Summing up the Mood

I was reading a not terribly interesting essay about art and politics, when I stumbled across this:

The political situation is dire. Nothing really feels important right now unless it somehow connects to that situation.

Here, I thought, is the perfect statement of why liberals in particular can't stop repeating the same frantic screeds about Trump over and over again.

Hey, I'm interested in politics; I read about it every day, and write about it four or five times a week. But I have never thought that it is the most important thing, and I certainly don't think the election of Trump is the most important thing to happen lately. Trump is a symptom of our problems, not in himself a cause of anything. (Unless he starts a nuclear war, but I'm still betting he won't.)

We have much bigger problems than Trump: economic problems, drug problems; bitter social divisions, rusting bridges and crumbling roads, millions of people suffering from crippling anxiety and depression; large sections of our society feel completely divorced from the nation as a whole. We also have vast energy and creativity: technical miracles on every hand, astonishing science, a madly various effervescence of art and music, thriving subcultures of a thousand sorts, ten thousand schemes for making the world better. All of this matters more than Trump.