Joseph Brassey

When this happens, it becomes increasingly clear that the only real purpose of Doomerism is to allow the person espousing it to let themselves off the hook for doing anything to help improve the world around them.

It's just laziness masquerading as enlightenment. If there's no hope, then you can feel morally validated and justified in fucking off and not doing anything.

Pictured: my termies forcing an entire sisters combat patrol to come to them on their home objective for multiple rounds while I ran around the rest of the board and scored. High value trade, but man watching them just not die turn after turn was so funny.

Why yes give me a small number of elite units so I don’t have to keep track of a bunch of bodies and let me play for scoring by teleporting them around the board strategically.

Let me seize key objectives, force my enemy to come to me in disadvantaged ways, and clap-back like a hurricane when they come at me.

Anyway this looks great.

The number of “progressive” white men (honestly this one crosses racial boundaries as well but I’m gonna keep my criticism inside my own proverbial house) who still expect dutiful obedience to patriarchal structures from their wives or girlfriends is off the charts.

Liberals that I know claim this is a Leftist thing. Leftists I know claim this is a Liberal thing. Honestly it’s just a dipshit men thing. It’s everywhere.

And the thing is there’s nothing wrong with a relationship where you both fit your archetypical gender role, but when it’s EXPECTED, and IMPOSED, and the guy refuses his share of the division of labor, that’s where your problem is.

Why do this? Why continue to plant flowers in blasted ground and bring children into a world of violence and pain? Because life is worth living. People who have lived in darker times believed so, and I will not do less.

I am a student of medieval history. I remember the punch in the gut, reading about the people who survived the Black Death, but there was tremendous hope and resilience in their story. They saw half the world die, and the resolved to continue living.

How can I do less? I will not shame them.

One set of my grandparents saw the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Korean War, and lived for a time in a dangerous and undeveloped part of the world, where they raised five children under the shadow of a dictators rule. I am one of their eleven grandchildren. My children are two among their twenty-five great-grandchildren. I live because they lived.

I refuse to die before my time.

I refuse to teach my children that defeat and loss are the only constants of life. Great beauty persists even in the sunsets over bloody battlefields, and flowers bloom in the ashes of the scorched fields of war. Mercy. Love. Decency. These things never truly die.

Maybe I am no-one of significance, but I don’t need to be. We all make our mark on this world, and no matter what happens I refuse to let mine be a mark of cynical despair. Fuck that. My family raised me better, and my ancestors did not bring me about to let the world make a coward of me.

As long as blood pumps in a single human heart, there is hope. As John Keats said: “the poetry of earth is never dead.”

And neither are we.