The Creep: or, The Theft, Sale, and Abandonment of The United States
A thing that most of you–white, part of the vanishing, increasingly-meaningless middle class*–may need assistance getting your head around is a big part of what collapse means. Collapse means that your government, your nation, stops existing. At least, it stops existing as you're familiar with it. It becomes wholly antagonistic, ceases to support you in any manner, and, being unabashedly an apparatus of its true constituency at this point (the rich), continues to extract from you all that it can. You're seeing this now. The thing is, basically anyone other than white people have seen this from day one. The way that society used to serve you, it never did others. Naturally, this is why we when you're looking for mutual aid in your town, you're probably going to find a Black-run group supporting all manner of marginalized communities.
It's going to get worse for everyone, though. Let me explain what I mean by this antagonism, though you might have guessed from the title.
*I assume. I don't run site demographics.
Your Government Doesn't View You As a Person
It doesn't really matter what government we're talking about, for the twenty or so people reading this outside of the states (again, I don't do demographics–I don't know why I keep bringing it up). But if you're in the west, even the old, non-American west, your government is doing its level best to sell you out. Spain, perhaps, is holding strong. Otherwise, I guess I'd be surprised.
I'm going to give you US examples but I'm willing to bet this extends to most western nations. Your government is making moves to ensure they know how to deal with you revolting. They're training their military in your cities in order to do so. If that isn't happening literally in your country, they are training in Little Gaza to do so. They're doing their level best to be sure we're watched every moment of our lives. They're selling the ground out from under our feet. We don't matter to them. We are grist for their mills. My conspiracy theory is that all the people in power agreed at some point that rather than try and give equity a chance, they would sooner destroy the world and get super yachts for another twenty years. Otherwise, it would behoove them to treat us better. But I digress.
In early June, the US military used actual US real estate to conduct training exercises–in Los Angeles, of all places. You understand the military owns millions of acres of land in the states; but they chose to occupy space in Los Angeles. They didn't do that for no reason. They didn't choose to make a lot of noise and fly helicopters over residential neighborhoods for a lack of space; they did it because, I think, Los Angeles was the scene of one of the first real pushes back against federal power in Trump's second term. This was a "look what we could do to you" flex.
Other exercises were carried out in other, nearby, cities. Again, not for lack of space. In the same way that giving cops military equipment is a threat, this is a threat. We are supposed to be intimidated by this. We're supposed to be intimidated by them trying to make mutual aid bail funds illegal, as they did in Atlanta. We're supposed to be intimidated by their new and ridiculous weaponry.
We are not people to them. Or, at least, people are not viewed as things worth treating with care and respect by them.
Even If They Did Care, They're Wrecking the Place or Selling it for Scrap
Being US-specific again, the House of Representatives passed a spending bill that fuses parts of the US military with Israel's. It's not as outright laughable as it sounds–for once the tin is a bit of an exaggeration of what's inside. The bill would not turn over control of the military to Bibi overnight, insofar as we aren't already being led by him. What it does do is greenlight a trillion dollars, that's a whole trillion with a t, for the military, and it would further intertwine the US and Israel's research and development of weaponry and techniques to fight various threats. In particular, it fuses "data and networks." Given that our cops already rely so much on the training of Israeli terrorists, this does not bode well. I honestly don't think it's that wild to be disconcerted about two militaries that love to drone-strike children and blow up civilian pagers getting greater access to each other's populace.
The approval of this fuse in the House is indicative of a complete abdication of responsibility on the part of our leaders. There is basically no corner of the country which actually wants this, evangelicals aside. Support for Israel is at historic lows, even among those who have no special warmth for humanity otherwise. The insistence of leadership to continue these moves feels less like stewardship and more like selling a used car.
On a different note, the Treasury has issued short-term bonds in order to cover its long-term bonds. If you don't know much about money and that still raises flags for you, good, because I don't either and know it's bad. This was a move to ease 10-year yield rates, which would ameliorate pains around big money for norms like mortgages, cars, and credit card debt. But this is moving numbers around, not actually tackling or solving the problem in any way, and financial experts–and world governments–know this.
We've hit $40 trillion in national debt, by the way. National debt has skyrocketed over the last half a decade for obvious reasons, but we have not gotten any kind of control over it due in no small part because of the fiscal policies of Trump from 2016 on, and Biden, too–no one wants to raise taxes, especially on the rich. Since most of the country's wealth now resides with them, so too would most of the tax dollars. Meanwhile, we're spending billions on wars, funding for ICE, and bailing out other countries (Japan, you see, holds a lot of US debt.) Meanwhile meanwhile, Trump and his ilk are pumping the stock market to line their own pockets.
The Creep
The people in power have no intention of actually running the country as a country. They are running it the way a virus or cancer takes over a host body. This is the creep; the unabashed piracy of all value, all wealth, all health from the United States. They will do it slowly and quickly, depending on who and where you are. For instance, they will do it quickly if you are Black, as they always have. They will do it quickly in Gary, Indiana. Gary has been without power for about two weeks. That's the anticipated restoration date–hopefully fulfilled as of publication of this letter–but who knows whether that should be believed.
Gary is majority Black, and that tells you all you need to know, really, as other nearby cities get their power back days ahead of a city of tens of thousands, and as Gary's numerous data centers are already back online. It's not just that climate change, and a super El Niño, are beginning to tear us up. It's the intersection of that hyperobject disaster placed over the very banal exploitation of minorities, of the poor, as locales for data centers, as sacrifice zones, as the blandest and most predictable continued transfer of wealth from everyone else to the handful of shitty white people at the core of this country.
You have undoubtedly heard that basically nothing is safe to eat anymore: popsicles are full of glass, berries and lettuce are full of explosive diarrhea, eggs are deadly. You'll note it took basically no time at all for RFK's deregulation to kick in and for companies to decide this meant they could just do whatever. This is part of it. The creep comes from all sides. It's like mold in a shitty apartment managed by an even shittier landlord.
I find these issues to be discrete from collapse mostly because these issues are entirely manmade and the decisions are executed now, in the very present, and their continued presence is a conscious decision by the people in power. Collapse, at this point, is as much a force of nature or law of physics as it is a phenomenon over we exert control. It has been in the mail for decades. Technically, it has been coming since we started the whole experiment. Collapse feeds into the creep, to be sure–I reiterate my conspiracy that part of why we feel the weight so heavily right now is because the people in power do, too. They know the hour is at hand. But our lettuce doesn't need to be covered in shit-bacteria. Gary, Indiana doesn't have to be denied electricity. This is cruelty for the sake of a lined pocket, if not for cruelty's sake. This is cruelty meant to beat us down.
Summer is ending, at least I think it is. It's hard telling with El Niño. But as the seasons shift toward harvest in the northern hemisphere, we'll really start to see the economic fallout of the war with Iran. We'll start to see the fallout of El Niño, too, for that matter. I would urge you to go through with padding your pantry, with making friends in your neighborhood, your apartment building, your block. People are getting more and more fed up with the state of the country and the world, and that is beginning to encompass all walks of life–even people we didn't think would be on our side. I would sooner embrace these people and do my best to show them the world through our eyes than resist their help fighting against, for instance, Flock in our communities. It is becoming clearer, I think, to everyone that the differences between us are small, and that the real enemy is the 1%. We need to harness that energy while we can, make these temporary allies steadfast friends, and take the fight to the ones who started the creep.