“You give me a piece of ground and a sword and I am going to take back this country with your help and the help of all the homeless Democrats and Republicans who are Americans first.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
If you’re wondering why our country is lost in lunatic raptures of lawless Lawfare and futile MAGAry, it’s because our economy has already collapsed, and our culture and politics with it downstream have also collapsed into spectacular degeneracy. It has already happened. Maybe you don’t know it.
The business model is broken. We’re a shadow of the industrial economy that won a great war and enjoyed a boisterous peace. You can’t replace ball bearing factories with theme parks and hedge funds. Sorry. The full faith and credit of the USA is not embodied in those frivolities, so our money is losing its mojo fast.
But get this: we will go on. This is not the end of the world or the end of history. It is the end of an era. Believe it or not, the economy will fix itself, it just won’t be what it was in 1957. It won’t be what the techno-supremacists think, either. (You need a dependable electric grid to run all those server farms and the apps they serve, and the AI supposedly looming.) It will fix itself because when things fail, as they are doing now, a lot of opportunities will open up to do things differently, even very differently.
When the chain stores fail along with their twelve-thousand-mile supply lines, Americans will figure out how to find stuff, make stuff, move stuff, and sell stuff at a smaller scale, maybe back on your Main Street (if it’s still there). There will be a lot less stuff, of course. But it may be enough stuff, and some of you will be busy making stuff of some kind. Imagine an economy where practically everybody has a useful role to play. Do you know how much more important it is to lead a purposeful, active life than to be lost in leisure and anomie with more stuff than you know what to do with? Which is where we’re at now, even for many who are statistically “poor.”
When the Happy Motoring colossus tweaks out, we’ll spend less time moving around and more time doing useful things, staying put around the places where we live. We’d be lucky if we could keep some railroads going, but the prospects are not great for that now. Sorry, we blew it. Should have re-started that project in 1970 when the handwriting was on the wall. (We made a lot of bad choices.) Cars and trains require elaborate networks of many interdependent technologies all integrated smoothly at the giant scale — oil, steel, plastics, electronics — and all of that is disintegrating. Pretty soon, you can forget about airplanes, too. That leaves… what? Yes, boats and horses. I know… it sounds inconceivable. Wait for it.
It’s already happening. Lots of people are returning to the ways of our grandparents working outside the home not to make a living to get by whilst their real sustaining work is at home. Gardening, canning, buying from local farmers what they can’t grow, packing the freezer with a half hog or cow or splitting it with neighbors, forming bulk buying groups, baking not shopping, or eating out as entertainment or a pastime. Taking back their lives independency, sanity, and decency. Turning off the News forgetting politics and who wants to be in charge and the divisional cults of followers. Taking back your life starts with it and your own. Not with leaders and these surreal cultural wars. It’s time to ignore everything else and only let into your mind and homes prosperity of your own.