@TrueBloodNet I actually think there are a lot of factors all folding in to one another that have got us here. There's almost never just one root cause for stuff like <broad gesture> all this.

@TrueBloodNet Agreed, yes. They've been at this since at least the late 1970s, & right-wing elements have been part of US politics & culture for a long time. I'd wonder if the state we're in was made easier by the fall of the USSR. Right-wingers opposed the USSR for ages, & now that entity is gone, so more energy can be focused on targeting internal 'enemies'.

Maybe. I'm just spitballin' here, in the broadest way.

This is all very broad & general & I don't actually know if I'm right or not, I'm just spitballin' here.

We don't have an external enemy like that anymore. We have tensions with Russia & China, but believe me when I say it was nothing like the tension between us & the former USSR.

& it's kind of fucked up, but I wonder if that lack of an identifiable externa enemy is one of the reasons why Americans are turning on each other so fiercely these days.

It isn't that ppl in the US hadn't turned on one another: of course we have. So many of our internal problems, then & now, are about conflict between different groups: racism, sexism, classism, etc. But for decades, we had an *external* enemy that politicians could use to 'unite' us: 'we're Americans & they're not'.

It dawned on me that, for decades, the USSR had served as a means of defining what the US was *not*.

Positioning the USSR this way was part of the US' cultural & political identity for decades. & suddenly that was gone.

Without a war, too, that was an amazing thing. Not without violence, but without *war*.

& of course, it wasn't really 'all of a sudden', it took months & years of pushback & protest & pressures of all kinds to finally bring the USSR down.

The Berlin Wall coming down tho', that was one of those pinnacle moments, a singular point in time at which everything pivoted. We watched in real time as an entire nation *fell*.

I do remember when the Berlin Wall fell. I was in college when that happened. The USSR collapsed not long afterwards. It was pretty amazing to watch, because all of a sudden our global enemy was just... gone.

Like we knew the adults on the planet weren't really adulting, it might cost the world its existence, & there was nothing we could do to stop it because we were just children.

I remember seeing stories on the news about the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Bloc nations, but I didn't really grasp the details.

One of the episodes we watched was on the Reagan years & the end of the Cold War. I remember being a kid & being aware of the threat of nuclear war if tensions between the US & USSR boiled over. I also remember my age cohort got waaaaay cynical because of that.

Last night I was feeling nostalgic, so watched some of the CNN decades series, the one produced by Tom Hanks. We saw a few eps from the Eighties & Nineties series in particular, since that's the decades SO & I came of age.

I maintain that John Landis' & Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video remains the best music video ever made.

I will die on this hill.

@Jacki I do have Major Depressive Disorder. Not seasonal, but does have ups & downs.

I'm hella tired now. Like all the anxiety built up before the meeting just discharged, & now I'm totally drained. I seriously want a nap.

OMG you guys my review was FANTASTIC.

I still loathe annual reviews on principle. It went great though. Lots of stuff about all I've done well over the past year. Criticism was minimal.

Which either means I really did great, or they're buttering me up before firing me, LOL.

A better model for those of us with mental health conditions might be... I dunno, anything but this. For me, maybe a 1x/month check-in or something. I do have regular meetings w/my manager & I'm like, why do I have to do this annual review crap? Because HR makes us? F.

I'm really not looking forward to learning about all the ways I've screwed up in the past year. That's what these things are to me, even when the feedback is good. Because there's always supposed to be room for improvement, so the business culture encourages managers to look for fuckups.

Yeah, I don't do well emotionally w/reviews.