What's Going To Happen To Us?

 I smoked a little too much weed and spiraled last night. It was triggered by a relatively minor series of events, I simply noticed that a LOT of smashers were having trouble with their flights both to and from Genesis, with delays and cancellations causing difficulty for tons of the people I follow. This observation can of course not be divorced from the numerous US plane crashes in the news lately, which is all pretty clearly being caused by President Trump’s absolute gutting of the FAA, with hundreds of flight traffic controllers being laid off.

I really try to avoid thinking about federal politics whenever possible. I’ve realized over time that my influence over decisions made at that level is basically zero. I can vote every two years for congressional and sometimes presidential candidates, but living in Illinois means that a democratic candidate is going to win every single time in my state. I would vote D over R anyway, but that’s irrelevant. What matters is that I and my opinions don’t.

Given that voting doesn’t matter, there’s nothing I can (legally) do to change what happens in DC. That’s what makes the prospect of the next four years of Trump’s presidency extremely concerning. To start with something that affects me personally, my wife has been going into incredible debt to attend law school. Our plan for this was a program that allows all federal student loans for an individual to be forgiven after they have worked for a government body for 10 years. However, right at the start of his presidency, and right as my wife is about to finish law school and apply for jobs, Trump instituted a hiring freeze for federal employees. Many of the jobs that my wife would have applied for are now unavailable at the precise moment that we need them.

Of course this is only one small part of the new Trump regime, as we are all aware of the apocalyptic program of Project 2025. Maybe some of those plans will be stopped, but certainly not all of them. Musk’s DOGE is implementing a program of systematically stripping away what remains of the federal government's capacity to function. I worry about what will be left of the American government by the time a new president comes into office in 2029, and whether there will be a capacity to reverse any of the damage done. The prospects are grim, as the only opposition to Republican looting is the Democratic party, which spent its tenure post-Trump 1 doing jack shit.

It’s not a solution, but I recommend reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, a book which I credit with explaining the American process of privatization of government in an incredibly elucidating way. This book focuses on what America has done to other countries, but as an echo to the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 1900’s, imperialism has come home. I think that anyone who wants to understand the enormous forces we’re up against should read it.

We don’t want to think about the future because we know it’s going to be worse than what we’re dealing with now, which is already bad enough. All these political moves from the Republicans would be bad enough without a continually worsening climate crisis. How are Americans to resist the continued degradation of our standard of living? What is going to happen to us?