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The Year Of DeEvolution

One Step Forward, 2022 Steps Back

Two years after voters booted Trump from the White House, the negative effects of his presidency are still reverberating through our lives.

Carl J. Petersen
Dialogue & Discourse
5 min readJan 4, 2023

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Had COVID been properly managed, it would have been in our rearview mirror as we negotiated our way through 2022. Instead, Trump politicized the virus, allowing anti-vax and other anti-science conspiracy theories to take root and condemning us to negotiate through a new normal where we are forced to deal with periodic outbreaks. The only positive is that adherence to Internet Pseudo-Science has allowed Darwin to rebalance the voter rolls.

Nightwish in London, November 2022

While in 2021, attempts to emerge from our COVID cocoons were often met with failure, public events largely returned in 2022. Concerts planned before the pandemic and then postponed and then postponed again were finally able to take place. In some cases, like Mötley Crüe’s stadium juggernaut, the wait resulted in an extreme case of anticipointment. Other bands, like Rammstein and Nightwish, rewarded their fans with shows that exceeded expectations. An evening with Midnight Oil reinforced for me why shows had been postponed in the first place as I ended up with COVID four days after seeing their show.

Trump’s body count will far exceed the 1.1 million deaths (and counting) due to COVID. The appointments he made to the Supreme Court tipped the delicate balance that was keeping Roe Vs. Wade as the law of the land. Ignoring the doctrine of Stare decisis, Trump’s court overturned nearly 50 years of precedents and removed the right of women to choose to terminate a pregnancy before viability. The effect on women was immediate, with some hospitals refusing to provide appropriate care after miscarriages and children being forced to travel across state lines “to avoid having their

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Carl J. Petersen
Carl J. Petersen

Written by Carl J. Petersen

Parent, special education advocate and former LAUSD School Board candidate. Still fighting for the children. www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com

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