Increasingly realizing my utility, in a political sense, is I’m still young enough to keep in touch with things but old enough to retain sone sense of the last social cycle.

Like, I saw NYC before Giuliani. I was in SF looking at colleges and it was full of street people, but then moving out west in I guess the second, 2000s tech bubble, it wasn’t.

The young generation has this hagiographic sense of the civil rights era and the integration of cities – which was exactly what conservatives were worried about with MLK Day – o, how anything is justified in its name, o how unthinkably terrible that government would do anything to resist it. And by the way why doesn’t everybody live in a city?

And I saw the wreckage of Camden, and the lines of horseback cops and water cannon tanks Philly kept to avoid going that far down, and I lived among the white-flight families who had maybe even been positive towards liberalism and racial integration until they had the experience of their city being occupied by a hostile, violent, teeming mass that could not be usefully reached as individuals in enough scale before they tore the city apart, while being supported by the government that claimed to reign in their name.

We’ve had a fairly peaceful interregnum since the ‘90s, and especially given how people tend towards historical understanding by projecting an eternal present back in time, we might have lost a sense of how this stuff works. This is why I spent the early 2010s worried that the counterforces weren’t kicking in yet but confident that once they did the channels were already worn in and they would kick hard.