We Are All Here, Now

Perhaps it has escaped your notice, but American society has pretty much collapsed.

It most likely has escaped your notice, because when you wake up in the morning, the lights work, the birds are singing, you go to work, you put gas in your car, you buy groceries, and it all seems... normal.

There are no troops in the streets. No one is driving around shouting out their car windows about revolution. Masses of people are not standing guard over barricades.

But if you step back from the minutiae of your life, the picture becomes clearer.

There is a doddering, selfish madman in The White House, enriching himself and his "friends." Congress is impotent, run by a party that supported the madman and now seems embarrassed by it, but can't break free of his Svengali-like idiocy. And the Supreme Court is run by Conservatives who are not interested in maintaining the integrity of the Constitution, but opening the door to fascism.

All the while, the engine of this destruction of Constitutional order, the White Christian Fascist movement that is woven into the fabric of our nation, is promulgating the removal of rights from anyone who is not a white, Christian, cisgendered male. Voting, birth control, abortion, gender-affirming care, and any kind of program meant to support the poor and indigent, these are slowly being erased as quickly as can be managed, only to be thwarted by a judicial system which, below the level of the Supreme Court, still seems interested in applying rules equally (with some exceptions).

We are all here, now.

If you're not seeing it, that's your privilege at work. Or, perhaps, it's because you are working so hard just to survive, you don't notice and have no time to think about it. Or, further still, maybe this is what you wanted, even as you profess "This isn't what I voted for!" Whatever the reason, it's here. We're here. There are charlatans, liars, thieves, and proto-Nazis wandering the halls of a building where Abraham Lincoln worked to hold the Union together, where Teddy Roosevelt fought the trusts and established our national parks system, where FDR brought a country back from the brink of disaster during the Depression and then fought a two-front war to end the threat of Fascism, and John F. Kennedy launched our nation on a trip to the Moon. Part of that hallowed building has already been physically destroyed.

Everything happening now enrages us. You see it poured into the text boxes of apps and websites to be posted on every variety of social media forum, from text to video. We are furious. We are anxious. We are petrified. We are panicked. We are confused. We are hoping, beyond hope, that someone comes to fix it all.

I'm sorry. It doesn't work that way.

True, there are organizations fighting every day, mainly in the courts, sometimes in the political arena, to stop the madness. They are, however, only working against those things that are happening now or have happened. They are not preventative. Nothing it seems, prevents this "administration" from moving on to the next set of outrages, as if the plan is to simply overwhelm us with a tidal wave of despair.

Honestly, and you're not going to like this, it's time to stop being outraged.

I'm not saying don't be angry. I'm not even saying to accept this as our fate.

What I'm saying, is that outrage is energy wasted. Outrage poured onto the Internet is energy diluted. Frustration, arguments, bickering, and the like, with other people we do not know, who may not even be people at this point, is not what is needed to meet the current crisis. We can continue endlessly - and we will - to rehash how we got here, but the essence is, that we are here. The question now is: What are we going to do about it?

This isn't just about elections, and who votes and doesn't, and who voted for what, when. None of that matters now. The fact is the forces that have expended decades planning and slowly executing their vision of an American run by white cisgendered men are within striking distance of their goal. They have created an atmosphere where people believe there is little be done, that voting changes nothing, that to rise and speak out means losing everything they own, and that they know what's best for everyone, even though it is quite clear through their dogma, that they think only of themselves and their "race" and religious proclivities.

These people profane the Christian religion, even as they pound pulpits and proclaim themselves arbiters of God's word. These people look down from their piles of money and contemptuously tell us to "work harder," even as they game the system to ensure that no matter how hard we do work, we cannot get ahead, falling even further behind. They proclaim the superiority of a "race" that is a figment of their imagination, built up by the perversion of science to fit a white narrative over the last two centuries. We are being ruled by the dregs of society, and we are allowing it.

You can tell yourself that all we have to do is win a few more elections, spend our money wisely, show up in the streets every so often to make sure they understand we aren't going to put up with this, and everything will be "normal" again.

We don't want "normal" again.

"Normal" is how we got here. "Normal" is white people on top, and everyone else scattered below, fighting to survive, picking up our scraps, and having to expend quantities of energy so vast, to get the simplest rights applied to them, as they should have been from the beginning. "Normal" is not having to think about who the people we elect are, because after every election, the country seems to keep running. "Normal" is, your cause doesn't impact me, why should I care? "Normal" is refusing to see the big picture of how the planet, life on it, and the processes of time and space affect it, and realize we are damaging it. "Normal" is trying to buttonhole people, force them into convenient categories, instead of accepting them as they are, even if we don't understand what that means. "Normal" is handing your ability to think rationally for yourself over to a machine that has no intellect, no passion, no feeling, and doesn't understand the simplest concepts of what it means to be human.

"Normal" is the set of chains we apply to ourselves while telling ourselves we have free will.

Nothing is "normal" anymore. Nothing, really, should be "normal" anymore. What it should be is equitable. What it should be is livable. What it should be is establishing community. What it should be is tolerable. What it should be is harmonious. What it should be is sharing and caring for each other.

They nailed a man to a cross for saying those things roughly two thousand years ago.

They are trying to chain us all up and imprison us for saying them now.

When are we going to stop them?

What are we willing to do to stop them?

That's the question you have to ask. It's not just voting at the ballot box or with your wallet or with your attention. No, it goes beyond that, because we let it. We let the barbarians into our hallowed halls of government and now they are destroying it, the thing that grants us everything. The rights we take for granted. They money in our pockets. The education we receive. The exploration we desire. The health we depend on. The help and support we need to survive in bad times and when we decide we can no longer work. All this is being destroyed. Physically, socially, psychologically, take you pick, but everything you know as "normal" is slowly being undermined and buried. When they are done, it will be gone, and we will have the Devil's own time getting it all back.

If this seems gloomy, if this seems like the seeds of doom, that's because it is. Take it any way you like, but yes, our country is coming apart at the seams, and the vast majority of us either see it and can't bring ourselves to do anything, or don't want to, or are frightened by the prospects of having to do anything about it. It's not 2026, really; it's more like 1775. The Redcoats are here. They are quartering themselves in people's homes without a by-your-leave, they are arresting people on the flimsiest pretense, they are marching through the streets letting people know they are there and making sure that the populace is frightened. And in quiet lanes and back rooms in taverns, and barns in the countryside, people gather and say "Enough!"

So, when are we going to say "Enough!"?

When are we going to accept that everything our nation was founded upon - and yes, there are problems with that founding - is being torn down after 250 years by a selfish, arrogant, stupid, incompetent man and his horde of ingratiating, venal sycophants? When is the outrage over this destruction going to go from the timidity of social media posts, to the full-throated roar of bodies massed in the street every day? When are we going to stand up, en masse, and make it clear, not just that we're upset, but that we want these people gone? When are we going to challenge their power over us, because government derives its power from the consent of the governed, and I, for one, do not consent.

Note, that if we're going to fight back, we do this together. Whatever differences may run through us, they need to be put aside. As the cartoon said in pre-revolutionary America, "Join Or Die." We join as one and reestablish and reconsecrate our rights as citizens, or we are put to the grinding wheel to become grist for the whims of billionaires. Make you choice. Make it soon. There may be little time left.