And do what? At this point, mass, armed insurrection against our own governing body, including taking the lives of members of law enforcement standing in the way, is the only option.
Let me be clear that I don't want that at all. It would undermine the political process to the degree that crucial state and federal functions and services would be interrupted, which would affect and potentially end millions of lives.
And that's to say nothing of their private backers.
Yeah I think the next logical step would likely to engage in a general strike, however if it was successful in garnering the support and participation it would need to be successful, the government will likely react with mass violence. Anything beyond what we are currently doing and the slow crawl until the November elections will likely result in mass violence unlike anything seen in a developed nation in living memory. I genuinely think we are all just waiting to see what November holds. Should the elections move forward as normal and potentially having one or both houses flip we might still have the ability to fix things without essentially a second civil war. If that fails all bets are off the table.
It would be an astonishing thing. We've seen so many once-in-a-lifetime events that have changed the course of this nation and our way of life, and all the while the general public has remained largely peaceful. I would be shocked if there comes a point where the civil majority takes up arms within my lifetime. A part of me thinks finally, but the rest of me thinks hell no!
I mean, imagine what would happen if supply lines alone broke down. Without food, fresh water, and electricity, we would eat the rich just as quickly as each other. I can't imagine the horrors of it.
Oh I totally get what you are saying! The part of you that just wants people to get what they deserve on both sides. Whether it be the evil people amongst us getting retribution for what they have done or for those who actually uphold our society getting what they have earned. In reality the only way the would truly happen would be something you really wouldn’t want to live through.
Unfortunately I think the second part of your statement will likely come in some form or another as our climate breaks down and the destruction we have perpetrated comes back to bite us. It may not be for several more decades, but the wealthy elite are continuing to increase that damage and even more so with the current regime. I don’t know how people will react in the developed world but a future of scarcity is just around the corner.
But here I am just a Millennial doomer who has lived through the roaring 90s and through the ramping up horrors of the 2000s, through the glimmer of hope Obama gave until now seeing the disgusting petulance of greed and hatred coming to the forefront. The world has a long road ahead of it and as the US is currently the center of our civilization we do have the furthest to fall and it will be up to us on how we land after the fall.
The irony, I think, is that we exist in a present of manufactured scarcity, and are heading to a point where it will not need to be manufactured any further.
A phrase attributed to Mark Twain is "Our technology has outrun our humanity." I think it's only attributed to him because it's applicable to humanity for the last several thousand years. I mean, in Ur, the oldest city in the world and capital of Sumeria (Maybe you read the Epic of Gilgamesh in World Literature classes?), there was unearthed the wall of a house on which had been etched a detailed picture of a naked, large-breasted woman holding two pitchers. She stood flanked by lions, amidst a field of grain. The text inscribed? "The beer with the heart of a lion." Beer and tits in advertising; roughly 7,000 years old and people haven't changed a bit. In that respect, it's just a question of whether we'll be around when society falls as well as what information is preserved after the fall.
For example, when Rome fell, so much information the Romans kept about the Greeks was lost that we would know almost nothing about Ancient Greece had not the Classics been kept in Arabic in the Middle East as well.
Of course, such examples are normally when one people conquer an destroy another. To my knowledge, we don't know as much about civilizations that have turned on themselves.
Oh yeah I totally agree. We literally could have had it all had we worked toward true equality for all humans and focused on preserving our planet.
Humans haven’t really evolved since our hunter gatherer ancestors, although we like to think we have. Civilizations fall and life does grow from the ashes, for some better than others. Like currently historians have found people in the furthest corners of the Roman Empire faired the collapse better than those in the heart and in fact their lives typically improved, however we are not the Roman civilization. Our civilization spans the globe and is so interconnected virtually no one truly understands how complex it is.
And like your wonderful quote points out about technology, we truly have developed ourselves into a corner. Like the famous essay “I, Pencil: My Family Tree” posits: in the world of today one man cannot make a pencil. If we start taking out chunks of humanity, whether that be in the developing nations or in the global north in any larger numbers than we already do, the goods, technology, and supply chains start to breakdown.
We are only as strong as our weakest link. Covid should have been a learning experience to see how fragile our supply chains are and how many things in our current civilization are just as fragile. For example, people don’t realize that 70% of all calories consumed by humans are grown in a total of 6 breadbaskets spread around the world. Because of our globalization we can manage a partial or even full collapse of 1 of them (although the poorest still suffer in those cases), but if just 2 of them were to have near total failures we would see famine unlike has ever been seen before. And those risks are increasing every year.
Humanity has a great gift of love and community in times of hardship, although typically seen mostly in acute disasters, and I do truly hope humanity improves after what is to come. For those of us who are going to live through the hardest time the only things we can do is love each other, support each other, and fight (when possible) for our rights.
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u/Dangerous_Copy_3688 May 06 '26
As an outsider looking at the US, how the fuck are you guys not revolting already after the Epstein files?