Front Porch Chats #21\Second Pint LFB

100 degrees today and I’m outside drinking a kolsch from Occidental, because that is the only acceptable outside thing to do right now. I should be inside. This is insane.

The kolsch has a bit of sourdough in the nose, while the beer itself has almost enough malt to it for me to think that there’s something there. The effervescence is steady but I’m pleased to say that even after the bubbly is gone, there is a hint of graininess, giving this beer just a little more heft.

I keep thinking about a clip I saw of The Nightly Show, just before it went off the air in 2016. One of the panelists said, of Trump getting elected, “The toilets will still work.”

When questioned on that, he said, “Look, all I know is, I press the handle and my poop goes away.”

This was meant to be comforting, a notion about how the fundamental structures that support us in America will still stand.

The USPS is being dismantled from within.

Even as someone who said to anyone who would listen that Trump’s goals were to make government as dysfunctional as possible and rape the treasury, I honestly could not have seen this level of malfeasance. I figured that I’d still be able to press the handle and the poop would go away.

Of the many lessons I’ve been learning over the past three years, it is that the structures that we rest our lives on don’t exist independently of us. We rely on them and when they work, we no longer notice them. When they fail, things like the tragedy in Beirut happen.

But Beirut didn’t just happen. There were warnings for five years about the dangers of something going wrong. Those warnings didn’t get resolved because of political reasons-a dysfunctional governance that figured it could kick the can down to the next guy.

One day, you are the next guy. The people who were certain that governance was the worst possible answer to your problems have dismantled your ability to actually solve the problems you have.

And no one is coming to fix them because the basic structures that would’ve supported action are eroded or gone.

We are being governed by people who want to take apart any system that might impede their ability to fuck over poor people.

The institutions cannot withstand such assaults.

We have to stand up for them, for each other.

Today’s second pint goes to the Lebanese Food Bank.