End, the end … of the year. New Year’s Eve (morning) 2017 (hour2)

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As I mentioned in the post that pair with this one, this show originally streamed LIVE over the black magic known as the internet on the last day of 2017. Posting this hour brings me up to date, yearly speaking. I still have all the shows from Jan. Feb. Mar. April. May to post. Man, writing it out like that really brings new importance to keeping the mind of the turtle. Good heavens.

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As the cities became more crowded, human anguish reached highs that would have been unimaginable in previous ages, with hundreds of millions inhabiting slums of inconceivable squalor, prey to disease borne by rats and contaminated water, without education or means of betterment. Crime flourished as never before and was generally punished by public maiming, branding, flogging or death; imprisonment as an alternate form of punishment developed only late in the period.

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Mental illness also flourished as never before—madness, derangement, whatever you choose to call it. No one know what to do with lunatics; they were typically incarcerated alongside criminals, chained to the walls, flogged, forgotten.

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Economic instability remained high, and its consequences were felt more widely than ever before. Three years of economic chaos in France led directly to the 1789 revolution that claimed some four hundred thousand victims burned, shot, drowned, or guillotined. Periodic market collapses and depressions wiped out hundreds of thousands of businesses and reduced millions to starvation.

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The age also ushered in the Industrial Revolution, of course, but this didn’t bring ease and prosperity to the masses; rather it brought utterly heartless and grasping exploitation, with women and small children working ten, twelve, and more hours a day for starvation wages in sweatshops, factories and mines. You can find the atrocities for yourself if you’re not familiar with them. In 1787 it was reckoned that French workers labored as much as sixteen hours a day and spent sixty percent of their wages on a diet consisting of little more than bread and water. It was the middle of the nineteenth century before the British Parliament limited children’s workdays to ten hours. Hopeless and frustrated, people everywhere became rebellious, and governments everywhere answered with systematic repression, brutality, and tyranny. General uprisings, peasant uprisings, colonial uprisings, slave uprisings, worker uprisings—there were hundreds, I can’t even list them all. East and West, twins of a common birth, it was the age of revolutions. Tens of millions of people died in them.

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As ordinary, habitual interactions between governed and governors, revolt and repression were new, you understand—characteristic signs of distress of the age.

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