Let's review 2021:
- Donald Trump was shipped home to Florida.
- Democrats won two Senate seats in Georgia, giving them a majority.
- Congress passed a $1.9 trillion rescue bill.
- Miraculously, effective COVID vaccines became widely available less than a year from the initial outbreak. By the end of the year, more than 70% of American teens and adults—including nearly 90% of the elderly—were fully vaccinated.
- The economy strongly recovered from its pandemic recession.
- After 20 years, we finally withdrew from Afghanistan.
- Congress passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill.
- Joe Biden and Senate Democrats confirmed 40 federal judges, a one-year record.
- The odds of passing BBB are better than they've ever been.
Item #9 deserves an explanation. At this point, I think all the underbrush has been hacked away and it's finally clear what both sides really care about. It was messy getting here! But Joe Manchin says he's willing to talk further in January, and I think there's an excellent chance that he and Biden will work out a reasonable compromise.
And now, to finish our list, the bad news:
- Omicron.
- Inflation.
- To this day, 70% of Republicans are still under the delusion that Democrats stole the 2020 election.
Overall, not bad! So why does everything seem so grim?
Maybe because #10 is so completely foundational.
Also missing is
11. Republicans seem well-positioned to retake control of Congress in 2022.
The grimness might be the climate change elephant in the room. It keeps taking up more space in our consciousness.
Both of the above are right.
And don't count on Manchin - unless he's locked into a room with Biden for enough time to miss all the comforts to which he is accustomed. He'll probably never apologize to his constituents, either.
So why does everything seem so grim?
Well maybe because ...
12. The media -- especially but certainly not exclusively Fox -- spend about 95% of their airtime on items 8, 9 and 10.
Bingo! That former guy, now a retiree living in a Florida resort, was so awful, and even though said media had to tone down their coverage of his antics and crimes because they were so off the scale, "fairness" and "balance" mandate that the next guy in the barrel, one Joseph Biden, needs to endure coverage as negative or worse as that other guy.
Regardless of his actual actions or inactions. That's just how it works in Journamalism Today.
Truth.
8, 9, and 10 for a start. 2 is a “majority” in name only. 1 shows signs of returning. And for 5 we still have a semi-steady stream of stories about how things are worse for this group or that with the return of the other Taliban.
And, you seem to have completely ignored an 11: Abortion appears to be about to return to the days before Roe. Which makes 6 something of a Meh.
Apart from that Pollyanna the play is fine…
Omicron may not be so bad. It looks like there is a strong possibility that omicron is a milder infection that will spread like wildfire. If we all catch it, it will crowd out more deadly strains and juice all of our immune systems to fight off later versions. That could be just what we need to get out of the pandemic and transition to covid as just another illness, like the flu, and not a public health disaster.
"The odds of passing BBB are better than they've ever been"
We are? That's not how I read the situation.
You might want to read this column in today's Gray Lady. BTW, this is not Bret Stephens or George Will. It's a spokesman for a major component of the Democratic Party.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/opinion/manchin-build-back-better-democrats.html
Nothing in that article changes my opinion about whether BBB is likely to get passed. I don't think Manchin want to pass anything based on his actions so far. For whatever reasons, he's spent months dragging out process and negotiating in bad faith.
“So why does everything seem so grim?“
It’s because of what Trump has done to us.
And I don’t see us getting over it for decades.
Maybe we can learn to live with it but the damage has been done.
Re: decades.
Too true. And another gripe of the shamestream media is that, hey! Joe Biden was elected! We ought to have instantly returned to "normalcy"! Because that hasn't happened yet, he's a failure, along with the entire Democratic party and its overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress and its ironclad grip on the courts. Why have they done NOTHING??
(sigh)
On the brighter (?) side, the people who will determine the next two elections pay little if any attention to political news ….
Simply put, because we've been denied the future we've worked for. My generation (i.e., X) was born into a world of endless possibilities, people going to the moon, computers, civil rights coming into bloom. Now what one older generation hasn't scraped clean, a younger generation has told us had no effect or actually made things worse.
Our generation is of course not blameless, but if you ask why someone my age is gloomy it's because it's 2021 and everything has gone wrong and looking for silver linings got old 20 years ago.
Expectations got pretty sky high after that first $1.9 trillion bill. There were a whole bunch of takes about the "decline in Neoliberalism", a bunch of people on the progressive side who seemed super-hopeful about greater public spending, and so forth.
We still did get the infrastructure bill (which isn't just bridges and highways despite the derogatory label), and we might get the smaller BBB. But it falls short of what they were hoping for.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks this was a bad year, well, compared to 2020 I'll take 2021 any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Now granted that's setting the bar pretty low but it's getting to the point to where I've rarely had a year lately where I said. "Man this was a great year for me personally and the country too. I wish it would never end." Of course you look back through time and you realize, especially through the Obama Era, hey those were pretty good years in retrospect. People want to get back to "normal" so bad, well those days were good as far as normal goes. I mean I assume that people mean. And by using that lens, 2021 is going to be that year where things started to work themselves out. Not perfect, but getting there.
Now there's a lot that can go wrong in 2022, I fully understand and perhaps maybe we'll learn to keep our expectations low (especially after this spring) but hopefully 2022 will be if nothing else, where things just keep improving as they sort themselves out through this new decade.
Still trolling for clicks? You're retired now!
"Overall, not bad! So why does everything seem so grim?"
The outgoing president conspired with key members of his own party and administration to illegally retain power by inciting an insurrection on the Capitol while certification of the election was inprogress. One of two major parties is fighting the investigation into the insurrection tooth and nail while laying the groundwork for stealing subsequent elections. The US, as a consequence, is no longer considered a democracy, but an anocracy (somehere midway between a democracy and an autocracy). Maybe that's why everything seems so grim.
Wasn't there something about BBB being done by reconciliation something something something that meant it needed to be passed before the end of the year? What changes if it's pushed into early 2022? I honestly don't know.
Aside from that though, 1) the BBB or any other plan or anything else anyone is doing anywhere feels woefully inadequate to address the actual climate crisis; 2) Economic inequality has vastly expanded as corporations and billionaires have reaped huge profits during the pandemic; and 3) the Democratic party and the US institutions are proving woefully inaccurate at countering the effects of the Big Lie, of widespread gerrymandering, and the worsening of the inherent imbalance of representation between the states, and with a likely takeover of the House or Senate or both this coming year, that will only get worse.
So yeah you can tick off some nominally not-as-bad-as-the-could-have-been things on that list but I'm still feeling dour and depressed about any kind of future right now. 😞
My gas bill, natural gas, for heating, has doubled over this month last year.
It's Republicans who set these prices.
Coincidence?
Oh wow, my December 2020 gas bill was $101.07 and the bill I just downloaded and set up to pay was $144.10, about 30% increase.
This is why we shouldn't have private industry involved in fundamental utilities, like energy or water.
Not sure where you are, but here in NM we are paying a surcharge for the February extreme weather event that knocked out a chunk of Texas' electric grid. Natural gas prices skyrocketed over a week span. I think NM Gas customers are paying an extra $10 or $15 a month on their gas bill for this (continued for 30 months).
The mRNA vaccines were developed almost instantly so it should not have taken nearly as long as it did to get them tested and distributed. Of course this is in retrospect and Trump was President at the time. But if pandemics are to minimized in the future the apparatus for producing the materials has to be developed in advance. Aside from vaccines we had shortages of masks and tests. This means national investment in the production facilities, not leaving it up to the free market to jump in at the last minute and make maximum profit. This is certainly possible because we do it for the military - since WW II we have been spending hundreds of billions yearly to be ready for the next war (or whatever we going to do with all that hardware). And since this is done with contracts, the private sector gets its share of profits.
There are two effective mRNA vaccines for Covid. More people tried to develop mRNA vaccines, but they didn't work. The Atlantic had a write up on this a while ago.
Making RNA now-a-days is pretty straight forward. But you need to have the correct sequence , it must be expressed properly in the human cells, there needs to be a way to get it into cells, and the RNA component needs to be stabilized so it just doesn't get chewed up immediately.
The vaccines had to be tested since it was a novel way to make a vaccine and we didn't have a profile for potential efficacy nor side effects.
Currently, Pfizer and Moderna have been doing pilot runs/studies for making vaccines for different variants. It will take ca. 3 months to ramp up production--which is truly remarkable. But the new runs would still to be validated. The question is, should we stop some production of current vaccine to make one for the currently new variant? Not as easy call...
13. Another year of procrastination on global warming.
One year closer to death.
Gonna die anyway, right? Conservatives are the real heroes!
Three reasons why it looks so grim:
1. climate change
2. #12 and its likely consequences
3. You are totally wrong about item 9.
#12 should be considered #12, 13, 14, . . ., 99. At least.
Of course, #9 has been a media obsession for long enough (can we find one more small-town mom to interview on camera about how she can't afford RC Cola for her 7 kids?) that even if it shrinks back to pre-pandemic level, no one (meaning "swing voters") will notice.
You also forgot #13: the "Crisis at the Border."
After twenty years the US is still inflicting pain on Afghanistan.
But not as much as are the Afghans and Pakistanis.
One more bit of good new is that the FDA just approved Pfizer's anti virus covid pill. Of course there will be plenty of MAGA morons who will insist on taking a Seabiscuit sized dose of horse dewormer instead of pill which is just another version of that devil vaccine.
They'll need to sell it out of the back of a car or pickup in an abandoned parking lot so it will take off.
Charlie is extending his kitty claws and says:
"What am I - chopped liver"????
(I would re-work this list Kevin)
I'd bet he'd like some chopped liver.
There's this odd subtext in most of KD's posts for the last year or so of "everything's fine, stop bothering me".
Things have looked grim to me since Trump Republicans gained seats in Congress after four years of the most corrupt, incompetent, buffoonish administration in history. They've looked steadily grimmer as it's become apparent tens of millions of Americans want to install a permanent white supremacist minority government, and the geriatrics who run the Democratic Party have no idea what to do about it.
Terrific analysis of why wingnuts are so freaked out by Anthony Fauci,
https://www.rawstory.com/anthony-fauci-2656094073/
"Miraculously, effective COVID vaccines became widely available less than a year from the initial outbreak."
That's simply not true. Vaccines were still tightly rationed in March of this year. Peak daily/weekly doses administered occurred at the beginning of April, suggesting that it wasn't until then that anyone who wanted the vaccine could have the vaccine (in the U.S.). Worldwide, the vaccine doesn't become widely available until at least June.
why so grim ?
1. it's 60 degrees in Denver in late December. It's been like this all of the fall, yesterday was 70. We've had 1/4" of snow since September and no other precipitation. This is unprecedented and deeply unnerving. As El Arcon says, the future is grimdark where there used to be hope.
2. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/12/10/why-the-us-is-a-failed-democratic-state/
3. as one of your other posts notes (thank you) in a year of widespread corporate and media whinging incessantly about people not wanting to work yada yada, wages are down for everyone. Billionaires of course excepted.
This list is missing what I think is by far the most critical item:
13. A serious attempt, involving many important people, was made to improperly overturn the Presidential election results, including a violent attack on the capital and votes by a majority of the representatives of one of our major parties to not recognize the results, and one of the major parties continues to overwhelming view this as a non-issue and indeed are actively preparing to act more effectively against democracy.