Calling my pre-election post "fall" turns out to have been pretty apt. Either way that the result turned out would have been accompanied by a continued fraying: as it happens, the fraying has been accelerated.
There's now a sociopathic real estate guy back in the White House bringing his ruthless transactionalism to the global stage, with his most stakes-raising / obliterating move so far being to say that the US should take ownership of Gaza, whose people and their homes have been decimated with US support, and turn it into a "Riviera of the Middle East". Basically, an approach that involves ethnic cleansing to "clear" the way for luxury waterfront property development, into which his son-in-law's private equity firm - "Affinity Partners" - is salivating to invest. Proposals like these generate media and commentary which intentionally or not serve to legitimize them, making them a possibility through repetition and response, closing the space for alternatives, a banalization of horror.
Meanwhile at his side stands the World's richest man who has brought in his "DOGE" team of young engineers to dismantle agencies. Greater efficiency and less bureaucracy and corruption would be great but that's not the intent here, instead it's deregulation, a convergence of land-grabs and tech-solutioneering that is accelerating capitalism's eat-itself, eat-us-all machine in darkly predictable ways.
Within this crumbling World small interactions, smiles, gestures of kindness and humanity across boundaries small or big take on a new significance, they are a faintly beating heart that may suggest strength, or at least holding on, holding together, weaving a fabric of other possibilities that we have to be alert to, kindling them, gathering around them like fires providing warmth and light among ruins.
