Who authorized this Grant?

As a physicist, I’ve spent a whole lot of time in labs watching machines do things they aren’t supposed to do. I know the feeling of a failing experiment. Like there is a strange smell coming from the fume hood, when the numbers you are reading makes absolutely no sense, the plot has developed weird, haunting oscillations, and the noise is so far off the roof that it’s practically in orbit. It most definitely also involves a grad student crying in the hallway.

This is exactly what it feels like, looking at the current US climate - except the “lab” in question is three million square miles, and someone accidentally left the Busen burners on over the weekend and nobody can agree on where the fire extinguisher is.

The data is, frankly, a fucking mess. We moved past the “interesting observation” phase and deep into the “I think the lab is on fire” phase. We are seeing a level of social polarization where even the laws of physics are starting to feel like suggestions. I won’t be surprised if I woke up to a news alert (reminder to unsubscribe to NY times) claiming that gravity is now a partisan issue or that the speed of light has been lobbied to go a little faster for certain zip codes or Oxygen is a radical agenda.

The current climate feels like a group project where half the students are trying to build a bridge, while the other half are convinced that bridges are a myth invented by ‘Big Steel’. Meanwhile the bridge is actually a giant slide leading into a ball pit, and everyone is arguing about whether the balls should be red or blue while the slide is actively on fire.

It’s the kind of chaos that makes you look at the control panel of the country and ask: Have we tried unplugging the country and plugging it back in?

I suspect if we just pulled the giant power cord out for like 30 seconds, let the capacitors drain, and then plugged it back in, we might clear the cache of all these collective “glitches”. We’d hear a satisfying sound of a system rebooting, and maybe, just maybe, the “Common Sense” module would finally load correctly.

But unfortunately, this isn’t the situation and the “Reset” button is buried under several layers of bureaucracy and a lot of very loud yelling!!

If this were my PhD thesis, I would have told myself to scrap the data and start over three years ago. Or even try to find a career in goat farming. Who knows? But since we’re all stuck inside the experiment, I suppose the only thing to do is keep taking notes and laugh manically. At least the data points are interesting, even if they make me want to move to a remote village in the Greek mountains where the only ‘conflict’ is which goat ate my laundry.

I’ll keep my safety googles on. I suggest you do the same and wait for the reboot. In the meantime, remember to be kind.

Φιλάκια,

Ρεμπέκα ❤

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