which is weird with the world falling apart around us, but let me explain.

I’ve seen so much change in my lifetime, and I feel like in many ways the old order is crumbling. We’re seeing its nasty and violent attempt to stave off the inevitable, but I believe big, postive changes are on the way.

I’m not going to enumerate all the ways thins have changed for the better, but here’s one that exemplifies how different the world has become. When I saw Billy Bragg in ‘88, I bought a t-shirt that said “Capitalism is Killing Music.” (This was a parody of the British recording industry’s “Home Taping is killing music” campaign which was dumb and wrong and also featured a cassette tape and crossbones logo, which made home taping look cool and badass instead of a thing that music nerds did all alone because they didn’t know how to start conversations with people they wanted to date. But I digress).

I always felt nervous wearing that shirt. In 1988, and especially in 1989 after the collapse of East Germany (which was a thing at the time) and the fall of the Berlin Wall (also a thing at the time), one simply did not criticize capitalism in the United States. It was considered somewhere between laughably naive and treasonous to dare criticize The Only System That Works.

Who looks naive now?

Sexuality, gender, economics, health insurance, whether it’s okay to do a genocide against a mostly-Muslim population—these are all issues where the people are far ahead of the politicians. They’re trying to forcibly drive us back, but once you start thinking that all people are fully human and deserve life, safety, and control over their bodies, well, it’s hard to unring that bell.

Not that they’re not trying; I just don’t believe they’ll succeed. We have a whole generation of parents who haven’t benefited from the current system, who have no hope of reaching the economic status their parents reached, and who love people who do not fit the “traditional” mold of what people are supposed to be. Banning a few books about gay kids isn’t going to change this.

Look at the most recent Wag the Dog show—this is the American power structure playing the hits—when you’re unpopular, do a war! But before, they were able to characterize the “enemies” as an existential threat to the US. Gotta keep those commies in check! Gotta strike all those Islamic countries lest they do a terrorism against us! But what’s the pretext they have now? “Get this guy who wasn’t even dealing the drugs people in the US like to do!” I’m just not seeing the kind of reflexive “rally round the flag” response people had when the US has launched invasions or bombed medicine factories in the past.

I know people are suffering mightily right now, and I am not saying that people shouldn’t fight or shouldn’t grieve for who and what we’ve lost and who and what we continue to lose. What I’m saying is that people shouldn’t despair. We’re going to win. I don’t know how or when, but I just don’t believe we’re in for a thousand-year reich.