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Article Summary and/or Excerpt:
We live at a time in which apocalyptic visions have become normalized. Slow-motion catastrophes unfold as the planet experiences massive floods, storms, droughts, toxic air, poisonous water, wildfires, dust storms and other tragic disasters. The railroad disaster and massive toxic explosion in eastern Ohio is just the latest example. In the political realm, fast-moving crises portend nuclear war, ecological devastation and the rise of fascism across the globe.
Creeping calamities have become routine. They are matched only by a civic culture that is under siege by the apostles of neoliberalism promoting privatization, consumerism, anti-intellectualism and a brutal market ideology purposefully bereft of any sense of social responsibility. Americans now live in an age when historical consciousness no longer functions to inform the present and has become the target of white supremacists and a far-right Republican Party that is silent about the dark past that informs its authoritarian politics. As the violent terrors of the past tear into the present, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his political allies enact school policies that freeze history in an ideological straitjacket, claiming they are liberating history when in fact they are denying it.
America is becoming a country that can no longer question itself, invest in the public good or imagine a future beyond the dreamscapes of the rich and ruling elite. Apocalyptic fears, uncertainties and anxieties feed a rising tsunami of violence that has become the organizing principle of governance, everyday life and society itself. American society is caught in the daily routines of lies, corruption and manufactured ignorance; one consequence is the withering of individual and social agency along with civic culture and the public imagination. American optimism has turned bleak. In the age of gangster capitalism, people lose their interconnections, community and sense of security. Isolation and anxiety gives way to mass depression and is ripe for expressions of rage and hatred. The guard rails of justice, compassion, the welfare state, politics, democratic values and the institutions that nourish them are under threat of disappearing. Apocalyptic terrors have moved from the realm of fiction into the social fabric of everyday life.