Insider NJ Year 2022 Advance Release (PDF)

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The United States came out of the Enlightenment – that curious exploration of an elusive condition called human happiness – but our public square at some point became a closer approximation to medieval times, that is – and with a certain generosity – decidedly pre-Enlightenment, plague and all.

These delicate social pacts comprising the provocations and procedures of an evolving civilization have swelled into a two-party system of a battering ram on one side and a trebuchet on the other, rudimentary and old-fashioned tools having no little to do with these sharper processes and deeper demarcations in the dialogues of humanity.

We’ve adjusted, it seems, to the abbreviated dynamic, in a way that sometimes made the spoon-fed coded slogans easier to identify than the depth of lifelong friends, as the noose of COVID was shooting obscenely.

Moreover, the forms merely repeated primitive dramas masking a darker aspect of our republic: namely, a failure of the system to consistently deliver results to real people, or even to pretend familiarity with core Enlightenment ideals. country. Our politics have come to carry ill-imagined substitutions of ideas by those who have no intention but to support pressing business interests while maintaining false collisions to keep so-called pygmy minds preoccupied.

China and Russia continued to witness this, of course, and delighted to reassert their respective tyrannies as more effective options on the world stage, perhaps in tandem, as the latter mobilized on the border of Ukraine and China bristling at President Joe Biden’s efforts to unite Western democracies.

Already driven from each other by our machines, we received the latest virus strain as the next downward ax to drive us further apart. Anyone alienated in the same electronic envelope of ego lacked this most fundamental and reliable ability to physically grasp.

What then, in the context of all this, does the upcoming 2022 election mean for New Jersey, supposedly that more fragile blue bastion of the Northeastern state on the other side of the 2021 election cycle?