With the election coming up (and Trump’s stake in it) and everything that’s happened (and is still happening!) in 2020 up to now (including stuff you may have forgotten about, like the death of Kobe Bryant), I’ve seen a lot of people (half-)joke about what new disaster is going to come before the end of the year, or whether this year is some kind of existential threat to a large number of people or to American democracy or whatever.
This is a totally instinctual reaction, and I’m not saying it can’t get worse, because it can and very well might, but… am I the only one who really isn’t waiting for another shoe to drop? Am I the only one who just has this feeling that any further earthshaking events this year will be more minor than what’s already happened? And I’m a naturally anxious person, and often pessimistic, but I just don’t see another worldwide disaster happening or major war breaking out or Trump successfully (to any extent) installing himself as some kind of dictator.
Or am I being all Pollyanna and America/the world is surely doomed?
I just try to think about today and tomorrow. It is my natural tendency to not study the future too much. I don’t know if I would become depressed if I thought about what might be waiting for us around the corner, but I do know I wouldn’t be a fun exercise.
I’m old enough to remember 1968. That started with the Tet offensive in Viet Nam, Johnson announcing he wasn’t seeking re-election, the assassination of Martin Luther King followed by widespread rioting, the Black Panthers’ shootout, the takeover of Columbia Univ. by students, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the black power protest at the Olympics, and the election of Nixon, and was accompanied by the Hong Kong Flu, which killed a larger percentage of Americans than COVID-19 has so far. Worldwide, life was even more interesting. Remember the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia?
My prediction is that there are more appalling surprises in store, and that, guaranteed, Trump will make them much, much, much worse.
I also do not think the virus will slowly fizzle out this year. Millions of people in the US alone have not had contact with the virus yet. There is no possibility it will fizzle, unless it mutates into causing a much less harmful disease.
I question this. I think we’re looking at some economic hard times for the next couple of years at least. We’re going to have a lot of businesses closed and a lot of people out of work.
Better than 50% chance things will get worse.
Second wave which will kill businesses that spent to reopen.
Republicans kill further aid to the newly unemployed, leading to waves of homelessness and perhaps rioting that will make what is happening now look like a street party.
We’ll figure out that a lot of businesses are not reopening, and their employees will stop being hopeful that they’ll have a job again. Continued low sales. Continued fear of going back to theaters and restaurants.
Wall Street will finally figure out this isn’t going to be a V-shaped recovery and swoon.
And then something unexpectedly bad could happen also.
The current unrest is going to lead to a massive second wave of COVID infections. Trump and the Republicans will push their authoritarian and anti-left agenda as hard as they can. By the time November rolls around, the reliability of the election system will be in doubt, which will lead to further divisions in society. The economy is going to struggle to recover, and the poor will continue to get poorer, the middle class will continue to shrink, and the rich will continue to game the system to make themselves richer. And the propaganda bullshit will continue to come thick and fast.
It’s not the end of America but it’s certainly going to be a difficult period for millions of Americans.
It is going to get much, much worse. Don’t forget as a backdrop to all this, we are doing nothing on climate change, the tensions that produced Trump are nothing to the tensions as climate change continues unabated. Each year will be worst than the last until we’re all dead. But the good news is I’m saving money on my car insurance with Geico.
I’m with you. People on this board tend to be a bunch of Debbie Downers about everything. I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I would be surprised if there is some other major disaster this year. Trump may win reelection, but I don’t anticipate he declares himself world dictator. And for the most part, for whatever reason, COVID-19 cases don’t seem to be rapidly increasing as things open up.
Yeah, I agree. Obviously, wildly optimistic predictions like Trump’s “the virus will disappear in April” were silly, but meanwhile, the worst-case “Dooooomsday!” predictions have been equally wrong, just … more quietly so. I expect the world in general, and American democracy in particular, will keep muddling along as it usually does, we will get incrementally better at treating COVID-19 and protecting vulnerable populations, and we will end up with fewer and more targeted restrictions as we understand more about how it spreads.
I hear what you are saying, but people back in 2017 were told they were being overly pessimistic for thinking that Trump would be half as bad as he turned out to be. And while I didn’t scold anyone for being pessimistic, I quietly prided myself for not joining in the sob fest when Trump was elected. Yeah, I was bummed out. But I figured he would surround himself with good people and he would at least try to act presidential. I figured there would be silver linings to his presidency, so I would try to focus on those. Back in 2017, if you had told me that we’d be in the state we are currently in, I would have told you you were crazy bananas. Because right now feels like a badly written dystopian flick that only has two-stars on Amazon Prime.
So now people are preparing themselves for the worst and understandably so. Every time we think we’ve experienced the “worst”, something pops up to take its place. It’s exhausting being optimistic after awhile.
I gotta say that the sanguine outlook is not just wearing me out. It is starting to really work my nerves. I suggested to my parents that they start stocking their pantry back in mid-February in preparation for quarantine, and they laughed at me. Forget about “worst case scenario”–their minds couldn’t even entertain the possibility of a “kinda crappy scenario”. To just suggest the possibility of a quarantine was me “overreacting.” Just like for lots of people, wearing a mask is “overreacting.”
You think preparing for Trump as a world dictator is “overreacting”. Why? I mean, I don’t think him becoming a world dictator is very realistic, but I wouldn’t put it past him to try, risking American quantity and quality of lives in the process. How does one prepare for such an insane proposition? I have no idea. But I guess I don’t blame someone for thinking it really isn’t such an insane proposition and bracing themselves. I know I am tired of being shocked by shit and saying to myself, “I had no idea this would happen!!” If I’m feeling like this, I know others have to be feeling it too.
There is some psychological comfort in preparing for the worst outcome and being pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t happen.
Does anybody remember when there was a worldwide pandemic outbreak with well over 1.5M recorded cases and over 100K deaths, 40M+ unemployed, businesses shuttered, trillions of dollars in economic aide injected and economy still teetering on collapse with the stock market in complete denial and treating it all like a moderate correction?
We need to remember that a lot of people who are thinking the worst will happen aren’t just being doom and gloom for no reason. Maybe they have loved ones who have died from COVID-19. Maybe they’ve lost their jobs and have no hope that they will get hired anytime soon. They can’t pay next month’s rent or their car note. They don’t have health insurance. And they don’t have a president who seems to care about these things. He either spews “happy news” or hurls insults at his enemies. So why wouldn’t their outlook be negative?
I can afford to be zen about the state of the world because from my vantage point, things are OK. I have a job. I can pay my bills. I have a frightening medical diagnosis, but I have insurance and the ability to pay the out of pocket expenses. If I didn’t have a job right now, I’d be freaking out too.
OK, but for a lot of people, predicting catastrophe is NOT a good or useful coping mechanism, particularly when it comes to stuff we can actually DO something about. Like, if I seriously believed Trump was going to cancel elections and American democracy was dead, I wouldn’t have spent the last three and a half years quietly working to get better people into public office, because what would be the point? And when I read worst-case scenario predictions that I really DO believe are likely to come true (about climate change, for example), it doesn’t help me cope with reality better, it just makes me feel despairing and self-destructive. It helps a little if I can remind myself about ones I’ve read in the past that have demonstrably been proven wrong (for example, a few months ago there was someone on DailyKos opining that we would be experiencing catastrophic food shortages right now – not because of coronavirus, which wasn’t really on anybody’s radar at that point, but because of the decline in insect populations!)
The only good thing about 2016 is that it taught me to stop making predictions. The natural progression of things are so disrupted at this point that the most optimistic prediction you can make is that anything can happen.
I think that complacency is a big part of the reason things are so bad. We kept thinking that there would be some magic solution to climate change, that electing one black president ended systemic racism, and that Trump’s supporters aren’t so bad. America has been refusing to make any effort to fix the huge challenges it faces and keeps racking up debt. Now the bills are coming due. Pretending everything is fine while cities burn isn’t working, it’s time to try something else.
New disasters will arise, old disasters will end, new good things will happen, old good things will end. That’s how life works. Will it be better than some people think? Almost certainly, given how bad some people think it will get. Will it be worse than some people think? Also almost certainly.