Sep 7, Year 1 of Publication
Someone came to me, my dear fellows, claiming that I believe that we live in a utopia since the rise of the Swingers in government. Let me assure you that this is not true.
However, so that this perception does not persist, I thought it prudent to take this opportunity to explain some of the reasons I don't believe we've solved all our problems, nor even the major ones.
We still deal with corruption in government, ugliness on social media, retaliatory tariffs, planned obsolescence, and slave conditions in our food industry, among other problems both individual and societal.
You might think, my dear fellows, that our government is the best it has ever been, but you'd be wrong. Sure, we've repaired a lot of bad laws, and our Congress is on the point of passing the Single-Title doctrine into law, but lobbyists still do everything they can to try to slip graft through the loopholes in the ethics rules, and some people can still be bought. And even without outside influence, a few representatives have pet projects they're on track to make happen with little visible gain to the country as a whole.
We once had a president who said that in any future age, there would be just as many good men and bad men, smart men and dumb. We've certainly found that to be true even under the Swingers.
This factor influences not just government but also social media. There continue to be trolls and haters on the platforms that allow anonymity. It has gotten a lot better than it was in the Twenties, when people could still get away with hating people for attributes beyond their choices, just because of how they looked or where they were born, without social repercussions. But there are still some people online who are so unhappy that they consider making others unhappy an attractive goal. Our actuan tendencies to apply appropriate scorn and mockery of mockers has cleaned it a bit, as I say, but we still see more ugliness online than reason dictates should exist.
And there's still a large tendency for people to post falsehoods, or give credibility to things that a little research can disprove. Some of this is driven by greed and a desire to get rich quickly, but the problem goes beyond that. A lot of it comes down to laziness: we'd rather believe something as we saw it than look for a second to check the facts.
Greed and laziness are behind the slave conditions in our food industry facilities, too. We've made zero progress, forward or backward, on this problem since '26, because we are lazy and greedy. This is the main reason for outbreaks of diseases found in human waste among vegans. It's like we're cursing ourselves, though only the witchy folk and the people of the Book believe in curses.
Greed and laziness are also behind the shoddy workmanship we see in so many products on the market. And this makes it more justifiable that other countries are imposing retaliatory tariffs on us.
Not all, though. Some of it is just reasons that have nothing to do with us, and some of it is because the Saud of Oxford hates us for the religious collapse of '33. Whatever the reasons, no one denies that our foreign relations are precarious.
The trend of shoddy workmanship hit its peak in the late Twenties, but we still have a long way to go before we can confidently buy something and expect it to last long enough to hand down to someone else. Do everything you can, my dear fellows, to encourage good craftsmanship.
This should suffice to show you that we do not live in a utopia, whatever gains we have made toward solving societal problems. There's still a lot of work we could do to be better, as a people. Let's continue to push for better living through better choices.