Pen Sunday | Disturbed & Alarmed

Sunday, July 14th, 2024

Jul 15, 2024

Sunday Feature…………………Donald Trump assassination attempt & the internet’s response

Sunday Songs……………………..ANOTR, Barry Can’t Swim, Chance

Sunday Headlines…………………Thomas Matthew Cooks

Last Thoughts…………………………Writing Plane update

P.S ……………………………………….Four sitting presidents have been killed: Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth), James A. Garfield (1881, by Charles J. Guiteau), William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz), and John F. Kennedy (1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald).

Disturbed & Alarmed

Donald Trump was almost assassinated this weekend. It was the first attempted presidential assassination in my lifetime.

They say history repeats itself, and if that’s true then I’d argue we’re re-living the 60’s in the modern era. 1960’s America was a pivotal time in the nation’s history. A quick Google Search with Gemini tells us —

“The [1960s] was a time of economic boom, cultural shifts, and social change:

Economy
The 1960s saw a post-war economic boom with low unemployment, rapid GDP growth, and tax cuts. The workforce grew by about 33% between 1961 and 1969, and more Americans joined the middle class. Automation also led to economic transformation.
Culture
The 1960s saw the emergence of counterculture and the civil rights movement. People fought against social injustices like racism and poverty through protests, marches, and sit-ins. African Americans fought segregation, poverty, and unemployment, while feminists demanded equal job opportunities. Mexican Americans protested discrimination in voting, education, and employment, and Native Americans demanded the government recognize their land claims. Environmentalists also called for legislation to control pollution.
Politics
The 1960s saw controversial political and military involvement, including the Vietnam War, which ended in failure. The government's questionable involvement in the war and its inability to manage domestic unrest led to widespread political disillusionment.

What else happened in the 1960's, was the assassination of JFK, on November 22, 1963. If you’re Gen Z like me, this is the era most of our grandparents were growing up.

It’s easy to find parallels between the 60s and now. Except for the economic boom, (maybe we dub the 2020’s the anti-boom), we’ve had the Black Lives Matter protest, Roe v. Wade overturned, the war in Ukraine, and the slew of other social-political challenges that await us in the final five years of the decade.

The final line in the politics bullet point states that the government’s inability to manage domestic unrest led to widespread political disillusionment. The people are disillusioned alright. Disinformation and political failures have left people hoping for something a lot better than what we have. After the presidential debate a few weeks ago, was anyone left feeling inspired on either side?

How proud are we to be Americans today? At this exact moment?

Minutes after Trump was shot, my IG timeline was flooded with memes about the attempt. Specifically, from one of my favorite profiles to follow, APlasticPlant.

In the following day, everything from Many Men comparisons to Trump’s raised fist in the air with a parental-advisory warning label at the bottom has been splattered across the internet. I’m disgusted & alarmed by that.

I’m 26. I’ve lived enough to see the old “Boys will be boys” be replaced and reverberated in real time to “the internet will be the internet” and with that said, I know I shouldn’t expect any better, but I can’t help myself.

If I asked the average American if the worst thing they’ve ever seen has been on the internet, or in their real life, I’d argue majority of them would say the internet.

Every day, everything from car crashes to shootings, stabbings, fights, explosions, terror & trauma, comes across the timeline. Sometimes seen by accident other times encouraged by people’s morbid curiosity. For example, r/NarcoFootage has 330,890 followers, and r/NSFL (not safe for life) has 428,000 followers.

Take that, then combine it with our favorite sports teams, photos of friends and family, art, animals, books, music, memes, gifs, and porn, mashed together in a series of endless scrolls, and it’s easy to traumatize yourself on accident and become desensitized to every experience and real-life moment, on purpose.

I, like most people my age, have seen some shit on the internet. Some of it good, most of it bad, a small percentage of it something I wish I hadn’t come across, and the rest of it, somewhere in the middle of — “Why am I even looking at this? Do I really care? No.” Scroll, scroll, scroll…”

Bang!

A clip of Donald Trump getting shot at. An event that will (has already) altered US political history forever. Something that hasn’t happened on US soil in 61 years, to one of the most important political figures in the history of the United States, and a scroll later it’s thrown in with all the other shit.

Meme-ified.

Translated through the internet in a way we can react to it. Laugh. Get our jokes off. Think that it’s hard he survived. Because now we have content and we need to make the content videos to get paid to eat and make money for our brands.

I get it. The game is the game. But I have to ask…

What the fuck is going on?

Are we really like this? Is this really who we are?

It’s gross. Slimey. Concerning.

Can we get the jokes off because he survived? Or do the memes come out if he dies too? He got grazed with a bullet and 25 seconds later discussion started about how it boosted his campaign.

I don’t even like Donald Trump. I don’t want him to be president. He shouldn’t be president.

Does that mean I want to see him get shot in the head in public on live TV, in front of a crowd of people?

I learned the answer to that is no.

A question I’m always asking myself is “Has it always been like this?” Because it never feels like it has. But then you ask anyone who lived through it before and they shrug and nod and say “Pretty much, yeah.”

SUNDAY SONGS

My house music phase came back this week. I’m listening to more Spanish music, and trying to get the language back, and I’ve been doing a lot of pullups in the gym. These are all good songs for those genres of activities.

I also threw in Juice because I thought Chance didn’t have it cleared on Spotify, but it came up on my shuffle this weekend so apparently that was wrong.

Classic song by the way. Reminds me of high school.

Closing out with Made from Sand, because it’s the first rap that’s caught my ear in a minute.