Don't Like - The Constant State Of Emergency

There’s a logic in the world that everything has to happen right away because we’re in a constant state of emergency. This logic is deployed all the time for most banal things like work assignments, online shopping, text communication, you name it. It’s a deep reflection of the hyper-connectivity of our times. When urgency gets replaced with a sense of emergency, the stakes ought to get more serious. However, if that happens over and over and over again, emergency becomes the baseline, which by definition means it’s no longer an emergency. Instead, it’s just a constantly rushed clusterfuck. There’s been no better proof of this than the first eight months of Donald Trump’s second term as president in which he has justified many of his largest actions from his tariffs to using the national guard as police. He does this for two reasons. The first is that in his mind everything that isn’t the way he wants it to be is an emergency. The second is that the executive branch is at its most powerful when invoking emergency authority. This is supposed to be reserved for extreme cases like a massive natural disaster or an attack by a foreign power. But there have been no such emergencies. Instead, we’ve gotten a severe realignment of the federal government to meet the whims of a fickle man. That’s not to understate what’s happening right now. But rather, I suspect that some point all of these hair brained schemes justified under shoddy pretexts will collapse—or maybe just society will.