5-year retrospective – the next 5 years

A longtime reader, supporter, and friend asked me to discuss the last five years and give some thoughts on the next five. The time, ten years, is an incredible amount to consider. And the breadth is even more colossal. To think where we have come and where we might be going as a people, country, personally, and all the intersecting pieces is daunting, but I'm glad he asked me to consider such a thing. If you want to expand your mind, try to wrap your head around a decade where you are currently in the dead center.

This essay will be somewhat winding and disjointed. I won't spend too much time on edits and the like. It will be better this way and feel more raw and sincere.

Five years ago, we were starting the last year of Trump's first term and just beginning to hear scant news stories about some new flu or virus in China. By March 2020, much of the world would be under lockdown, curfew, or restriction. However, you would prefer the phrasing. We would shortly thereafter experience the George Floyd death and riots. At the end of 2020, we would see what I and many believe to be a stolen election. 2021 would start with a protest of that election that spawned a massive FBI hunt as Biden took office.

The Biden years were odd. Immigration went entirely unchecked and even enhanced at every level, from legal to illegal. The cost of living jumped the highest I have ever seen in my life, and probably most people's lives, unless you lived through the oil crisis or maybe the Carter years (I do not blame Carter myself.) Many right-wing figures came and went. Some projects did well, while others folded after wasting a tremendous amount of money.

Censorship was kicked up in the past five years across all platforms, only showing a slight reprieve once Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and started to make platform changes.

The last five years, for me, have been a mixed bag. There were many difficult changes in my life, and I found it hard to maintain a steady pace. I had extreme productivity and growth periods, followed by long bouts of stagnation and falling backward. I put out a considerable number of essays and ideas despite this. Going forward, I will try to level out my workflow and find a nice balance instead of the all-or-nothing approach I've had most of my life. I spent a lot of time providing legal aid to people in our community, some things with great success, and others I found to be an uphill battle. I wanted to grow something more significant, like what the ADL or SPLC do for their causes. I simply cannot network and fundraise at that level to support a project that requires employing several full-time people, at the least, to gain momentum and produce results. As such, I kept on doing what I could personally, such as providing legal aid and writing and activism. The idea is still valid and worthy of pursuit, but I don't think I can put it together.

Going forward, I suppose I should clean up my act, personally. What I mean by this is that I've been screaming into the void for my entire life. Recently, it was brought to my attention that people who can introduce policy changes and fund the people who do are paying attention to things people like me, or me specifically, are saying. That change in audience might mean a shift in messaging style. Not the message or the end goal, yet refining the style.

There was a point I wrote that I would likely not be on social media at all except to drop in here and there to say hello and catch up with friends. Leaving social media was partly due to censorship and partly because I felt it was a waste of time and "unbecoming." I had developed a professional career, and what felt like university antics seemed useless. I say university antics because my favorite pastime in academia was sitting in the back of lecture halls, scrolling and posting on Twitter. Something changed: Twitter once again became a central hub of ideas and once again the "public square," where discussion about policy and culture happens.

Part of the great difficulty in thinking about the future is that there's a tendency to want to "predict" the future, and when you realize you cannot do so, paralysis sets in. The solution is probably in methods, systems, habits, or procedures and not getting too caught up in the specifics or substantives. There needs to be some flexibility going forward and the ability to go with the flow of things outside our control.

I have goals that do not mean much to anybody outside myself. Finishing a restoration project or bathroom remodel or having a higher net worth or lower body fat percentage are all great, but they only help others as much as I do. Having them makes it easier for me to do things that help others. However, we all need a strong base from which to work. So, make sure you have your personal life in order.

Regarding politics, my personal goal is to spend more time on activism. I want to write and publish more. Network more. Increase my readership on Twitter and long-form essays. My hope is that our ideas reach the mainstream more than they have. Five years ago, nobody was talking about mass deportations or ending birthright citizenship. Now Trump is! That is huge. Some years ago, nobody would listen to me about the importance of ending arbitrary censorship of legal speech on Twitter; a few years ago, Musk brought Twitter to fix censorship. As far as I know, it's not fixed, but we are hopefully moving in the right direction. When I want to complain, I imagine Bill Gates purchased Twitter instead because he wanted to restrict content more than had been done. I appreciate that we are having an H1B discussion; under Kamala, there would be no debate; the answer would be "more.”

What might make the most sense is to think about the problems with the country and what would fix them. Immigration is huge because it costs enormous amounts of money, lowers wages, raises the cost of living, destroys social capital, and makes everything unpleasant. The next issue is crime. If we had no flood of migrants, both skilled and unskilled (or whatever), the following issue would be the costs of crime and its effect on social capital, taxes, insurance, and the like. Then, probably the economy, the offshoring of so much, insourcing, outsourcing, and the unironic lack of economic diversity. After that, we want to tackle quality of life and pollution / environmental concerns. These are somewhat nebulous, but things like the culture and "feel" of the nation. The kinds of movies produced, the music, the media, third places like the mall and bowling alleys, the food quality, and how we manage the air, water, and waste. And, of course, our animal friends.

Once we have a list of issues, we can think of solutions. Once we have ideas for solutions, we work on specific policy changes that would address the problem, implement the solution, and some metrics to unironically monitor the situation to ensure it is indeed getting better. At that point, we could be well on our way to having a nice society again.

Some issues probably cannot, but more importantly, should not be solved by legislation, policy, or the government. I don't believe a government agency should be going around deciding what films people can and cannot watch. However, are there practices we could implement to make cinema great again? Sure. We could break up the monopoly that Clear Channel has on radio stations, for example. At 1,2000, some radio stations would be scattered to independent owners again. When that happens, various viewpoints and opinions and an actual "marketplace of ideas" forms. Currently, we have a Hollywood producer making trash, who then pays Clear Channel to run ads and have their DJs say how great it is, and the whole incestual relationship exists to prop up awful material. A government could break that chain and allow others to be involved and have a say. The way it is currently, if a DJ gets a job at a radio station and is critical of a politician or celebrity of film that is in the good graces of the Clear Channel top brass, they soon find themselves without a job. Disrupting that cartel would go a long way and be much more "light touch" than a strict government body screening material.

Other issues, like immigration, are difficult for the public body to sort out. There needs to be direct government oversight and intervention to secure borders and handle deportations.

To bring this full circle, the past five years have been a bitter and challenging era. I'm unsure if enough time or effort is available to turn it around. My fear is that Trump does some good but ultimately needs far more people who understand these issues at a deep level and far more time than he has, and the next election will produce another liberal or centrist who continues down a doomed path.

I always have to keep in mind that what we believe is a massive drop in quality of life from the 80s and 90s is the most significant improvement of all time for most of the world that wants to flee here. For most people, no matter how bad our cities, neighborhoods, and economy become, it will still be better than theirs, and that's why they want it.

What happens then? I will try to do as well as I can in the decline. Try to figure out how to make as much money as possible off the migrant invasions and live as well as I can until there is an opening to straighten out the political situation that led to it all.

Right now, we have an opening. I might be naïve or drunk on hope, but I've never seen so many of these once-fringe ideas in the mainstream. I have people who thought I was simply unhinged, sending me things about the USS Liberty and Saddam Hussein that I said years ago. Tides are turning. We must get professional and try to get every idea we want in the light out there and every policy we want thought out as if somebody is listening.

Again, it might all be futile, but I don’t know what else to do but try.