Literacy was a mistake

I just witnessed someone asserting, with no apparent irony, that Abraham Lincoln had non-violent alternatives available to him to end the Civil War. I mean, if I want to be charitable for some misbegotten fucking reason I suppose he didn’t actually append “and win” to the word “end,” but Christ and fuck, how does just existing keep getting dumber?

Yesterday I had another, different human explain to me with no small amount of exasperation that just because I had lived through the thing he was talking about, a thing that happened before he was born, it didn’t mean I knew anything about it. Not even “knew more than he did”! Knew anything at all.

The older I get, the more I want to roll all technology back to somewhere between 1998 and 2005. Actually, hell, I can give you a date: let’s say back to November 6, 2000 and just erase every single Goddamned thing that’s happened since then and start over again. That was when the world went off the fucking rails, right?