First, let me get it out the way here by saying the title of this thread is not hyperbole, and if you think it is, perhaps you should be browsing other topics. While fueled by recent events, such as the assured promise social rights for women will indeed be at risk of being thrown back decades, those who know my posts know I speak of America's issues dating much further back, long before many posters here were born. So then, with the preface out of the way, I'd like to take time to go over concepts and themes that I believe will cripple America, and are either choking the life out of it now, or will asphyxiate it in the future.
One has a nightmare of a job to even begin to talk about America's tsunami of problems, so I guess I'll start with the macro-scale ones that afflict societies beyond the States, and then scale down. The first issue facing this country is climate; as the per capita problem maker in the world, America is presently hellbent on destroying this entire planet by adhering to the interests of money and the rejection of science. Well, that's no longer true; it seems the Trump administration accepts climate change, but that comes with a "well, it's too late to do anything, so just go crazy" type of response to the matter. The issue of climate change is an excuse used to justify a buffet of carbon emission efforts and letting them expand in harm, not contract. This will create an issue where resources, not just in the United States, but all over the world, suffer, leading to migration issues, but we'll get to that in a bit with Trump's Alt Reich agenda.
The second macro-scale issue, also afflicting American's the most in a per capita sense, is automation. People really are downplaying the danger of technology because they think the spook is in the erosion of jobs, when in fact the problem is that technology will negate rises in incomes due to the delegation of skills to technology. Retail and services will be ground zero for this issue, and seeing as full-time employment has largely been replaced by part-time employment in much of the first-world since the Great Recession, you're employing more of a majority of people in an arena absolutely poised to abandon them within the next decade. Looking at just one macro-scale study that correlates some isolated studies down based on specific countries (Oxford, the Obama administration, and the United Nations come to mind for these small studies) the numbers at risk are absolutely staggering. This will impact tens of millions of Americans, and massive amounts more as we look the world over. This may also have an implosion effect where the ladders to prosperity are eliminated. I mention the UN earlier, but their study on India in fact raised alarms that technology may leave a permanent underclass with no upward mobility. This is actually very dangerous, especially when if we're supposed to rely on the left as the "party of reason" they're proposing job guarantees. They haven't even admitted that full-time employment is no longer a norm! They're giving us a proposals conservatives in other countries come up with, and it's usually as an emotional response to even entertaining the idea of systemic change.
Before I even begin to talk about the next thing, I must address something important: the two above points are happening at the same time, and will intersect upon one another, and this is really where the fuel for most dissent, conflict, and strife will bloom this century. The Pentagon believes this is what will destabilize societies the world over. These problems alone would be enough to talk about, but as we're talking about the shithole known as America, ya'll know it goes deeper.
The fundamental issues of racism adopted via the neoliberal lens that "wealth is worth" play their own role in every fabric of social living. Black people are almost seen as intrinsically unpeople, that they have superpowers where a 12 year old is supposed to be a "man" and will have jaywalking held against them if laws would allow it occurs in the same space where a white man at high school sexually assault women - hello Brett Kavanaugh - is seen as someone who can redeemed by the facets of time itself. One increasingly sees, since the 1970s, this country has moved from a society where life is value to where only the market has value, and under parasites like Ronald Reagan, adopted too much of the country into this vision. Any form of business is the best form of business, any for of government is a bad form of living, and all rights should appeal to them and the market first. We are literally having puzzling articles and inquiries on how to solve paid family leave, as if it's truly a fuckin' cosmic mystery that's befallen us since the dawn of time itself. One may presume it's high-brow to presume this plays a role in America's injustices, it very much does, for what exists outside of market value and terminology is, by its association with those very concepts, considering unneeded and disposable. If the market somehow cannot solve paid family leave, it would presume that it's not a worthy thing to have. This is literally the lens in which we collectively live within. No wonder this is a culture bathed in violence.
The only thing America has done since the 1970s that we can see has been a constant net-positive has been the expansion of social rights, but as they have no market value, and as conservatism, the disease that it is, believes we've made mistakes in regards to these social rights, they'll all being put on the cutting block. You have candidates outright calling for the euthanizing of the unproductive, putting work requirements on the poor and addicted during an opioid crisis while ignoring real issues the precariat already face, parts of the population lacking drinking water, entire swaths of human life put in literal internment camps. The fullness of this problem, to me, is that we can be so full of ourselves and our myths of wellbeing and exceptionalism that we pulled out of the Human Rights Council potentially because of a scathing report that America commits immense abuses to its very own people. We have, as Henry Giroux aptly describes, curated a "culture of cruelty". In this culture, freedom is itself a word of exclusion; it's no longer freedom for, but freedom from. Freedom from dignified living conditions, freedom from security, freedom from education, freedom from healthcare. We have been seeing for many decades the attack of social safety nets and social rights altogether, but they're only in the spotlight now because grandma might be addicted to drugs, or your trans brother may be a potential target in this current period of history. And this, if we're real about it, is only going to get worse before we can even start believing the current pixie dust that it will get better very, very soon.
As stated in another thread, the parallels of America's emulation of the formation of Nazi Germany cannot be overstated or evermore clearer at this point in history. Once you have a power play where a minority ruin the system while proclaiming this is done to benefit the masses, you directly fall into the hands of authoritarianism. It's precisely the same game would-be normalizers of America's neoliberal mess use to talk about the collapse of the Soviets, failing to realize they're literally in the same game, right now. Power and wellbeing for a few as the empty rhetoric of "restoration" and "prosperity" are given to a vulnerable public, and this is normalized under an egoic lens: if you're doing good, who cares about the rest. The very danger in this country is specifically based around this vulnerable public. Are there enough reasonable people to see the violence, the insolubility of current paradigms, and are they able to course correct this mess? Who says revolution would right all wrongs? Further, who is to say that the vulnerable public, as seen in the dipshit Trump supporter who has already bought the game of illusions, isn't big enough to carry the country further into dissent. Look at the damage done already with the literal moron in the White House. The most alarming aspect, in my perspective at the very least, is that due to us being a reactive and not a proactive society and species, we may only wake up and act in an already-too-late scenario. Worse still, one of the literal diseases Americans face is how they normalize injustice. Another school shooting? Just another day of the week. Oh, mom got cancer? Gotta find a way to make our GoFundMe page appealing for donations. Things that should make your blood into magma are just as common as seeing sunlight. Any one major injustice is a national travesty, but we can go through many in one day.
The literal sickness this country sits in is deep in its blood, and I often wonder what will happen when the "body" stops working, what can be done, if anything, to alleviate the aftereffects and looming chaos, and if there's enough that could even be done to avoid an outright implosion within the borders of this eternally divided country. One may say I am being pessimistic, but I would argue I am being realistic. The first thing to do, as far as I'm concerned, is to be real with "what is", and it's that this country has functioned on the most smallest sliver of presumptions that, when exposed as fraudulent, the entire show gets exposed, and we're living in that each and every day of our lives. I don't even think we can fool ourselves by assuming all of this can be avoided, hence the paradox of "possibly" avoiding "inevitable" collapse of systems and structures.
One has a nightmare of a job to even begin to talk about America's tsunami of problems, so I guess I'll start with the macro-scale ones that afflict societies beyond the States, and then scale down. The first issue facing this country is climate; as the per capita problem maker in the world, America is presently hellbent on destroying this entire planet by adhering to the interests of money and the rejection of science. Well, that's no longer true; it seems the Trump administration accepts climate change, but that comes with a "well, it's too late to do anything, so just go crazy" type of response to the matter. The issue of climate change is an excuse used to justify a buffet of carbon emission efforts and letting them expand in harm, not contract. This will create an issue where resources, not just in the United States, but all over the world, suffer, leading to migration issues, but we'll get to that in a bit with Trump's Alt Reich agenda.
The second macro-scale issue, also afflicting American's the most in a per capita sense, is automation. People really are downplaying the danger of technology because they think the spook is in the erosion of jobs, when in fact the problem is that technology will negate rises in incomes due to the delegation of skills to technology. Retail and services will be ground zero for this issue, and seeing as full-time employment has largely been replaced by part-time employment in much of the first-world since the Great Recession, you're employing more of a majority of people in an arena absolutely poised to abandon them within the next decade. Looking at just one macro-scale study that correlates some isolated studies down based on specific countries (Oxford, the Obama administration, and the United Nations come to mind for these small studies) the numbers at risk are absolutely staggering. This will impact tens of millions of Americans, and massive amounts more as we look the world over. This may also have an implosion effect where the ladders to prosperity are eliminated. I mention the UN earlier, but their study on India in fact raised alarms that technology may leave a permanent underclass with no upward mobility. This is actually very dangerous, especially when if we're supposed to rely on the left as the "party of reason" they're proposing job guarantees. They haven't even admitted that full-time employment is no longer a norm! They're giving us a proposals conservatives in other countries come up with, and it's usually as an emotional response to even entertaining the idea of systemic change.
Before I even begin to talk about the next thing, I must address something important: the two above points are happening at the same time, and will intersect upon one another, and this is really where the fuel for most dissent, conflict, and strife will bloom this century. The Pentagon believes this is what will destabilize societies the world over. These problems alone would be enough to talk about, but as we're talking about the shithole known as America, ya'll know it goes deeper.
The fundamental issues of racism adopted via the neoliberal lens that "wealth is worth" play their own role in every fabric of social living. Black people are almost seen as intrinsically unpeople, that they have superpowers where a 12 year old is supposed to be a "man" and will have jaywalking held against them if laws would allow it occurs in the same space where a white man at high school sexually assault women - hello Brett Kavanaugh - is seen as someone who can redeemed by the facets of time itself. One increasingly sees, since the 1970s, this country has moved from a society where life is value to where only the market has value, and under parasites like Ronald Reagan, adopted too much of the country into this vision. Any form of business is the best form of business, any for of government is a bad form of living, and all rights should appeal to them and the market first. We are literally having puzzling articles and inquiries on how to solve paid family leave, as if it's truly a fuckin' cosmic mystery that's befallen us since the dawn of time itself. One may presume it's high-brow to presume this plays a role in America's injustices, it very much does, for what exists outside of market value and terminology is, by its association with those very concepts, considering unneeded and disposable. If the market somehow cannot solve paid family leave, it would presume that it's not a worthy thing to have. This is literally the lens in which we collectively live within. No wonder this is a culture bathed in violence.
The only thing America has done since the 1970s that we can see has been a constant net-positive has been the expansion of social rights, but as they have no market value, and as conservatism, the disease that it is, believes we've made mistakes in regards to these social rights, they'll all being put on the cutting block. You have candidates outright calling for the euthanizing of the unproductive, putting work requirements on the poor and addicted during an opioid crisis while ignoring real issues the precariat already face, parts of the population lacking drinking water, entire swaths of human life put in literal internment camps. The fullness of this problem, to me, is that we can be so full of ourselves and our myths of wellbeing and exceptionalism that we pulled out of the Human Rights Council potentially because of a scathing report that America commits immense abuses to its very own people. We have, as Henry Giroux aptly describes, curated a "culture of cruelty". In this culture, freedom is itself a word of exclusion; it's no longer freedom for, but freedom from. Freedom from dignified living conditions, freedom from security, freedom from education, freedom from healthcare. We have been seeing for many decades the attack of social safety nets and social rights altogether, but they're only in the spotlight now because grandma might be addicted to drugs, or your trans brother may be a potential target in this current period of history. And this, if we're real about it, is only going to get worse before we can even start believing the current pixie dust that it will get better very, very soon.
As stated in another thread, the parallels of America's emulation of the formation of Nazi Germany cannot be overstated or evermore clearer at this point in history. Once you have a power play where a minority ruin the system while proclaiming this is done to benefit the masses, you directly fall into the hands of authoritarianism. It's precisely the same game would-be normalizers of America's neoliberal mess use to talk about the collapse of the Soviets, failing to realize they're literally in the same game, right now. Power and wellbeing for a few as the empty rhetoric of "restoration" and "prosperity" are given to a vulnerable public, and this is normalized under an egoic lens: if you're doing good, who cares about the rest. The very danger in this country is specifically based around this vulnerable public. Are there enough reasonable people to see the violence, the insolubility of current paradigms, and are they able to course correct this mess? Who says revolution would right all wrongs? Further, who is to say that the vulnerable public, as seen in the dipshit Trump supporter who has already bought the game of illusions, isn't big enough to carry the country further into dissent. Look at the damage done already with the literal moron in the White House. The most alarming aspect, in my perspective at the very least, is that due to us being a reactive and not a proactive society and species, we may only wake up and act in an already-too-late scenario. Worse still, one of the literal diseases Americans face is how they normalize injustice. Another school shooting? Just another day of the week. Oh, mom got cancer? Gotta find a way to make our GoFundMe page appealing for donations. Things that should make your blood into magma are just as common as seeing sunlight. Any one major injustice is a national travesty, but we can go through many in one day.
The literal sickness this country sits in is deep in its blood, and I often wonder what will happen when the "body" stops working, what can be done, if anything, to alleviate the aftereffects and looming chaos, and if there's enough that could even be done to avoid an outright implosion within the borders of this eternally divided country. One may say I am being pessimistic, but I would argue I am being realistic. The first thing to do, as far as I'm concerned, is to be real with "what is", and it's that this country has functioned on the most smallest sliver of presumptions that, when exposed as fraudulent, the entire show gets exposed, and we're living in that each and every day of our lives. I don't even think we can fool ourselves by assuming all of this can be avoided, hence the paradox of "possibly" avoiding "inevitable" collapse of systems and structures.
