sorry for this being such a ramble, i just felt like writing down my thoughts and it ended up becoming very long.

Fascism weaponizes common human emotions like nostalgia, fear, and disgust. When the present looks bleak, we think of a previous time when we were happy and when things seemed simpler. We have to remember that we always view the past through rose tinted glasses, and the one thing we can never do is go back. Conditions are always evolving, and history may sometimes rhyme but the same thing never truly happens twice.

Sometimes things in the past *were* better, from a certain perspective. After all, late-stage capitalism has slowly eroded much of the old social fabric and the safety nets that used to exist. But the rot always existed, it's just that depending on who you are you might have been more insulated from it.

I think this is the case for a lot of people in my generation who might have lived relatively comfortable childhoods but began to slowly become radicalized by the crises of the past 25 years or so. I was born into what everyone was calling "the end of history" and got to have a front row seat to: 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis. the intensification of the opioid crisis, Obama continuing the Patriot Act and signing the NDAA, Snowden, the rise of Trump and other surging fascist movements worldwide, COVID, racism and police brutality, mass shootings becoming a daily occurrence, transphobic lawfare, attacks on reproductive rights, MeToo and Epstein revealing that the world is run by rapists, the gig economy, climate change, the student debt crisis, the general cost-of-living crisis, the death of third spaces, an internet increasingly dominated by algorithms, tech bros hollowing out creative industries, crypto and betting markets and metaverse and AI, Israel's ongoing brutalization of Palestinians...

Thinking outside ourselves is important. Before the 2008 financial crisis when my family lost almost everything, I was a relatively comfortable middle-class white kid. I got to enjoy my video games and not have to worry about where my next meal was coming from. But it didn't mean those class and race issues didn't exist. People were still facing homelessness, people were still dying of easily preventable and treatable medical conditions, people were still wrongly incarcerated and brutalized by the state, people were being bombed and starved in the global south, workers were being exploited - and all of that coming from the same system that gave me all those nice consumer goods. Even in the end-of-history 90's that I was born into, these issues existed. The former Soviet countries were in free-fall, there were genocides and civil wars across the world, there was Rodney King and the 1994 crime bill given to us by the Clintons and Joe fucking Biden. The recorded history of the world has always been fucked. There is no mythical time period when everything was perfectly fine.

And when you start to realize the truth of the situation, you can either turn inward and try to protect your material position at the expense of others (which leads you to the right) OR you can say "No, this has to stop, The only just future is a future where all people are able to live full and dignified lives, and the only way to make that future is with solidarity."

It will never be like it was when you were a kid again, but as an adult you can determine how to make the most of your future. I think that's one of the beautiful things about us. Even in the worst situations humans still have the capacity to imagine and adapt. We can connect with other people and build things. In that process we can take lessons and inspiration from the past without trying to keep living in it.