I never imagined, 60,000 posts ago, that our country would be in so much trouble today. [View all]

[highplainsdem]

We certainly had challenges, back in 2004. We had a lot of incompetent - and in some cases evil - people in office. There were lots of reasons why we Democrats looked for likeminded people online, and I was very happy to find DU among the liberal websites.

I'm even more grateful that it's still here. My thanks to EarlG and to everyone here for keeping this site going.

I still believe we'll survive the challenges, even though they're worse now. I doubt any of us would have believed in 2004 that Trump could ever be elected president, let alone be elected a second time after losing an election, orchestrating an attack on the US Capitol, and being impeached twice. I doubt any of us in 2004 would have imagined the rise of social media being so harmful. Or the development of AI creating the monstrosity that is generative AI. It's a safe bet that if anyone could go back in time to 2004 and tell the science fiction writers at the worldcon that in a couple of decades the most-hyped tech would be hallucinating AI trained on stolen intellectual property, with those AI models never trustworthy but still being forced into government and education and every part of society, they'd laugh and think the messenger from the future had to be drunker than anyone else at the convention. They'd REALLY think that if told that Donald Trump was elected president in 2024, for a SECOND time, despite being impeached twice and attempting to block the transfer of power.

Our world seemed saner, in 2004.

There we were, now here we are
All this confusion, nothing’s the same to me

Those are Oasis lyrics, some of the lyrics to Columbia, one of the tracks on their first album. If you've read very many of my posts here since last summer, you've seen a lot about Oasis and their reunion tour, and the amazing reviews and articles about the tour, which from July through November was one of the few bright spots in a year of mostly overwhelmingly bad news.

I hadn't planned to mention that song or any other, but those lyrics came to mind while I was writing this.

We're a long way from where we were. A long way from where we need to be. And at times now it seems like everything is confusion - chaos swirling around the despicable wannabe dictator in the White House.

But we will get through this. And for those on this board, DU will be part of that survival. I'm not sure exactly what will be necessary to save our country, or those our country is currently a threat to because of the malign administration and its enablers and supporters. There is undeniable confusion these days - not about the goal, but how to get there from here, given how evil many of our opponents are.

I'm hoping that by the time I need to post another of these milestone posts we'll have seen much brighter days, with the second Trump admin crumbling under the backlash it deserves from US citizens and the world.