Dystopian scenarios are easy to conjure since so much literary ink has been devoted to portraying them. The fact that they are easy to imagine doesn’t make them more likely to happen. The immediate future may be less dramatic and more hopeful. There’s a good chance that violence will erupt throughout the country. It is unlikely that it will result in any long term seizure of power. It’s likely that there will be increasingly frequent outbursts of violence aimed at various targets that are deemed to be enemies of the white supremacist insurgency. The insurgency has allies among the police and the military, but except in some local instance they don’t dominate those institutions. Despite the evisceration of the Federal and many state governments the majority of people in government are dedicated to the rule of law.
There’s enough of a window to put the Green New Deal into motion. The creation of new jobs and the distribution of wealth back down to the lower classes will go a long way toward extinguishing the flames of discontent. That can happen quickly, within months. There are no doubt many infrastructure projects that are shovel ready, probably some left over from the stimulus program of the Obama administration. Planning for new projects has been underway for a while and many projects, such as installing solar panels, building wind turbines, retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency can get rolling quickly.
It is disheartening to come face to face with the extent of the depravity of our society, the extent to which greed and its incumbent sociopathy dominates our collective ethical character. Yet there are better angels. There have been moments in our history when goodness has come to the fore. Not that our national character has ever been completely or thoroughly wholesome, but there have been brief flashes of goodness that demonstrate that we have that quality within us. It feels precarious, but I think we have a pretty good chance. Crises provide opportunities for bold action and the government is aligned for it.
The sun may soon begin peeking through the clouds.
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