One of the worst things about PTSD is the feeling of impending doom you sometimes get. It’s hard to shake and impossible to ignore. I get it about six times a year, and there’s no telling how long I’ll be a prisoner. I’ve never admitted this in quite these words before. I couldn’t. How do you face such a thing? Because, when it happens, it’s overwhelming. You’re honestly certain that the world is coming to an end.
In 1999, a shitload of people had this. The hysteria was contagious. Many references were made to the “end of the thousand years”. Nostradamus was said to have predicted the battle of Armageddon in December of 1999. There were fears of computer systems crashing, leaving cities without power, and that mayhem would surely reign.
The movies that came out that year didn’t seem to help much. Schwarzenegger was in an underrated film, “End of Days”, Johnny Depp was in the terrifying “Ninth Gate”, which let everyone down with an absolutely dumbass ending to a decent story. But there were plenty of debunkers and unbelievers, too. Watching wrestling, which was better at the time, was fun. Chris Jericho went by the nickname “Y2J” in a thumbing of the nose at the worriers. His Titantron entrance showed chaos erupting.
Plenty of scholars pointed out that Nostradamus was at best a scribbler of fantasy whose writings were completely open to any interpretation a reader wanted to apply.
In November, the superstitious and pseudoscientific population took a truly weird event as an omen. In the eastern Atlantic, Hurricane Lenny was born. He did something that confounded the NOAA, no small feat. He traveled east. He was the first to be observed doing so exclusively, without looping once either north or east. He was born over water and died there, a freak among Atlantic storms which are known to be unpredictable.
The threat we faced was nothing more than fear. On New Year’s Eve I watched the countdown to midnight in Times Square. At 00:00 hours, nothing happened. Nothing blew up. Nothing shut down. Nothing crashed. There was no chaos, no mayhem.
People are often scared of the things that never happen and the things that do happen but defy easy explanation, like Hurricane Lenny. I’ve sure been hit by both. It seems that it’s in our genes.
But what gets me the most is when people should be afraid, but aren’t.
I saw that people reacted to the coronavirus with a mixed response. In some states, people stayed home, but by then the virus was well seeded here. The United States has been the epicenter of COVID-19 for months. Now people have had enough and are reopening businesses. That could have been done with minimal risk and physical distancing. Masks are mostly illusory and provide little protection. But those, combined with distancing and testing, are effective. Quarantine after a positive test result is essential. Some people did it. Some didn’t. Some were contagious way before getting tested, making it worse, so what we had before the protests was a climbing rate of infection. Stories of a decline were false or just wishful thinking and denial. No decline existed. New York may have seen a drop but that’s a different story.
The protesters are in close proximity to each other. Some wear masks, some don’t. But the lack of spacing, the viral load concentration between people as they talk or breathe heavily as they walk distances that elevate heart rate, is a really big problem. I deleted my blog “The Last of the American Dream” because nobody ever read it. To get views, you really need a paid WordPress domain and search engines have to like you. And people have to “like” your posts. I don’t have either advantage and people just don’t come here. My other blog was more political and science based. I followed up news stories on climate change and fact checked, then tried to explain in simple terms what to expect. Believe me, it’s not good. These days nobody wants to read about it. No one wants to put it on the cable news. You can ignore or even disbelieve anything you want. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It is there. Every update I read proved a past prediction about the speed of glacial melt in gross error. Sea level rise isn’t the guide, it’s merely an effect. Watching huge wedges of ice shelf fall into the sea is partially a guide, but what so many miss is that the more ice is lost, the more danger we are in, both short term and long. It should scare the shit out of you, because it’s too late to stop it. Seawater is very good at retaining heat. That seawater, perhaps a degree or two warmer than in past decades, eats away at ice. The sun heats the air more, so that blue pools of melt water are clearly seen on top of expanses of glaciers. Melting has been achieved from above and below. The tundra is thawing. Fear among scientists that an inevitable release of methane will happen, will be epic and catastrophic, are true. Yet no one talks about it. Except scientists and teenage girls smarter than any of us can ever be. Nobody reads. Nobody listens.
The pandemic may have shut down a lot of emissions as highways were empty of traffic for a minute. The Los Angeles sky cleared. The earth didn’t constantly tremble from motor vehicles. I know we can make changes. But now it’s forgotten as the fossil fuels burn again. None will remember. The climate change wasn’t slowed. It wasn’t long enough to do that. In truth even if it had been sustained for two years or more, the temperature would still rise because of what’s already in the atmosphere, which isn’t visible, as smog is.
It’s a pity people aren’t terrified of what’s in store. Every prediction is obsolete before it’s made. It’s far, far worse than you can imagine.
Being unable to imagine something is no sin, but knowing that an event or condition will come and doing nothing about it, is.
We are in an existential crisis. As a country. As a species.
Nightmares are here. More will come.
TRUMP’S AMERICAN DESTRUCTION
You can lie to others. Even to yourself. If you truly see Trump as a saviour, you are full of lies. He has set a record for lies told by a sitting president, so don’t be too hard on yourself for being full of shit.
Everything he’s done has caused irreparable damage to this country. Now Joe Biden admits to fears that Trump will as president bring all his powers to bear in order to limit ballots. He’s considered the possibility that even if he loses the election, Trump will play dictator and refuse to leave the White House. Fuck, I predicted that in 2017, then again last year on my blog. You saw the White House surrounded within days of the first signs unrest following George Floyd’s murder. A new fence. New concrete. Mercenaries brought in to show his power, armed to the teeth, as all dictators begin. He was castigated for his threat to use regular military personnel against protesters; be thankful he backed up. Someone finally stood up to him and made a difference.
That difference will vanish into nothingness when he tries it next time. He has a mission. He clearly acts on the whim of Vladimir Putin. The mission is to take this country to a level of weakness that will allow Russia to complete its invasion of Ukraine and take other countries as well. It’s about resources and military targets. While our military focused on the hopeless war against terror, draining money and wasting lives and time, Russia consolidated every resource for home defense. They can’t be prevented from military operations in other countries with the condition he’s put us in. Putin bides his time, awaiting the hour he knows Trump and his family and confederacy of goons will provide for him. We know Trump was professionally groomed without knowing how deep he was in the shit.
Putin isn’t as stupid as his puppet. He’s watched the United States lose face militarily since Vietnam. He knows what Nixon called “peace with honor” was bullshit, a dishonorable defeat in a war we should have known better than to get into following the French colonial forces getting their asses kicked. When we disengaged, everyone seemed happy. But around the globe, it was seen as proof that America didn’t hold up to its commitment to people it had vowed to save. That on the ground, in the air and even at sea, American forces could be beaten and bloodied.
That war did more damage than anyone but a few can ever know. Veterans returned broken, guilt ridden and damaged beyond the possibility of healing. Scholars picked it all apart in thick volumes that should be required reading. Documentaries were made. In the end, what remained was a nightmare Kennedy and Johnson had inflicted on our country. We’ve been mocked ever since, tested, shoved, provoked and battered as a result of incompetent intelligence and leadership. Money taken from intelligence resources and put elsewhere. Resources which would have kept us out of Iraq and prevented needless death and the destabilization of that entire region.
We are so slow to learn. Even slower to stop, take a breath and consider our actions and give proper appraisal of the possible consequences. Vietnam and Nixon changed everything. We rebounded but with his presidency the corporate world had taken hold of the republican party by the balls, and it never let go. It never will. Water rights are taken by corporate interests by the most horrible means, and in return we get chemicals that are added “for taste” but aren’t tasty at all; they simply make one thirstier as well as being a potential threat to fetuses if enough is taken in by an expectant mother. Not that each bottle contains toxic levels, but over time and with enough consumption, it’s possibly a threat. In any event it is a dirty goddamn trick. Microplastic material is found in alarming amounts and a devoted drinker has been said to take in the equivalent of a credit card in a week. But soon you’ll have no choice but to buy your water from these brazen corporations. Or, to be more accurate, illegal conglomerates who make money enough to fight court rulings and fuck us up the ass. And we take it readily, without asking for any lube or some gratuitous foreplay.
Chaos has been the rule of thumb during the Trump administration. Christ what a ride. And it’s a horror now, today, on a level we’ve never seen. We never asked for it. I have no patience for motherfucking morons who say, “He’s your president! He was elected so show respect!”
That’s normal considering they were never respectful to President Obama. They bitched despite never having one dishonorable thing he ever did for them to bitch about. The conspiracy theories never panned out. The accusations were nonsensical bullshit. He worked his ass off for us and saved us from a terrible economic situation that was the result of carelessness and greed. Trump’s been all about tearing apart everything Obama worked so hard for.
THE PANDEMIC
The Trump White House was super slow on the uptake. Someone in there knew something, sure as hell, because the CDC was required to clear statements with the administration first. And more was done to muffle the threat. We have ourselves to blame for sitting still. We got news. It was reported. Nobody wanted to believe it. Since when does something that bad suddenly travel that fast?
I read everything I could. I knew it would be bad, but I thought it would be worse than it is at this point. I talked about chaos theory and why predictions were too limited to be accurate. The NOAA has trouble predicting the paths of hurricanes, which don’t cooperate very well with data input. Programs have limits. As far as coronavirus is concerned, I knew and warned that it was impossible to predict, that this wasn’t an SIV, but a SARS disease, more contagious and more deadly than H1N1 influenza. There are variables, I wrote, which cannot be foreseen, but can and will cause the spread among the population to behave unpredictably. It was going to be worse, in other words, than the programs could calculate.
For example, who could have predicted that travel restrictions imposed by the White House would have so many exemptions? Who could have known that summer weather wouldn’t stop it, that there would be no resurgence in the fall because it never went away? Who knew Arizona or Texas would be hotspots in June?
Chaos theory dictates unpredictability in any closed system, and biology is a closed system. Outside forces may occasionally intrude, as in extinction-event meteoroids, but even that comes from an unpredictable, closed system we can define as the known galaxy. Aside from such rare events, we feel secure without reason to feel secure in any way. Disasters happen suddenly, no warning given, or with short warning. Even hurricanes can be tricky, making devilish moves and making landfall when no one was prepared because watches had been lifted. It is rare but it does happen. Just look up spaghetti models and rummage around. Have a go at it. You’ll see what I mean.
One variable impacting the pandemic is the murder of George Floyd. It outraged, as well it should have, a large part of our country. The protesters did us proud, but there’s the devil to pay. Already spikes are being seen in the infections of coronavirus. It will get much, much worse. And severe heat won’t matter. As we enter summer, Arizona is fucked-up. North Carolina has a governor second-guessing reopening public spaces or businesses. Half of the contiguous United States is seeing a terrifying rise in cases of Covid-19.
Combined, hurricane season, global warming, social and economic upheaval, political corruption and the coronavirus have put dark days in our path. Chaos theory is in full play, showing it’s not just real but that we’re weak, all too mortal, and that we must pay for our habit of not heeding warnings. Our habitual abuse of the environment. And for cowardly failing to stand up to a man with no soul. He should never have made it this far. But he has made it this far, constantly being aided by republican politicians and corporate money and clout. If I wonder whether this is the beginning of events predicted in the Bible, you’ll forgive me, yes?
You can disagree, of course. I’m sure I come off as a madman. But tell me: this time last year, did you see this coming? If someone had told you, what would you have thought?
Memoirs of an American Christian 