A couple years ago, I talked a bit about my friend Matt. He grew up in Iowa but moved to Ohio around 2005. He wound up living relatively close to where I grew up in fact. We had become friends in the late '90s over comics and graphic design, but talked on a wide array of subjects. Around 2010, he started getting involved in activism. A local hospital was being forced to shut down and he joined in with the group trying to save it. In doing so, he saw how its closure mostly stemmed from political machinations, and so he started getting involved in politics. Not running for any office, but he was very active in helping elect who he thought were the "right" people in races from the mayor to his state representative. He worked for people he believed in and, in most (maybe all?) cases, the candidates he helped ultimately got elected. (I'm sure he would have been the first to admit that he had, at best, only the smallest part of those victories, and that he just happened to back candidates who were extremely compentent.)
After "his" canidates would get elected, he'd often continue to work with their offices to some degree for a while afterwards. This gave him a very direct, about-as-first-hand-as-you-can-get-without-actually-being-elected-yourself view of politics at both the local and state levels. Over the next 10 years or so, he became very knowledgable about how politics worked. How they actually worked, not the ideal frameworks that get outlined in social studies classes.
One of the discussions Matt and I had on more than one occasion circled around trying to answer "what can I do?" when it came to some policy or other. "This bill being proposed is downright dangerous! What can I do?" "This other candidate has pledged to end this really excellent program! What can I do?"
While we would have good conversations, he always found my suggestions lacking. Not because they were necessarily bad or impractical, but because I was answering a different question than he was. My answers always centered on protection: how can I protect me and my loved ones from the effects? I didn't realize until much later that never his question, though. He was always asking "what can I do to ensure that no one needs protecting from this to begin with?" His was obviously the nobler of the two. And also the more strategic. However, that wound up being a problem for him.
My position in answering those questions stemmed from the premise that I had zero power to have a meaningful impact on any government operations, and so I have to take a very tactical approach in just dealing with the repercussions. Matt's premise was that strategic approach, if successful, would indeed mean that I wouldn't have to deal with that tactical level at all. He was, of course, quite correct; however, that "if successful" clause is an exceptionally tenuous one. Because if you're unsuccessful, then you still find yourself in the position of having to take a tactical approach, but now with less time to act on it. And what Matt found is that "if successful" clause is almost never, ever used. He regularly wound up comparing trying to get a successful, even modestly progressive act moved forward at any level of government to the act of pushing on a rope.
Even getting the "right" people in the "right" positions didn't really matter, Matt found, because the polticial machinery at all levels is set up in such a way to prevent progress from happening. The people actively trying to do the right thing for the right reasons would find their hands tied. And if those people couldn't do anything, there was certainly nothing Matt could, in fact, do. After asking "what can I do" over and over and over, the only answer he found was: nothing.
At a service in Matt's memory in 2022, a number of people who got to know him through his campaign work, in addition to praising many of Matt's talents and traits, made reference to depression and seeking help if you need it. But the thing is, Matt wasn't depressed. His final message to me said that, his last blog post said that, his last video -- recorded mere hours before he ended his life -- said that. Depression is indeed very painful and I have lost friends who fell too far down that rabbit hole. But that's not where Matt was coming from. Matt's afflication, if I were forced to put a name to it, was nihilism. He had accomplished the modest life goals he had set as a teen/young adult and no longer saw any reason to stick around. His work, and the work of others he was helping facilitate, ultimately went nowhere. Accomplished nothing. He saw the political machinery in action and how it was going to keep making things worse and worse for anyone who wasn't a billionaire, and the very most even the most admirable and talented politicans could do was slow the destruction of everything just a little. The machinery was designed to wrest everything out of you, the everyman, up to and including your very life, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it.
So, in June 2022, he opted out.
Back in the mid-90s, I enjoyed playing a game called Jump Raven. You basically had to fly around this pseudo-future, climate-change-impacted New York and pick up DNA capsules of nearly extinct animals, so that various gangs like neo-nazis (who, of course, were shooting at you) wouldn't get a hold of them and create mutant monsters. The actual game play was a little repetitive, but they used an interesting (custom) software engine and there was a good story around the game. One of the game features was that you could choose what type of music you listened to while you were flying around. All original songs, most of them quite good for a small-ish company's video game. But what stuck out to me back then was that one of the the songs had a spoken word refrain over an electronica type beat. The line was "The average lifespan of nations is 200 years."
At the time, I didn't know if that was an accurate figure or not. But I always thought it casually sounded about right. A lot of short-lived countries of 50-100 years and a few outliers that skew the average upwards. Sounds like there's never been a lot of actual research on it, but what there is puts the figure between 150 and 250. Given that the United States passed it's 200-year mark about two decades before that game came out, it did get me thinking about the country's time was indeed limited. I didn't know by how much, certainly, but with each passing year, I felt we were pushing our luck.
The thing was, though, I couldn't see HOW the country might collapse. I couldn't find anything really comparable. The USSR seemed to be about the closest, but really only in terms of size and power. The political structure and geographic issues were wildly different. Despite thinking about that off and on for decades, it wasn't until 2017 that I started to figure out how a collapse might happen. My guess is that individual states start seceding in "protest" of federal regulation. I could see both progressive states peeling off from a GOP-led capital or regressive states peeling off from a democratic one; who leaves first would depend on who's in power when they finally push brinkmanship too far.
One thing I did make a point of trying to learn from studying the Soviet Union's collapse was what happened to regular people. The collapse is almost always discussed in terms of the politics of it all, but rarely in terms of what happened to Joe Average who was just trying to earn a living. Spoiler: Joe Average doesn't do well. The poverty rate in the region skyrocketed from 1.5% in 1991 to 49% in 1993. Life expectancy dropped from 64 to 57. Alcohol-related deaths rose 60% and deaths from diseases went up 100%. Thousands upon thousands died as direct result of USSR's collapse. By 2004, 20% were still in poverty and by 2011, 53% could still only afford basic necessities (which technically isn't poverty, but not by much).
I've heard it said that the Soviet Union seemed strong and didn't look like it was going to collapse, until it did. And it threw many people into financial turmoil almost overnight. I think a decade from now, people will say the US didn't look like it was going to collapse, until it did. And the people who will fare best in a US collapse are the ones who have already been thinking about how to deal with it. The people who were answering the question "what can I do?" from a tactical perspective.
It was when I started understanding how and why a collapse might occur that I started publicly suggesting that the United States was unlikely to survive as a country past 2030. Now, this was back in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump first took office, so I recognized even at the time that some cynicsim on my part might be at play. But I have circled back to this notion repeatedly, and I have yet to see anything to suggest to me that my 2030 "deadline" needed to be adjusted. I still don't. Trump's time in the White House before did much more damage to the country than I think most people recognize, and even if Joe Biden did everything possible to fix things (which, to be clear, he didn't) it would've still taken decades to repair the damage Trump did.
I am absolutely NOT cheerleading the collapse of the United States here. However it happens and whoever is in the White House at that moment, it will result in thousands upon thousands of deaths. Those who aren't killed outright will suffer massive hardships, many of which will lead to early graves.
I posited all this to my friend Matt at some point. At the time, he hadn't put his own timeline out there, but he didn't think mine was unreasonable. (One of the reasons, I think, we were friends is that we often took our different outlooks, applied different data sets to them, but came to strikingly similar conclusions.) I don't know if he ever put an ultimate "deadline" on the country as a whole, but I know he chose his own time in part to make sure he avoided all of it.
I don't have anything to comfort anyone. Yes, you should do what you can. Yes, you should try to avoid collapsing into a ball of despair. But the reality is that things will get worse for everyone reading this. You will see some of your favorite businesses go under. You will see many people you know and love lose their livlihoods. You will see people you know and love have their very existence declared illegal. You will see people you know and love die. There's more than a fair chance you yourself will be one of those people who lose their livlihood, are declared illegal, and/or die. There is no way I can make any of those realities any more comforting.
Other people will have much more practical advice about resisting. Building communities. Establishing (relatively) safe havens. The practical ideas I have are largely specific to me and my situation, and circle around my and my wife's physical safety. (See the "what can I do?" portion above.) The only broader advice I can offer is to mentally/emotionally prepare for the worst, but frankly I'm not sure how to do that. Try to hold on to hope as much as you're able -- the loss of my friend Matt still haunts me and I don't want to see anyone else deal with that. But I can't offer "it'll be okay" or "it'll get better" platitudes with any degree of sincerity because I flatly don't think it will. Not any time soon.
If you are here reading this, I suspect you and I are in some measure of alignment with regard to good and bad, right and wrong, facts and opinions. So I do wish you well. I hope you're able to survive and thrive in every way possible. But luck favors the prepared as Edna Mode said, so do what you can now. Build your communities, stockpile your supplies, plan your escape route, do what you need to do.
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