Also whew boy it is hard to know even where to begin with the state of the world.
There is a deep and bewildering undercurrent of denial running through Canadian politics and society, which maintains that even the barest most rhetorical difference in the volume of evil between Canada and the United States justifies Canadians to see their culture and society as generally fine if not good if not great. Mind you, lots of things are better, for _most_, which is I guess is a big part of what makes this commitment a national one. The baseline for uninsured healthcare is certainly less inhumane, but if you make a distinction between "less inhumane" and "more humane", it doesn't really meet the definition of the latter and is by design destined to fail in many of the same ways.
When I was first learning about politics in a real way it felt very hard to imagine that capitalism/empire would eventually begun to self immolate by repeatedly making the most obvious mistakes. Mainly that in an effort to keep maximizing profit, the capitalist class will resort to making society unbearable to live in for everyone else. The last decade proves that that prediction is even an understatement, considering capitalism is poised to make the whole planet uninhabitable for its current lifeforms at this point.
In both things I'm just left speechless at how morally abominable yet also unimaginably arrogant the majority of the people in power really are. I have a lot of hope in humanity and an unshakable belief that most people are inherently good and with the right power structures in place we could all be happy, healthy, and safe, and the things we can achieve with technology and science is incredible, but jeeze, the degree to which those same _most_ people from above are being actively deceived as to what is the right thing to do is staggering.
If anything makes me feel hopeless it's that the lie that is American Empire just won't unravel fast enough for most people to realize that the ruling class really do not give a single flying fuck about you, for every 1 middle class person who can ascend into capitalist class there's a 1000 if not more who slip into poverty, the uneven distribution of wealth is only deepening further and further, and every crumb they give you represents a warehouse of cakes they're making off with. They would literally slit your throat to make an offshore tax haven grow by a fraction of a percent and they will always get away with it, since they're the ones holding each other accountable in the legislature and the courts.
Maybe this really is what it feels like to live in the earliest days of a revolution but I'm still consistently at least lowkey horrified at the disparity between what is happening, how those in power spin it, how they just proceed as normal making everything worse, and the general reaction to it. You can practically set a watch to the events that follow right wing extremist violence, police brutality, environmental regulations slackening, a legislature giving more power to capital and private property, and so on and so forth. I think they (whoever they may be in the moment) have gotten particularly good at sensationalizing police brutality, news outlets farming ad revenue from the increased traffic, politicians holding press conferences where they deliver slickly rehearsed mopey routines, the ad revenue keeps coming in once protests erupt and the future American Gestapo (actually, might even be fair to call them the present American Gestapo state) brutalize protestors with impunity, and as people fight tooth and nail to introduce even a barest whiff of accountability, the stamina of people involved and the number of people who are able to keep paying attention to it dwindle, if lots of people hear about the protests, fewer hear about the arrest of the pig who did it, fewer hear about the charges, fewer and fewer follow the trial, fewer and fewer and fewer people hear the verdict, fewer people will be around to either protest the acquittal or wait around for sentencing after the conviction, and even fewer will be around to hear the sentence (or protest it, if appropriate). I don't even see this as a moral failing, these things are mainly about local communities and the issues are national if not global, but it's an easy to see tactic once you learn to see it.
When all means of holding those in power accountable deemed "legitimate" are also in their control, there is not and never will be justice, only a drip feed of showy displays of pretending to do the right thing, making promising looking budgets or making donations (tax refundable of course!), doing puppy dog eyes for the cameras, all while remaining confident that the ruling class' power structures will continually reproduce themselves without fail. It's difficult to draw attention to it and not look like an asshole who's just posturing as superior (and hopefully that isn't what you'll think of me because that's not the intent and I'm sharing out of trust), but as an indigenous person, we're more familiar than most with this sort of song and dance. America and the ideas it represents have been an ongoing disaster for us for going on 500 years. I mean, not that I've been nearly that politically aware my whole life (it's a long story), just, following indigenous issues means you can see what settler state governments and courts act like with even less inclination to posture as the good guys who will sort things out.
Maybe that's why this event made me think of business as usual in Canada, strangely enough. No matter how ridiculous and baldfaced this gets there will be plenty of people eager to downplay it and desperate to get back to brunch. There is a very Canadian-like air of cognitive dissonance here. I feel like it's almost assured that what could go down as history's stupidest failed/attempted/halfassed coup (is this even the right word?? I mean, a coup implies more of a political purpose than people whose major demands apparently consisted of stealing paperwork from Pelosi's office and tasing themselves and then dying of a heart attack, essentially fucking around in the capital building for an evening and then leaving) will barely even be headline news in 2 weeks and I would actually be shocked if there were a high percentage of convictions of the people who were arrested and if there are even any token arrests after an investigation.
I think mostly what I'm shocked about is that a crowd of relatively disorganized people stormed a federal government building to make demands, but it was a crowd of deluded far right people from all over the country and not anyone else.
If any FBI or CIS are reading this, this is all purely hypothetical and/or satire, but maybe other people out there could take note that it is possible if there are enough of you to just break through security at the capital building and literally just go to where the ruling class are in person and ~ go from there ~ I mean, dang, I don't even think security/the pigs were "letting" people through so much as they, apparently, are not paid enough to endanger themselves (apparently cops are mainly paid as much as they are where they are exorbitantly overpaid and overfunded in order to pull someone over and fish for a charge just before their shift ends so that they can rack up overtime pay doing rote paperwork).
