If this year has a theme, it’s that everyone is waiting for the punch of ultimate disaster to hit.
It has hit in some places. Texas, and anywhere prone to flash floods. Arizona, and anywhere prone to forest fires. Government, and anyone whose job was to help people. Iran. Gaza.
But these are expected disasters. If you’re not directly involved, they’re manageable disasters.
What I see people waiting for is the bigger punch of events beyond anyone’s control. Environmental disasters beyond our power to comprehend them. A market crash that wipes out millionaires and a few billionaires. A Depression with unemployment over 10%. A housing crash. A nuclear war. A real revolution in America.
The risk of such disasters was always with us. But before this year there was a feeling someone was in charge, that these risks could be managed. No more. The current Administration has deliberately wrecked the agencies and control points that keep small disasters from becoming ginormous ones. They’ve attacked the fundamental protections of freedom, democracy, and individual liberty, for no better reason than that they have the power to do so, and they somehow see these things as a zero-sum game. As in, if you have freedom, then in some way I don’t have it.
Liberty Requires Cooperation
What Dutch history taught me, and what English history hasn’t taught these jamokes, is that all forms of liberty are interconnected, and that there is no such thing as freedom from responsibility.
The Netherlands is a European version of Louisiana. The whole place is a delta. If nothing were done half of it wouldn’t exist. Almost half of Louisiana has disappeared in recent decades, although this doesn’t show up on maps.
It took enormous amounts of cooperation, over hundreds of years, to turn Dutch swamps into polders, and to pound pins into the polders so you could build foundations on them. It took cooperation to create corporations, to create insurance, to create banking, and to enable capitalism.
Nothing runs itself. No man is an island. These are vital lessons America has rejected. Putting one man’s family over another, with rights and wealth most can’t comprehend, creates an appearance of invulnerability. But you’re only as invulnerable as others allow you to be. The French Kings thought they were invulnerable too.
Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen need to read these words again:
“To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The Punch
American liberty was a revolutionary act. At its heart was the need for cooperation to secure its blessings. Those who refuse to cooperate lose their right to demand cooperation from the rest of us.
This is the punch line, because its implications are dire. Inequality today is greater than it was under Louis XVI. If we’re to have a class system, we’re going to have a class struggle, and Jefferson told us where that leads 250 years ago.
That’s the punch we are now waiting for.
Billionaires need to wake the fuck up.
