I’m not going to lie, the current state of politics and the country sicken me every day.  For a while there, it almost looked like the country was doing great things.  Now every time I read the news I feel like I’ve slipped into some kind of alternate reality where everything just went completely wrong.

Today at work the white male middle-class Trump supporters were giddy with excitement about the handicapped kid who got beat up by a group of black kids.  Giddy.  Because it gave them this weird righteous validation that, as middle-class white males the world was, in fact, out to get them, and that they were justified in the whole “reverse-racism” thing.

Not once did anybody talk about the kid who got beat up as an actual entity, only a pawn in the grand scheme of things.  And then, to boot, they threw out the whole “well why do we always have to talk about color, and labels and stuff.  Why does it always have to be about people’s race, or transgender stuff, or…”  I put my headphones in and cranked the volume when I heard “If it was white kids that beat up a black kid, Chicago would’ve been burned to the ground by now.”

Oops, your racist is showing.

How did we get here?  How are we still here?
Did this all happen when I started reading Murakami?  Am I somehow in IQ2017?