Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(81)
The end of civilization has been a constant in our collective conscious, not to mention our entertainment. Through stock market crashes and housing crises, and the accelerated warming of our planet, we’ve treated ourselves to the comfort of watching our world end on our screens, over and over again—The Road, Children of Men, The Day After Tomorrow, Zombieland, Armageddon, Extinction, Deep Impact, Independence Day, I Am Legend, The Walking Dead and all its spinoffs. Maybe it’s just catastrophe porn. Maybe we’ve been trying to numb ourselves for what we’ve always known is inevitable. After all, we grew up mourning the future we’d never see.
The Apocalypse has always been a fantasy to some. Those who believe Jesus will ride down from the clouds on a white horse never cared as much about joining him in paradise as they did daydream of the perverts and sinners suffering in lakes of fire. To the equally cruel and no less delusional, the marauding hordes of brainless zombies weren’t a nightmare but masturbatory fuel that one day they’d finally get to fuckin’ shoot someone. Men would be men again. Women would be forced back into their godly role, serving the needs of manly men who protect them. And that bitch, Kevin in HR, won’t survive the first round. Fuck that guy. To the rest of us, the end of the world sometimes felt like relief. Maybe we could outrun and outsmart the violent gangs roaming our blackened cities. Maybe not. Who gives a shit. At least we’d never have to pay off the student loans and credit cards. At least we could skip the second shift. At least we’d see it coming.
It’s not that we didn’t hope for a better outcome. We watched a Black man win an election promising change, and we hoped. We actually believed. We really fucking did. But this country wasn’t built for change. This country was built, from its very founding, to maintain the status quo, to protect the rich, to protect the powerful, the white men and their money.
And this is where the Family was fucking right. God damn them. In one of those books, there’s a comic called “The American Dream Is a Nightmare.” Like a lot of the early comics, it looks like a Chick tract. And they probably did hand it out on the street back in the day. And skipping the doctrinal part, it’s fucking true. There is no getting ahead in this country unless you’re extremely talented, connected, and lucky.
We work. We consume. We get sick. We die.
Instead of freedom, instead of a chance, instead of peace, we’re sold lies. They teach you hard work and patriotism and greed are virtues. They keep us so busy struggling every goddamn day just to stay alive that we don’t have the time or energy to fight back. They tell us we have all the power, all we have to do is vote. Then they close polling locations and require ID, and only one machine works, and they won’t even give us the day off. And when we do put them in power, they’re really sorry about that vote, they’re sorry we couldn’t outbid the white men with money. They needed the money to win the next election. They’ll remember us then.
This is the greatest country on earth. Pledge your allegiance to the flag. Just don’t ask any questions. Keep your head down. Work hard. You see that guy over there? He’s worth a billion dollars. He started from nothing. You could make it too if you tried a little harder. You could make it if it weren’t for that other guy, that immigrant, those poor white trash, those welfare queens holding you down. Keep working hard. You owe it to your country, your community.
Cults fucking wish they could pull it off.
They’ve had help recently, the guys who pull the strings. Sometime back in 2007, you took a quiz to find out which Brady Bunch character you really were. And you’ve been fed a version of reality ever since. Which reality? The one the algorithm knew would keep you online longer. The news that confirmed your beliefs. You were right all along. Everyone you see on your feed agrees with you. You don’t even need to look outside. It’s all right there on your screen telling you the truth as you see it. Every time you clicked, the algorithm learned a little more about what that was. You think it’s like arguing with cult members? Fucking tell me about it.
All these things you take for granted—access to books, music, the simple ability to find an answer to a question, that what you were taught is true, that your heroes and idols weren’t predators, that the institutions you trusted wouldn’t fail you. I long ago had to question everything I’d learned, everything I thought I believed, to deconstruct an entirely false narrative of history and the world, of my country, of my life and who I thought I was. It’s fucking infuriating now to see you believe a meme or clickbait when a world of information is right there in your hand. It’s fucking surreal to watch the same confirmation bias, the same belief persistence, the same goddamn cognitive dissonance that stole my childhood turn an entire nation into blank-faced true believers. But then, if you don’t leave a cult, you’ll never know you’re in one. America is the greatest country on earth.
What does it say about us then if the only change, the only escape, the only end we can envision, is violence and annihilation? Let the motherfucker burn. They’ll kill a million of us and stack our bodies in the streets to protect the status quo. They enslaved and jailed and slaughtered entire peoples to build this nation. What’s a few million more? As long as they keep us busy, as long as it’s the other guy, as long as Facebook tells us a nice story about ourselves, we’ve been happy to go along. Until something happens, one crisis too many, a pandemic maybe, and all those systems were exposed at once—our healthcare system that never was, our economy that only works so long as we consume, our police who’ll only protect us so long as we allow them to murder with impunity, our service industry that requires the blood sacrifice of its lowest-paid workers to thrive, our food chain that’s always been a row of bleeding dominoes ready to tumble, and our governing bodies that cannot handle even the smallest crisis without sacrificing the poor and the vulnerable. Once more, on our screens, we watched it unravel. Then we took to the streets to let them know we finally were seeing it laid bare.