Pretzel

 The cranes that tower over the city are festooned with red and green lights for Christmas. They glow through the mist as I head to work early in the morning. More glass towers are being constructed, though all the existing ones are half empty. The banks and the developers don't care; it's just another scam in a country whose entire history is an exhaustive encyclopedia of scams. Meanwhile, though the cracks in society that started to appear decades ago are spreading, crazing out in all directions, the people who live and work in those towers still feel secure. Their wealth will protect them when things really start to crumble. Who are these people? I don't know, I never see them. I don't hang out in the places they hang out, don't shop at the stores they shop at. They ride the elevators from their condos to the underground garages and drive past the encampments which line the bases of the buildings, speeding out of the city on their way to spend their leisure time in the mountains, the woods, the beach. Wine country. They remain hidden from those of us who spend our days wandering around the streets which are being transformed into a generic house of mirrors.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how things got this way, but the opacity of the systems which run our country shields them from scrutiny. It's difficult to effectively critique something you don't  understand. I can see fragments of the story, but it's hard to fit them together into a coherent narrative. This is one reason interest in conspiracy theories is more intense than it's ever been; I'm not the only one who feels baffled by the world around me. Plenty of  people are struggling to make sense of issues which remain calculatedly obscured. The people (mostly men) running things know that if we really understood the con, we would revolt. Or maybe not. It's hard to get people to rise up, as long as they remain reasonably comfortable -and as bad as things are here, all you have to do is look at footage of a war-ravaged country like Syria to realize how much worse things can get. But we are kept distracted, we are kept docile, and years of cynicism and failure have made it difficult to believe that real change is even possible.

As a result of all this, many Americans have given up on democracy and are eager to embrace a fascist regime, which is ironic considering how much they gripe about being told what to do. I realize they're just lashing out, that there's no rational thought behind their actions. The far right politicians, seeing that their party has become increasingly unpopular and out of touch, resort to rigging elections and changing the laws in order to cling to power. Their constituents are encouraged to vent their frustrations on various manufactured enemies, such as immigrants, or "Hollywood elites;" in a wildly successful attempt to direct their rage away from their own leaders, the people actually pulling the strings. In the meantime, the politicians on the left express concern but claim that their hands are tied.

It's hard not to feel powerless in the face of so much dysfunction and hypocracy, especially when the threat of climate change is no longer an abstract, distant worry. Even the most adamant deniers must know, deep down, that life on this planet is about to become a lot more challenging. I really think they're as terrified as the rest of us, but instead of accepting that we have to make big changes and sacrifices to try to slow down the apocalypse, they double down, grabbing as much loot they can and clinging to it. Billionaires make crackpot plans to escape to outer space, or slip into other realities. When I think of all the good things their money could accomplish, I feel sick with rage. And yet, I'm not rebelling, I'm not risking my life to fight the establishment. Unhappy as I am, I'm still not willing to risk what delicate stability I've managed to achieve.

So the cranes above the city are all festively lit, and so is the tree in the center of town, a majestic Douglas fir chopped down and sawed apart and reassembled in Pioneer Courthouse Square, though hardly anyone comes down here to shop. Most of the retail businesses went belly up long ago, or fled in the quest for cheaper rent. The few that remain hang on despite people's disgust at the rows upon rows of tents that line the sidewalks. They say they're afraid of crime, but they're mostly just afraid of being reminded of just how precarious our lives are, afraid of that glimpse of how much worse things can always get. I don't do much to celebrate the holidays, but I did put my little dollar store tree up this year. On a prominent branch I hang my favorite ornament: a very realistic pretzel, complete with big crumbs of ersatz salt, made by a departed friend. There are way too many ornaments for such a flimsy tree, and the whole thing looks like it's about to topple over, but I feel the need to pile them all on. In these dark times I'll take any bit of brightness I can get.