Jingo

Jingo was a good book to be reading during the election debacle. It may not make anything better, but it's a nice reminder that we've had these problems for a long time and we've been fighting them for a long time. I may be disappointed that we seem to be falling back on old habits rather than moving forward into a bright future. But things are better than they were, and things will continue to get better, because there are and always have been and always will be people who disagree with what apparently remains the status quo.

Jingo is about war and the futility of war and patriotism and when it goes too far. It's about fighting people just because they're from a different place or look a little different and how completely stupid that is. It's about all the assumptions we make about "them" and how unfounded and false those assumptions tend to be.

In short, this is a wonderful book about a lot of deeper themes that seem especially relevant in today's world (and have seemed especially relevant for years). It opened my eyes when I read it several years ago, and serves as a good primer on unconscious biases. It's a great book to hand someone who's just starting to question some of their long-held assumptions.

It's, perhaps, disheartening that this book remains as important and essential decades after it was first published. The world hasn't come as far as we'd all hoped. There's still so much work to be done. But seeing war treated as a crime, seeing characters with deeply-rooted biases start to question them, seeing the Discworld start to become more tolerant and understanding and diverse, it gives me hope for this world all over again.