trey on Nostr: Well said and largely agree. In the point of local and state governments, there is a ...

Well said and largely agree. In the point of local and state governments, there is a massive difference between those and the federal government.

For instance, state and local cities/towns have to try to keep a balanced budget. Sure, many get aid from the federal government, but many others pour money and resources into the federal government.

I work a lot with both state and federal grants/funding in my nonprofit work. There is a lot of good that I see done, especially at the state and local level, through different taxation efforts and social programs. Perhaps this is where I may differ from some of my U.S. libertarian friends, but I’ve seen the net positive for low-income folks who can’t live on minimum wage.

I completely echo that I think the most positive change is going to come from focusing on local communities. My fear at the federal level beyond economics continues to be the erosion of social protections and freedoms for the lgbtq community, healthcare/abortion access, racist politicies, and more. I’d like to live in a nation that guarantees and supports these basic protections at a national level.

quoting note137s…wn5c

Our society is not well. There are a lot of things contributing to that but and many places we can see the evidence for it, but I’m thinking about the future and where it goes from here.

The idea of national unity or shared vision or direction at a scale of millions is pretty much out the window. We had a flavor of national unity for about 5 minutes at the beginning of covid before it devolved into tribalism. The Internet, social media, algorithms, and rent seekers mean the chance for shared vision is gone.

We see cultural decay everywhere. In the absence of religion we see people trying to bootstrap religion ether explicitly (seeking spirituality or something similar) or implicitly signing up for pseudo-religions (like wokeness or red team versus blue team politics).

When I read national news it seems like the country, and the world for that matter, is a dumpster fire. Of course, it’s not. That’s a distorted sample of the most click worthy stuff. But there’s enough signal in the noise to pick up the trend line.

There is also evidence of this decline in my own community. The culture wars have not missed us and neither has the crisis in meaning, the death of the stable family, or the opioid crisis (all of which is connected anyway).

However, when I consider the future I believe that small communities will become more and more important. People “out there” seem crazy, but when I walk around my community I see people mostly just trying to struggle through life. Trying to make a living, raise their kids, and find some enjoyment in life.

This is why I’m increasingly skeptical of the federal government and more focused on state and local government. We need to be allowed to build systems that fit our communities without interference from forces wildly disconnected from them. Especially when those forces are loaded with rent-seekers and narcissists driven by greed and power.

The rub, obviously, is that even if we all decide that we’re going to focus on building healthy local communities, there are countless forces that will transcend those boundaries, ranging from pandemics to global military conflict to environmental disasters.

I guess I see two approaches for individuals concerned about the future of our society or, put simply, the world our children and their children are going to inhabit. We can either focus on the large scale, trying to solve problems through things like national politics or “winning” the national (global?) culture war. Or we can try to focus on our local communities first, devoting proportionally less energy to systems which are increasingly disconnected from us.

Of course, it’s not a simple dichotomy. However, we can choose where we set the slider. While I recognize the allure of being part of something much bigger than yourself is ever-present, I think too many people have set the slider to the former. And I’ve little confidence that the latter will succeed at a massive scale. It would require a radical change in where most people spend their energy (and there’s a reason that so many people don’t right now – it’s difficult). But I am certain that the former approach will fail and in fact is currently failing spectacularly before our eyes.

I’d encourage you to take an audit of where you spend your energy. Is it shouting into the noisy nihilist void? Or is it developing yourself, your family, and your community in such a way that they grow and develop into something greater than they were before?

#plebchain