Heirs to the Wreckage

I debated naming this blog “The Political Jungle”, which references a high school blog I was involved with as an assignment. Sadly my group and I never took it past a school project, but I found the exercise of writing in it liberating, and I’ve paid it a small homage in this first title. The purpose of this new blog is to serve as a sort of therapy for me. Every single day, I find myself on the internet seeing more headlines than I can keep track of, and each one seems to mark another shift in the global status quo. And then it gets worse. I find myself on Threads, Reddit, YouTube, and I see the signs of a vile culture war where every sides stubbornly insists on its own narrative. The pendulum never shifts, it only oscillates between toxic A and toxic B.

To be Gen Z in 2025 is to be subject to rampant disinformation, to live under the looming threat of climate change, to be dispossessed or to spectate people being dispossessed, and to constantly have the truth distorted. For me, the experience has been one long circus of rushed decisions and debates. Study for this test, get this thing on your resume, swallow your revulsion and network, make sure you don’t overstep political correctness. And this is privileged compared to what many in the world experience, but not a day goes by that I don’t feel some sense of insecurity despite having lived a relatively safe life. How can we just sit in our own lives worrying about our circumstances, grinding for that job that’ll supposedly secure our freedoms for us, when some of the problems we face threaten generational fuckery? And at the same time, it isn’t practical nor psychologically sustainable to try and live life on the scale of those issues.

Please don’t mistake this for pessimism. This is my view of the world, but there’s joy to be found in it. There’s joy in finding answers, in growing up, in meeting people, and in satire. Satire is an incredible tool for deconstructing things. I’ve known two types of people who will make a “racist joke”. The first type will hold full-on racist beliefs, and the joke is offensive or uncomfortable. On the other hand, I have met people who within the joke can satirize racist beliefs, as opposed to expressing them. Conceptually, racism is darkly and tragically ridiculous, the things we say about people, what we do to people, how we flee hysterically from a person for being different. That can become satire, because it’s not a race joke but a joke about racism itself. I would love to be in the 2nd category, but I don’t fully have the comedic awareness, so I wisely refrain from trying at all. Alternatively, one runs the risk of referencing racial traumas that are simply too painful or visceral to satirize.

So what is this blog? And what can I tell you about myself? Broadly this is a place to reflect on, disseminate, and discuss politics and culture. I want to probe certain questions, such as: why is genocide suddenly justifiable in the name of protecting a western status quo? Is that job (as I mentioned above) really worth pursuing, should we accept their normative definition of success? There’s no real agenda beyond things I personally find interesting or worth talking about. On the admittedly slim hope that this attracts readers, I also want to see what other people believe. Comment, challenge me if you disagree with something I say. If you feel you have something to express that is taboo, or unaccepted in your social sphere, jot it here. I want complete, open, unadulterated conversation. My only condition, of course, is that you express your views respectfully- with curiosity and openness.

I would largely describe myself as left-leaning, but this does not mean I champion all “left-leaning” positions. I’m American, and this means a lot of my posts will be centered around the US since it’s what’s familiar to me- I’m happy to go beyond this. I studied political economy but my interests also include pop culture, movies/games/books, politics, and critical theory. I’m quite new to the last one, having just started reading my first book. I was always awed and even a bit jealous of philosophy majors during undergrad, they had such artistic explanations for everything. I’m not an expert on anything I plan to discuss, and certainly will never claim to be. All I have are my opinions, and those are contestable. Again I consider this a sort of therapy for myself, writing for an other helps me understand and structure my own thoughts. However, I also have the hope that I’ll be exposed to the ideas of other people, and other dialogues. Anyways, that’s it for today, I enjoyed the rant.

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