Here Comes Tomorrow
Spare some change, mister?
I haven’t written here in a while because the onslaught of living in a rotting society has been somewhat stultifying. The Cambridge Dictionary word of the year for 2025 was “parasocial”, but if they were truly hooked into the vibe, it would have been a gif of Riggs in Lethal Weapon putting a gun in his mouth, daring himself to pull the trigger.*
*Honestly, my favorite word of the year is one my friend Nik coined, “bogginess” - being inundated by the necessities of life so that you can’t do the things you actually want to do. Because as society breaks down, more and more of the responsibilities are offloaded onto the backs of regular folks, and more and more things fall through the tatters of the social safety net onto your head. As Jeb Lund put it in his TruthDig column:
“…I just realized that most people experienced the fall of the Roman Empire as, ‘One day a bridge collapsed, and no one came to fix it’.”
But if it’s a thing you need, then you have to fix it. If the city doesn’t have enough money to hire enough people, you’re the one that has to navigate the understaffed bureaucracy to get something done. You have to track down the missing packages. You have to wash the triple-washed lettuce in case it’s covered in listeria. You have to start thinking about setting up a compost toilet in case the plumbing goes out. If you’re wealthy, you have to start figuring out how to control your private militia when money no longer means anything. The normal spectrum of things to worry about in a collapsing empire.
I start e-mails these days with some version of, “How are you feeling as life devolves into an unending deluge of fascist absurdities generated by the most venal, violent simpletons in history?” and end them with just a picture of me drinking bleach. Google’s AI – which I keep turning off in a struggle that would make even Sisyphus say, “Give this guy a fucking break already?” – constantly sends me notices that it is “worried” about my mental health, and urging me to contact a Google-certified psychiatric technician.
It is not all hopeless; I do find myself excited for the new Netflix reality competition where teams from all over the world compete to build a new Tower of Babel in defiance of god and all that is holy. And folks, if you don’t watch Race to Depravity, you’re just not going to be part of the conversation.
Life in the Dollar Store Abattoir
But every decaying corpse has a maggot that finds a patch of rotting flesh no one else has chomped down on.* And buddy, I found my corner of the cadaver. One of the missions of these essays has been an attempt to answer some questions that I see repeated over and over online; questions that are asked in good faith, but that emerge from a historically-oblivious or neoliberal or heavily, heavily propagandized understanding of how the world works. The point is to not just answer these questions, but to give them some philosophical context so that the people asking them might not just get an answer, go, “Oh, okay,” and then go back to discussing Race to Depravity on Reddit (“Team Defilement is really spitting in the face of the the lord with their tower!”), but actually metabolize it and perhaps even transform ever so slightly. If one’s aim is to actually change things (the world, oneself), one has to be clear about how those things actually work. Step one is asking the questions; step two is asking where the questions come from and kicking the tires on your ideology. Step three is… uh, something. But step four? Change!
*A very common saying.
Over the last year, I’ve seen variation after variation of the following: either vehement exhortations of “General strike now!” or vague lamentations of “When will it end?” or “Why aren’t we doing anything?” (The latter mostly from folks who, in their hearts, identify more with the cops than Marsha P. Johnson.) I’m joking – kinda – but many of the well-meaning people who say these things and ask these questions, they’re the people who think Trump is the culprit and once we, or whatever microscopic beast is currently rotting him in plain sight, runs him out of town (or “runs him out of town”), everything will be okay.
Back in 2020, the confluence of Covid and the egregious, difficult-to-ignore murder of George Floyd created a fracture in the unreality bubble that America had built for itself. The bubble itself was manufactured partly as a protectionary mechanism, to protect ourselves from the genuine truth of what it was to live during the dying days of a collapsing empire governed by violent white supremacists. While it’s rather cowardly to skulk around in the shadows of Reality to avoid the truth, on a charitable read, it was to avoid going fully insane. On an uncharitable read, it was out of pure denialism, because to face the music would mean that you would have to start grappling with the moral dimension of benefitting from such a psychotic society, and for fuck’s sake, if you have to make a real moral decision, that’s going to change your entire self-image. But if you continue to avoid the truth, all you have to grapple with is the little troubling knowledge in the back of your head that you’re not the good person you thought you were. And there’s a little something we call “drugs and alcohol” that we use to make that voice shut up.
But if you genuinely grapple with how to be a good person in a country that’s mostly made up of hedge funds and abattoirs, you’re going to have to completely reconfigure how you live in the world. Both the repression and the reconfiguration are a lot of work. Better to live in denial.
But the bubble burst for part of 2020. Some people were radicalized; most, as the Biden administration went about with its slightly-less-brutish (domestically, at least) version of neoliberalism, went back to business as usual. The memory-holing of Covid coupled with the construction of a completely fraudulent economy based on scam after scam – NFTs, crypto and then AI – helped build the bubble back better. Though by 2025, it was totally straining. Americans’ ability to live in Unreality was getting increasingly more and more fraught and, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, this was being reflected in our increasingly bizarre behavior.
However, as more and more people are shot in the streets by government agents, our country’s true being – that America is just a dull-witted Klansman with excellent PR, Adolf Eichmann in a Party City Uncle Sam costume – has become almost impossible to ignore. Even though the US and its proxy states, for the entirety of our lifetimes, regularly murdered dozens of people – at minimum – daily, sometimes egregiously and publicly, like Hegseth’s double tap strike on the South American fishermen in early December last year, average Americans could stay ignorant about what that actually meant about us. But watching cadres of dull clods execute innocent people in the streets has, like George Floyd’s murder, made the problem too present, too manifest. The bourgeois desire to be a good person – or at least be seen as a good person – despite the fact that we directly benefit from this ghoulish depravity creates a fractured psyche, and in 2026, the contradiction of being an empathetic person living in the imperial core has become too difficult to contain, too difficult to ignore, and the ways we were solving that contradiction previously no longer do the job. The oxy’s run out, and all that’s left in the cabinet are Skittles.
Some people can hold the psychic dissonance together without allowing it to collapse into denialism; they face the truth and let it radicalize them to work in whatever capacity they have to dismantle and replace the system with something more humane. Some people gleefully (or quietly) throw in their lot with the barbarians. Others devote more and more psychic energy to shoring up the protective bubble, their behavior becoming increasingly strange as reality encroaches more and more into their constructed world.* Some, out of ignorance (the inferiority of our educational system is, I have to believe at this point, by design) or an obsequious idealism, no matter how violent things get (up to a point, I suppose), pour all their energy into continuing to work within the system. Increasingly shrill appeals to vote, call your reps, and participate in the occasional impotent, rudderless march batter us like the category 12 storms that are now weekly. This only deepens the contradiction, but sometimes the contradiction gets so deep, it puts your psyche to sleep.
*The fascists, through media control and AI, have constructed their own parallel universe, but living in it might be easier because 1) maintaining unreality is less psychically intensive for them because unreality has the opposite effect on sociopaths; they are allowed to finally unmask and let loose the bloodthirsty oaf that they’ve been hiding from the world for most of their lives and 2) those dipshits have cash, power and a tighter control on the boundaries of their fabricated universe.
Oh, also, you could be nihilistic or apathetic. What Sartre would have called, “The Lazy Asshole’s Path”.
So yes, in the wake of the three very public, very obvious murders by government agents*, at least two of which were captured explicitly on video from numerous angles, it makes most of these, the denialism and rationalization and heck, maybe even the apathy, very difficult states for most people to live in, and all my social media timelines are – justifiably – filled with angry, anguished people earnestly clamoring for change. This age is producing legions of confused folks with energy and a gut feeling that the whole country needs a page one rewrite, but it has not yet given them the context or will or structures to do so.
*It’s obvious, but just to state it plainly, it is the egregious, public nature of the murders, but very specifically, the egregious, public nature of the murders of two white people. ICE has been murdering, deporting and disappearing people for the entirety of its 24-year-old existence, and at least one recent death of someone in ICE custody was ruled a homicide. And who knows how many corpses CECOT has produced.
The Sandy Hook Principle
For the last few years, I’ve been mulling over a proposition in my head that I’ve been calling The Sandy Hook Principle. If Americans en masse are willing to continue on with their everyday routines after dozens of children and teachers are murdered in a mass shooting, they will accept almost any violent action that doesn’t immediately interfere with their daily lives.
This isn’t an indictment necessarily. If you’re reading this, and you’re like, “Fuck you, pal. What’d you want me to do?” The answer is, you, individual person reading this, no, I am not criticizing you. I am, however, trying to describe the conditions by which we might escape out from under the mangled thumbs of the deranged cretins that have slithered their way to the heights of power.
If Americans, living in a country built by evangelical white supremacy, are willing to watch their white, Christian children be violently exsanguinated and do nothing, they will not agitate for clean air in their own children’s classrooms; they will not stop their own children from being infected with a disease that, if you get it enough times, it causes brain (and organ and immune system and chromosomal) damage; they will stop vaccinating their children against preventable diseases; and they certainly will not mask in public voluntarily. They will not oppose the genocide of a people halfway across the globe, which is assiduously documented daily on their phones; they will not oppose the ethnic cleansing of a rich and beautiful culture and its replacement with a dogshit society that makes Mad TV look like Cervantes. They will not oppose the American Nazi gestapo that has been operating, in the same way, just more surreptitiously, since 2002.*
*For fuck’s sake, over a decade ago, people wouldn’t even stop eating at Chik-fil-A after the CEO made homophobic remarks, and it was revealed they donated millions to anti-LGBTQ+ organization WinShape Foundation. I remember clearly people saying the food was too good. And look, I get it, they’re the only restaurant to ever receive a Michelin star, and there’s certainly no where else you could ever get food like that, so sublime that the act of eating it becomes a work of art in itself, worthy of van Gogh (and heck, I’d love to get in a van and “gogh” get a couple orders of their 80-piece nuggets myself). But this is what I’m talking about, as a society, we are not prepared to make even the smallest sacrifices to change things.
Again, chill out, reader; this is not an indictment but an analysis of what will it take to change. Because if people are willing to swallow mass death in all these myriad ways, if they’re willing to swim in a dull, meaningless culture with life experiences that range from ‘mostly unsatisfying’ to ‘genuinely distressing’, they will not act to change it. To change things in America requires, in this early stage at least, one to perform a supreme act of self-redefinition, to reeducate and reposition oneself and stand in opposition to the sheer overwhelming wash of most people thinking and behaving differently. You have to become an early adopter of ethical integrity before it becomes hip and cool, the first person to wear the virtuous fanny pack across their torso. You must be the early hominid of moral rectitude.
Until there is a critical mass* of people willing to do this, it is a lonely endeavor and therefore most people are unwilling to actually engage in it. I know this personally because I still mask. Because most people want to deny how bad being repeatedly infected is, or maybe even worse, do understand the science, do understand how much repeatedly getting Covid damages your body, but are willing to live a shorter life or willing to risk becoming disabled**, in order to eat inside at In-N-Out or see The Wizard of Oz with Zaslav’s face edited in at The Sphere. To metabolize my existence and the existence of everyone else who masks in public, the majority of people must either regard me as crazy, overcautious, a hypochondriac or immunocompromised myself.
*There are tons of people in Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis and every other city where ICE is killing and disappearing folks that are fighting back, forming neighborhood watches, engaging in mutual aid and working in whatever capacity they can to protect their neighbors. On a larger scale, there are people like Roger Hallam, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, who, in his words, designs revolutionary change, who are building the guidelines for community resistance and the construction of a shadow government that truly represents the interests of the people. There are academics and artists and pipefitters and nurses all figuring out ways to oppose the fascist barbarity of the dipshit Right in ways that are amazing, surprising and promising. I’m not trying to paint a picture of mute compliance with the gestapo and obeisance from sea to shining sea. While I am pessimistic, it’s not because of the inspiring work of people putting their bodies on the line to resist ICE. (I mean, if I’m being honest, if I’m pessimistic, it’s because my parents mainlined the horrors of the Holocaust right into my veins from an early age, so I always assumed we’d end up back here somehow.)
I wouldn’t even call this pessimism. They are just observations of what is needed to truly change society. And it’s going to require a critical mass of people willing to do the difficult work of reckoning with their own existences and making concrete changes to the way they live and exist in the world. Actually, it’s not pessimism; it’s a recognition that accepting the epiphany and doing the resulting work are incredibly difficult tasks to undertake.
**Obviously because it’s all just abstract. I doubt that most people who know the dangers of Covid and don’t take any precautions will actually be okay with dying a few decades early or becoming disabled for the back half of their lives. Also, I’m not even discussing the culpability one has when they knowingly pass around a disease that is still killing thousands of people weekly.
The structures of a fascist society in the midst of apocalyptic capitalism – the rewards one gets for going with the flow and the punishments one receives for opposing it –make it extremely isolating to adhere to even the most basic, scientifically-accurate understanding of reality. For those that lament publicly, “What will it take for us to rise up?” the answer is simple to say, but long and arduous to undertake. A person’s material conditions must change such that it is more unbearable to live and benefit from a violent regime than it is to be socially marooned. The reward for trying to change the world must be more exciting and meaningful than the punishment for trying to change the world. The excitement and rush of meaning into one’s life must become contagious until there are a critical mass of people willing to risk both their lives and their own self-image.
This is a long-term, generational* task. If what you actually want is for the violence to go below the surface again, for the images and outrage on Instagram to be hidden by the algorithm, if you want to go back to discussing Oscar snubs without the fiddling, little feeling in the back of your head and mental flashes of bloodstained concrete, if that is what you want, the work will be building thicker and higher psychic walls to keep the world out. The work will be to not go absolutely insane as reality leaks in through the cracks.
*The more one is embedded in the system – the more your sense of self and livelihoods and friendships and emotional wellbeing draw their power from The Way Things Are – the more difficult it will be to truly change. I don’t want to say that Boomers and Gen X are lost causes, but they reproduce the current order with every molecule of their being. To paraphrase Thomas Kuhn, the change will truly come when the old order dies away.
But if you want actual change, at a minimum, it will require expropriating the ill-gotten gains of billionaires and the imprisonment of the entire ruling class (Dems and GOP alike) and their loutish henchmen, and to do that will require the sacrifice of our dreams and probably many of our lives. As I have been perpetually asserting, this is not an indictment of the average person who so far has been skipping down the killing floor of American life. Deep, fundamental change is a lot to ask of people and because of that, it will require the material conditions that force people to act. When your existential dreams and your own life mean less than the liberation of all, when the pain of living in such a noxious, inhuman society gets to be too much, you will have to make a decision.
Maybe this will be a defining moment for a lot of people. Where mass shootings felt remote and Covid’s wreckage is mostly invisible on the short term, a legion of small-minded cretinous beasts and moral lilliputians goose stepping across the street from their local Dairy Queen is a fantastically visceral and galvanizing image. Being harassed by some newly-deputized Atomwaffen half-wit while you’re just trying to get an Oreo Blizzard can be radicalizing.
The truth of the world is beginning to impinge itself on large populations of heretofore blithely unaware Americans whether they like it or not. We live in shining city built on a mass grave and the work it takes to cover up the stench is becoming too much to bear. Or, as Audre Lorde wrote much more eloquently, “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them?”
Trading in societal camaraderie for moral clarity is obviously fraught, but if you can make the leap, existence becomes truly vibrant. It’s like yesterday, I started out watching the 2009 film Gamer, a grim, almost-campy C+ action film (with some very fun performances) and finished with Park Chan-wook’s 2024 Decision to Leave, one of the most visually and emotionally engaging films I’ve seen in a while. Grimy bullshit you can barely swallow is on one side of the divide and incandescent, melancholic meaning is on the other side. What can you live with? What can’t you?
