As fascism descends up us, is it possible for us to get used to an all or nothing existence, an artless, meaningless world where people are systematically categorized and other-ized by a single man, our great leader, Donald Trump, where we are forced to devolve into one-dimensional characters, reduced to a single adjective, discarding other individuals or groups out of hand, as they would discard us?

The individual cannot effect the fundamental shift it would take to change our current trajectory. I really wish each individual act of kindness could change the world. I wish it really worked that way, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. The cultural tone is coming fast and hard from the top down. We have been captured by a madman. And no one seems able to counter the endless degradation coming from the President. What once symbolized our highest aspirations is now a cesspool of insults, corruption and paranoia. It’s as if we are just daring him do his worst. And I just don’t see American society coming together to stop the madness.  He has us by our addiction to our comforts and conveniences, carefully engineered by an army of corporate oligarchs, sly handlers and hapless predecessors.

It’s not something abstract, going on in the highest reaches. It is affecting everyone. We all are settling for the shell of our former existence.  Relationships no longer provide the bedrock of trust, an opportunity for a level of intimacy, a spiritual exegesis, a longing for discovery and connection, we grew up knowing. We have gotten used to being separate, together in proximity but no longer in substance. In sickness and health but empty and devoid of feeling and meaning.

This creeping breakdown of important relationships is a feature of our time, a product of our corporate handlers. Disconnection has been carefully engineered into our society because people who aren’t connected, who fear each other, are simply easier to control, where accepting of our differences, embracing and trusting one another, has become an act of rebellion that will no longer be tolerated.

The idea that we can no longer believe what we see, that no one can be trusted or counted upon, has been conditioned into us from the top down, from a deeply sick mind, infecting everyone below. Orwelll described it in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Did you want that with or without ICE?

It is no longer a simple matter of approving of him or not. This kind of divide and concur, might makes right, us versus them binary thinking doesn’t just destroy democracy; it makes family obsolete, relationships irrelevant, and a meaningful life impossible. It’s all too chaotic and oppressive now for those things to matter. Chaos rules. Conflict and disfunction have been normalized. We have devolved into an Orwellian hellscape. And the rapture culture really believes Jesus will come and wipe away the suffering, that his second coming is just around the corner, when we’ll get a cosmic do-over. The next big thing will finally make everything right. The trouble with this theory is that Jesus was never anyone’s ace in the hole, who sweeps in on cue after some anti-Christ or Christlike figure, depending on your political persuasion, wreaks havoc. We must consider the most likely scenario that Trump is just a sick rapist monster, a pathetic instrument of Putin, not the instrument of God. He is simply the bringer of a giant Pottersville, where chaos and darkness reign.

What if the world is indeed committing mass suicide? The harsh desperation spreading from the top down is like a dark cloud circling and infecting all of us with a mass death wish, a mass resignation. I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to live in such a world. We may think we can somehow escape it by packing up and moving. But what if this world is the only one we have and when we have finally wrecked it, it will be gone? This dark force typified by Trump is now ubiquitous. It has become a world where children can walk away from their parents, lovers can become mutually convenient friends and eventually our insignificant others. Without love and kindness and hope binding us together we snap and lash out at the people we used to count on and trust. The detachment of online, no baggage, antiseptic connections are now more appealing than those of flesh and blood. No one expects anything of anyone in these subcultural siloed dreamworlds. We are one step shy of retiring into our tiny Metrix pods. The result of the daily onslaught of lies and chaos, shock after shock, is that no one trusts or believes anything they see. And we stop caring. We don’t even trust our gut which knows this is all a lie. Fear lurks around every corner. We feel frozen, stuck, stranded and abandoned.

That’s not what I signed up for; it’s not how I choose to live. Our only refuge from the storm is an abstract idea of a loving God, not the Christian Nationalist God that is being shoved down our throats. When my faith has been absconded, where am I to turn? I’m certain enough in my faith to know this is not the way. The world is destroying itself from within. Love itself has become a museum piece, a quaint idea only long-ago dead people used to experience. All that’s left are the symbols and relics of a time when people cared for the world and for each other.  Hope is an empty platitude from a bygone fairy tale era.

Then is the time to leave. It seems the only question is how to leave quietly without adding to the misery. We can simply die while our heart continues to beat. People have been doing it for centuries. But it has been perfected in the era of Trump. We are burdened with a sadness that is too great to be shared and too much to bear alone. We long to slink away and die. But must we literally die, enter that undiscovered country from which there is truly no return? To be or not to be is a real question being asked on mass in this terrible moment in human history. The usual answer, to hold on till morning, is becoming hollower by the moment. For we know that with every new dawn there is only going to be another shock, another distraction, another scheme, more and more chaos and misery.

Will the world eventually change? Will the pendulum swing again toward mercy or has it arrived in its final resting place? Is it too late for love? Is all hope finally exhausted? Trouble is, if we’re dead we’ll never get to be part of some great awakening that surely must be right around the corner. Something’s got to give. Will he bring about some cataclysm that destroys the entire system and most of the people all at once, together? What will happen after Trump? Who or what will fill the void? What is the vision for our future?

If by cataclysm, how will it look? When fuel reserves are gone, estimated by fall, the power, water and food supply will crumble first, our economic systems will fail, and all our money will be worthless. When insanity rules, nothing and no one can be trusted and any atrocities are possible. Each distraction is a distraction from the previous distraction. As trust dies, relationships die. We have become alone and we will likely face the great unknown alone. When there’s nothing left to live for what will keep us going?

Of course, this started well before Trump. The right’s obsession with breaking unions, enslaving workers, denying healthcare, stealing our social safety net and culling back our rights has been underway for since 1980. We have been living as mindless slaves, one accident away from catastrophe. Freedom started becoming an illusion, an empty slogan, decades ago. We’d been told for years that we must work every day of our short lives on Earth for billionaires and their army of petty anonymous millionaires, stealing our wages. What had been going on for years, Trump is finally bringing into the light, his one and only accomplishment.

“When people claim that the fulfillment of basic needs for all would destroy the incentive to work, they are admitting the entire capitalist system is based in coercion, that it is a form of slavery – work for us or starve. Labor can never be ‘voluntary’ in such a system.” The Hampton Institute

Sacrificing our lives to enrich these chosen few because enough is never enough for them has left our society broken and rudderless. We have been conditioned to sacrifice our relationships, our very soul, for these chosen few, whom we worship in return. The greed of the few at the expense of everyone else for so many years has skewed our vision, our priorities and our judgment. We can’t even see the truth of our dire condition. And we can’t take five minutes to be honest about how sick we are. We accept this malevolent capitalism as the natural condition of humanity. But it really isn’t. And now we have a president who has shattered the difference between proactivity and vulgar hubris. 

We would rather commit a slow mass suicide than be honest with ourselves. It’s been coming on for years, for centuries. We were founded in a lie, on the backs of slaves and the slaughter of native peoples. On some deep level, we’ve always known we were the bad guys. We’ve always known it was inevitable our society must die, to make room for something else, a place where people are kind to one another, not enslaving, not selfish, where beating your fellow humans is not our soul aspiration. We must sacrifice our way of being to make way for a place where lifting others up is the norm, where liberty and equality are available to everyone, where all people are valued, where in fact our people and relationships are our most valued asset. We are the world for God’s sake.

The truth is we all are now paying the price for not fighting the good fight when we had the chance. The corporate democrats took the easy road, instead of fighting the oligarchy when the fighting could have been civil. The civil war didn’t end in 1865. It has been fought in America’s living rooms for centuries. And the union has finally gone down with a whimper. We’ve been killing ourselves from within, because we’re too afraid of the unknown, the finality of real death, the uncertainty of a real fight, the fear of speaking out, even as everything we are doing is bringing us closer to a fiery end or some grand reawakening. We just can’t get off the treadmill long enough to see it. Slavery is all we know by now. We want so bad to stop but we cannot do it alone. And we have become so incredibly alone. So, we must die alone, together. It won’t be long.  What’s not working must be sacrificed to make way for something that actually does.

Should we try to hold out till after the cataclysm, on the slim chance our bodies survive the fire? Or should we sit back and watch the death march, stick our head in the sand like so many are doing, and wait for the enlightenment that probably won’t happen in our lifetime? It’s the law of nature: something must be destroyed in order to create something new and better. It is quite liberating to finally realize we’ve been living a lie. It’s awesome to consider all we thought we knew was a dark, hell-infested delusion that must now finally yield to the truth. Our familiar way of being must give way to something better.  No doubt it will be painful and God knows how we hate pain. All I can say is whatever comes after, damn well better be worth the sacrifice we are about to make.