It's been a year, hasn't it?

It's said 2022 was "2020, too", and that feels about right. At the beginning of this year -- it feels so long ago --  the capital of my country was overrun by thousands of moronic automatons who fancied themselves freedom fighters. Their enemy wasn't the virus. No, for reasons I still don't pretend to understand, they were dead set against anyone who took the virus seriously. The virus which has killed at least fifty thousand Canadians.

I want to stress this point. The measures we took -- the lockdowns, the masking, the social distancing, even as haphazard as it all was at times -- those measures meant that per capita, one sixth as many Canadians as Americans died with covid. So when people protested those measures, what they were agitating for was six times as many deaths.

If people held up signs demanding a quarter of a million people should be killed, you would rightfully call them insane and lock them up. We let them loiter and lollygag around Ottawa for a month before we did anything, and when we finally did something, it was akin to picking up eight thousand cats by the scruffs of their necks and gently setting them down elsewhere. No meaningful punishment. Me, I would have exiled the fuckers. Every last one of them. But no, they're planning freedumb convoy 2.0 for Winnipeg in February. Two things with that: one, Winnipeg in February?!?! Even more proof these people are crazy. Two, what the hell are they protesting this time?

We know the answer to 2), as it happens. The clue was in all those signs the first time yearning to have sex with Justin Trudeau. These people are QAnon North: they believe Liberal governments and perhaps Liberal voters are invalid. And there are thousands and thousands of them, all championed by the Conservatives and their "leader", Pierre Poilevre. I will not write any further about that man: I'd like to keep the contents of my stomach where they are, thanks. Gag.

Trudeau managed to defuse Ottawa with an absolute minimum of cracked skulls (as in, zero). I regained a fair bit of lost respect for him over this. But I didn't have time to catch my breath before we were faced with something I thought had been left in the glittery eighties: the threat of nuclear war.

It was inevitable Russia would invade Ukraine. Any student of geopolitics would say the same and any student of recent Russian history would say it much louder. The response, however, was unexpected.

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I'm a big Stephen King fan. Have been since tweenhood. There are two things King makes clear about the evil in his stories: one, the real monsters are human; two, evil usually fails, either through stupidity, overconfidence, or both. In THE SHINING, the Overlook Hotel is indeed haunted, but without a deeply flawed alcoholic father and husband to drive insane, its haunts are just scary pictures in a book. Danny Torrance is the prize the hotel will stop at nothing to win; Jack kills himself to deny that outcome. The villain in THE STAND sees his best-laid plans fall through time after time, thanks to people acting in ways he can't foresee or understand.  Similar lessons are to be found throughout King's output: evil can and must be fought, but it helps that it fights itself....and sometimes takes itself out.

 This holds true in spades for 2022. This year has been a series of case studies: villain after villain being thwarted by his own stupidity and/or unintended consequences. None more so than one Vladimir Putin, the big bad Russian bear. His unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine has, um, not gone according to plan. I mean, it was supposed to be over in three days. It's been more than three hundred, and Russia is losing.

I am in awe of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Absolute awe. You'd never know he was deeply unpopular and politically living on borrowed time when Putin invaded his country. Overnight, he transformed into the very essence of a wartime leader, highly worthy of respect and admiration. Putin didn't expect that. 

Putin also didn't expect the West's retaliation. We'd shrugged our shoulders in 2014 when he annexed the Crimea (that was a mistake); this time, to put it mildly, we put our foot down. Economically, with wide and deep sanctions (which didn't seem to work for a while, until they did), but more importantly militarily.  Joe Biden has done an absolutely masterful job uniting much of the western world against Russia, and Putin didn't expect that either. Hell, Putin didn't expect to have to deal with Biden at all. He bought someone else in 2016 and was expecting more of a return on that investment.

The guy he bought is still bubbling away, like swamp gas. That's nice, dear. In a turn of events I can't say I was expecting, the Orange Julius has been...almost...muted? The media doesn't hang on his every fetid exhalation anymore, and lo and behold that was his own undoing. Was it the dinner with the white supremacist? Threatening to ditch the Constitution, the very document Presidents are sworn to defend? It was surely partly Dobbs overturning Roe. Overreach. It'll bite you in the buttock every time, and Republicans have a big chunk out of their cheek. 

Villains gloating and then glouting. Liz "Lettuce" Truss and her Chancellor of the Exchequer (that's a finance minister to us non-Brits), Kwasi Kwarteng. They couldn't have tanked that government any harder or faster if they....you almost have to wonder if they tried. Here's  a little irony, it's good for the blood: the free hand of the market they both so idolize reached up and bitch-slapped them right quick. 

This was the year Elon Musk tried to illustrate how much public good a billionaire could do by...oh, never mind. His Twitter tenure has been by turns comical and infuriating, and he's lost well over a hundred billion in net worth in 2022. (Still worth $145.7 billion as of this writing...c'mon, everyone, try harder!)

Musk has decided, in the manner of the misbegotten mango before him, that financial laws like severance and obligations like rent don't apply to people as rich as he is. I feel a shift in the zeitgeist that I think Elon missed: people are less inclined to put up with "rules for thee but not for me" in the wake of three years of blatant hypocrisy. Remember the forbidden covid parties that political leaders across the spectrum from Trudeau to BoJo and DoFo sneeringly attended? Remember how your chances of contracting covid-19 skyrocketed if you attempted to buy something from a company that didn't donate to Doug Ford's Conservatives? The world has been absolutely teeming with two-faced tomfoolery and its consequences are coming home to roost. 

Chris Rock told a mean joke and received instant karma. Will Smith slapped Rock and received near-instant karma himself: a ten year ban from attending the Oscars. Two rich men behaving badly and paying for it. 

Just this week a former kickboxer/current incel god Andrew Tate unwittingly doxxed himself with a pizza box. The ol' box-dox, ya gotta love it. He, too, clearly didn't think his actions through. Just had to taunt a teenage woman. It's pathetic...and I haven't felt so much vicious schadenfreude in years. Well, boy howdy, if it ain't the consequences of my actions, come to pay me a visit.

Part of me relishes a rules-based orderly universe as a hedge against the chaotic and quite frankly rude universe we actually find ourselves in. I have always believed irrationally strongly that actions must have consequences and those consequences should be considered. Over the past several years I have watched with dismay, at times almost a species of dull panic, as meaningful consequences eluded people who richly deserved them. What a relief to find in 2022 that the idea of cause and effect isn't completely broken.

Let's keep this up going forward into 2023. Let's ensure actions have consequences. Let's ensure we understand what, exactly, it is we are fighting. It has several tendrils.

Southwest Airlines is an excellent example of one of those tendrils: shareholders über alles. I mean, that's been SOP at almost every corporation for years -- customers? Employees? Fuck 'em -- and sooner or later the cows were a-gonna come home. Really, it's easier to list the companies that AREN'T being destroyed in the name of profit, if you can find them. And even things that aren't corporations soon will be, if our esteemed (?) Premier gets his way. Have you seen what's left of our health care system lately?

What is our response?

Another tendril has already been mentioned: people so poor that all they have is money, thinking rules and laws don't apply to them (and largely, for many years now, being proven correct). This is how rapscallions like T---- get to be admired: they don't bother with the pretending. They break norms, rules and laws right out where you can see it, then they boast about it. You get too much corruption and authoritarians shamble out of the shadows. It happened to the Roman Republic; it's currently well underway in the modern western  world.

What is our response?

If I'm correct, 2023 will be the year the climate emergency becomes unignorable, which means it will kill a number of white people. It's all too easy to see conservatives the world over suddenly embrace climate change and shut off the lights and heat to Black neighbourhoods. It's not as if they've bothered to fix the water in Jackson, MI -- or on any number of reservations in Canada, lest you think this country blameless. Funny how there always seems to be money to shove oil pipelines through indigenous land, but never money to get drinkable water to indigenous land.

What is our response? 

The world is changing, both slowly and quickly. A new world is emerging, and we can make it our world again if we only try. Let's re-solve that, for 2023.

Happy New Year, one and all.