Nostalgic for normalcy

You learn all kinds of new stuff when you have a front-row seat to creeping authoritarianism.

- Jonathan Kronstadt

I now know, for example, that what I'd long taken for a natural law - that you cannot get sacked from a federal government job, of which there were once many around here - is as unnatural as hell. I know lots of folk who either retired rather than be shoved into paper-pushing corners, got DOGEd or are hanging on in agencies that have either been almost fully emptied and/or populated with politicos whose prime directive is to destroy everything they can reach.

I also now know that it's illegal to drive a commercial vehicle on National Park Service land. I read about park police setting up checkpoints and pulling over commercial vehicles and shortly thereafter - shock and alarm! - ICE agents would arrive to check the status of the predominantly Hispanic occupants of such commercial vehicles.

The legality of such checkpoints is decidedly murky, but that's how things are in the good old US of A these days: murky AF. The new stuff one learns is distressing at best, and everything you thought you knew has gone ultra-squidgy.