In my defense I want to say I’m not apocalyptic to the point of turning to divine prophecy this week just cause I’m mentally unbalanced. The trip to Pennsylvania threw me, just confronted the fact that there was no way it could work without scrapping the whole thing and starting over, and there’s no more reserves to prop it up with, we’ve drawn down the tangible material buffers and now we’re on to drawing down like, “trust” and “legitimacy”.

And realizing that that accounted for my issues with Portland, that it must be like that around the country and we’re a lifeboat that everyone who can is escaping to, on the basis of money to buy a seat.

And neither a town of bougie professionals and their pet servants using self-serving, self-righteous morality as a shield; nor a countryside of, you know, wreckage are appealing societies to inhabit and that dynamic can’t hold, anyway, and there’s no frontier left to retreat to and regroup.

I’d kind of hoped that opposing forces could be propped against each other and grind each other down until we left a down cycle and they were both exhausted and discredited while the fresh new order assembled itself under the radar, like the ‘80s.

But no, it’s got to be torn down and rebuilt, and any possible force ready to do that would do it at terrible cost and build a terrible replacement, like the post-Soviet states and more likely they’d all try at once and fall upon each other in an even more wretched mess, and not reach stability anyway (also like the post-Soviet states, but with no New World Order waiting in the wings).

I dunno, man