PSA: If you joined DU between 2001 and mid-2003, you now have a proper join date

[ForrestGump]

51. Been a few changes around here

I just noticed the start date on my profile when I logged in for the first time since I-don't-know-when. I thought I joined earlier than 2003, but it's been so many years now that I have no real idea. I don't know when was the last time I logged on, but it must've been years rather than months and I don't think I've been active here in over a decade.

So many changes in that time. In my life and in the lives of people I know, of course -- lost touch with the cohort of people I knew here on DU (an abusive ex-fiancee who sent every female I've ever known in my life, almost all 100% platonically, breakup letters on my unknowing behalf didn't help, and I think she zapped most of the people I knew on DU) -- but certainly huge changes in the tech of this whole Internet thing and, most definitely, the political and social sides of things.

Back in the years of the Cheney junta it would have been impossible to imagine that we might one day look back upon those days as, if not quite exactly the Good Old Days, at least marginally better. To be vaguely noaztgic for 'W' is just a very weird feeling, and certain;y a potent indicator of just how badly things unraveled in the past few years. At least Cheney and the Neocon Horde knew the rules of the game, even if they flagrantly broke them in broad daylight; at the very least, as much as I despised all of them, including Junior, they now represent a case of "it could have been worse." To me, though, that was still pretty much the end of the US, in some meaningful ways, a process set in motion in earnest during Reagan but arguably going back to at least the killing of JFK and probably 30 years or more before that, in some ways.

President Obama fought a valiant rearguard action, against horrendous obstruction from a hostile Republican Congress, but was essentially doing well just to tread water and ameliorate what damage he could and then the American electorate (almost predictably, at this point) voted in the obviously inept and unsuited Trump and his bunch of pirates, the mopping-up operation following on from Cheney and indulging in even more rampant and blatant criminality while all but burning the US to the ground. Now we've got to fix it again, and even though the Manchurian Cantaloupe is in exile we're stuck with his knuckledragging cultists, who are absolutely mindnumbingly removed from any semblance of objective reality or rationality. Hopefully the worst of the damage can be addressed within Biden's first term so that we might finally get on with actually PROGRESSING as a nation (that is, of course, unless the ubiquitous American Idiots don't vote again for a moron or for an incipient fascist autocrat, this time probably a much smoother and smarter one).

DU was certainly valuable to me in helping me to know what was going on in the Cheney years and into the Obama presidency. It's good to sign in again and I'm sure I'll be back from time to time. Good to see that it's still up and thriving.