Don’t Get Caught
We Had A Good Run
Well, we had a good run. It feels weird to say, but it’s finally election season again, and we’re in for a wild ride.
As Democrats (and Republican primary challengers?) clamber to win our hearts and minds, it really is hard to say which issues will dominate the election. This administration has undermined American national security and divested from education. It has thrown tenuous progress on healthcare into disarray. It has effected self-defeating economic programs. It’s environmental policies are, just, wow. (Even Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act for chrissake.)
This administration has taken a humanitarian crisis and created a human rights atrocity. It has assailed a free press, the Constitution, and civil liberties at every turn – it’s worth mentioning that this extends far beyond the old leftist tropes of “human rights” and stuff: Donald Trump is on the record saying “take the guns first, go through due process second,” which is incredible, really. Somehow he is still endorsed by the NRA.
And so if you caught the brimming Democratic debates last week, it should not have surprised you to hear a lot of ideas on how to fix this stuff. We heard a few different takes on healthcare. We heard about our rapidly warming climate. We heard about campaign finance, and identity politics, and a Universal Basic Income to combat wealth inequality. This is all really important, but there is something missing from the Democratic field: foreign policy chops.
In fact, the conversation was so focused on stinting damage domestically that we never looked abroad. The only mention, really, came from Marianne Williamson (who I’m pretty sure is only up there to sell books), when she rightly suggested that any humanitarian crisis on the southern border is a direct result of American foreign policy in Latin America over the last century.
In two years we’ve burned allies, insulted neighbors, praised journalist-murdering dictators, and torpedoed decades of hard-fought diplomacy. Career diplomats have left the State Department out of moral conviction. Right now a handbag designer is leading our efforts in the Korean Peninsula.
The damage done by this administration to American credibility abroad cannot be fixed in a single presidential term, even with a diplomatic genius at the helm, and we don’t have a diplomatic genius in the field. Best case scenario, we are probably looking at another decade of foreign policy floundering as the next administration struggles to right a disastrous four years at home and abroad. Maybe then we can begin to rebuild trust around the world that the United States will at least pretend to support democratic values and strong partnerships.
What this means, really, is that we’ve had a good run on top. We have now burned through all of our international goodwill (from defeating the Nazis, remember) by electing a Nazi sympathizer and allowing him to run this place into the ground. This administration is the beginning of the end of the United States’ global status as a diplomatic leader.
And, I mean, that’s a bummer. But it’s also probably not the end of the world. The Roman Empire fell, and Italy is fine, right? Like many colonial powers before us, it’s just our turn to step down now. Like Portugal. And Holland. And Belgium.
Like, Belgium had a good run, you know? They had their part in the rape and pillage of Africa and then kind of bowed out. As far as I can tell, Belgians now pretty much watch sports and smoke cigarettes and drink a lot of beer. Local beer, even. That place has, like, a lot of different beers. It’s great. And the UN is still based in Brussels – it’s not like it’s all over for them, the same way that New York will probably still be a global financial hub for the foreseeable future. People just won’t ask us for our opinions as much, you know?
And it’s kind of cool, in an historic way, to watch the fall of a great civilization. Can you imagine being there when Nero burned Rome? Now you can! So screw it. I’m going to go have a cigarette and a beer, I hear there’s a football game on.
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Trail Etiquette
If you get out and enjoy public land, hunting, fishing, using trails, or whatever, you’ve probably had an overwhelmingly positive experience. America’s public land legacy really is one of the best things about this country, and against a backdrop of an emerging police state that keeps stolen children in cages, it stands out even more.
Foreign and domestic policy in this country is quickly fitting the dictionary definition of “blowing it,” but somehow public land protections are emerging as a silver lining of bipartisan progress. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would never say that we’re not blowing it. Our climate “policies” are the least funny jokes outside of an Adam Sandler movie. This Administration’s forestry and energy directives seem to be convinced that the year is 1884. And there is an ongoing, and increasing threat of privatization of America’s west.
But at the same time we just permanently reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is our strongest conservation tool. We’ve passed large scale conservation and public access bills nationally. And public lands have emerged as a unifying issue for the left and the right. Hunters and hippies, united at last.
It turns out people love to go outside, and will actually vote about it when you tell them they can’t. This is great. Outside is where we go to recharge our batteries, and have fun, and be alone for a while. Outside is important, and it’s worth going to the mats for.
Of course if everyone is outside, at some point they’re going to have to see one another, even though sometimes the whole point is not to see anyone at all. When this happens, you would be forgiven for thinking that folks who see other folks doing pretty much the same thing with their disposable time would more or less get along. And oh boy would you be wrong.
It turns out that even though spending time on public land is the great common denominator of the American West, we can still spend our entire lives fighting about it. Complaining about trail use and etiquette is now the most popular use of public land in four states*, if you can believe that.
And there are a lot of schools of thought behind how to deal with this. Some merry bands of misanthropes would modestly propose that if we would all simply recreate the exact same way that they recreate, then everything would be fine. Others prefer a rigid, bureaucratic flow chart for each trail user to keep in their pockets and reference when encountering another user.
I would like to propose a third way, wherein we recognize that we are different, and all just try to be nicer to each other**.
The reality as that most anxiety around public land and recreation management is rooted in narcissism. Consider your own behavior. When you’re out on the trails, do you expect that you won’t see anyone else (looking at you, headphones people)? Do you feel like the way you enjoy outside is more pure, more rooted in heritage, or somehow better than another way of enjoying outside? Do you define the best use of a place in terms of your own experiences? Think about that.
I mean, I don’t like seeing people out there either. That’s a big part of going out there. To be alone. To be small. To be shocked from our daily status quo of bustling, and competing with the Joneses, or whatever. But the whole point of wide open spaces is to remind ourselves that not everything is about us. In the era of Strava, and Instagram, and self-righteous letters to the editor, that is easy to lose.
So get out there. Have fun. Try not to be a dickhead. And let’s build a tradition of trail etiquette from there.
*this is a made up fact.
** this may also work in other places, such as when driving, talking to customer service employees, and on the internet
