Too many people bought the lies
Just enough to guarantee there is no future for us
by Mike Meyer
It’s good to try to be optimistic after a horrible two years of America’s political death throes which seems to include the whole English speaking world. Hope springs eternal that the flailing and insanity doesn’t necessarily indicate death. But very large organizations like very large creatures are difficult to kill. They succumb slowly.
I can’t erase the image of the giant dinosaur mindlessly munching leaves at the top of a tree not realizing that it is effectively, already dead due to predators devouring its hind legs. But organizations are a bit different than animals because the millions of components are more independent.
That doesn’t help as dying organizations are even worse. Most of the operations and people running them continue on until the morning that the layoff notices come or, worse yet, the doors don’t open. But how many people continue to work even though the paychecks are late. And there is always that last person to leave.
Nation states don’t die like that either. They are land and cities and people and the death of the government doesn’t make that go away. It simply becomes a dead state with no functioning government. The death and suffering becomes the essence of the region. People who can leave do but there are always those that don’t have the freedom or the resources necessary to that. It just becomes a dead state.
If there are major resources the dead state simply becomes the battlefield for those looking to loot what remains. There are always some that will try to take it over but they must fight all the others.
As you watch the accelerating collapse of the old lead nations of this planet, destroyed by a corrupted economic system founded only on growth and greed, it’s hard not to be angry at the stupidity that brought this on. That is bad enough but when you realize that the final death blow was fully self delivered perhaps it was also fully deserved.
In the case of America the corruption could have, of course, been stopped. For decades the problems would grow but then the reforms would come and right the ship and maybe add some expanded services for the citizens. Expanded services are a clear sign of health. Services being removed is a sign of death. But they told you that was good. You didn’t want those services anyway.
But that final death blow was delivered forty years ago when a spectacularly evil group that had nourished racism, greed, bigotry and ignorance for generations final took over the national government after having been sent into exile fifty years earlier after the Great Depression.
Voiced by an aging and mentally weak actor, the key propaganda piece was honed to a fine point. White supremacy must be maintained but it must be done as a secret only we know about. Government is bad. Hate your government. They are helping those other people who aren’t white take the things you should have. They have made things so expensive that you can’t get anymore until they are gone. But we don’t say that aloud and we can pretend to not be haters because we are exceptional.
The inherent absurdity of a supposedly democratic nation hating itself and seeking to destroy its own government was well hidden. Either our government is all of us or we are all doomed. We learned that it was ok to hate yourself. You are not gaining because of those other people. Enough people believed and still believe that they repeatedly agreed to give everything to those who taught hate, bigotry, and greed. And who rigged the nation to give themselves everything.
Your government should have been you but you agreed to destroy that. Your money is now ours and we don’t care about you or anything but our own greed. What did you expect? We subverted just enough of you to make it possible to destroy the rest to our benefit. We have something like 70% of all your assets because you didn’t realize that those assets were yours but you wanted to make sure those other people didn’t get any. We told you that is what being American is about. And you bought it.
Now you can hate your government because it isn’t yours anymore.
The climate is changing and it is already too late to protect most coastal cities but it will be a few years before the waters claim them. In the next month or so a major winter vortex is projected that may split into two this year. The arctic warms while the arctic cold is brought down to North American. Then the storms of spring will be back and bigger and the heat of summer will be hotter and drier and the fires will start earlier and last longer.
What have we bought instead of a future?
In purely economic terms, health consequences dwarf the other effects of climate change in sheer cost to the United States, estimated at $141 billion due to heat-related deaths alone by 2100
But its all a joke. An you bought that, too.
