I don’t claim to have the one true answer. It’s not surprising, all things considered, that so many people cope by filling their minds with daydreams about vast catastrophes that will flatten the current system and most of its inhabitants, or that so many others hunker down and try to ignore the world around them, with or without the assistance of drugs, alcohol, or a bullet to the brain. Off in various corners of the internet you can find people who insist that armed revolution is the only answer how many of them are agents provocateurs paid by the FBI to entrap the clueless is an interesting question, but the number is unlikely to be small. Plenty of political groups have an equally facile answer-“donate to me!”-but here again, we’ve all seen just how little that accomplishes in practice. The politicians all have their canned answer-“vote for me!”-but after this many abject failures to follow through on the implied promise, I trust none of my readers are so naïve as to fall for it. The question that remains is what to do about it all. Take a good look anywhere outside the well-guarded bubbles in which the well-to-do live, and you’ll see ample signs of precipitous decline. We don’t even have to get into the crumbling Dickensian hellscapes of modern American cities, where the budgets for necessary maintenance long ago got diverted into the pockets of the well-connected rich, rents have been artificially propped up to the point that buildings stand empty while the poor huddle in ragged tents at their feet, and the police are too busy arresting people for “hate speech,” whatever that remarkably flexible label means in any given week, to spare the time to keep the streets safe. The inevitable result of the last half century of US government policy. It was a time when inept medical care hadn’t become the third leading cause of death in the United States, and its wildly overinflated costs hadn’t become the single most common cause of bankruptcy when starting a small business hadn’t yet turned into a labyrinthine nightmare of endless bureaucratic barriers meant to keep big corporations from facing competition and when young people with good grades could go to college without mortgaging their entire future by way of predatory loans, and come out with a genuine education at the end of it. The fact remains that there was a time not so long ago when most Americans, irrespective of sex, race, and the rest of the current round of hot-button categories, could readily find jobs that paid enough to cover the costs of food, clothing, shelter, and the other core necessities of life. Thus the worse it gets, the more frantically denial and handwaving become the order of the day. The reality of our accelerating decline flies in the face of some of the most deeply rooted habits of American thought. It’s not even that corporate media flacks are mindlessly mouthing these same soundbites in a desperate attempt to get anyone to believe what their masters want the rest of us to believe. It’s not just that the Biden administration has been shouting at the top of its collective lungs that the economy is doing just fine-Biden’s rich friends are raking in big bucks, after all, so what’s your problem?-and brandishing carefully massaged statistics to suit. Yes, I know this is a controversial thing to say just now, at least in some circles. “Under the red, white, and blue” used to mean something else. Quite the contrary, for most people in the modern industrial world-and especially here in the United States-conditions have been getting worse for decades. Nor, despite the bleatings of true believers in progress, is it getting better. It’s understandable that this should be so, since the world around us is such a steaming mess. ![]() These days I hear a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible to change the world, and if so, how to go about it.
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