PART I - HERE

So. Here we are.

And the question is: what next?

Next? Well, either he wins, or he loses.

Either he gets what he wants, and his party get what they want, and his cheering hordes get what they want, or else they don’t. http://www.armoxon.com/2020/10/streets-part-i-here_16.html

If he wins, it’s a grim matter but at least it’s a simple matter. We have enough of a trendline to see exactly where we’re headed.

We’ll see the full-throttle victory of all our old worst historical traditions and the death of all our best aspirational dreams for ourselves.

We’ll see the final death gasps of whatever shreds remain of our tattered global reputation, and the irrevocable end of our oldest alliances.

We’ll fully commit to being an authoritarian kleptocracy, a theocratic genocidal white ethno-state, which exists to line the pockets of the very wealthy and to profit off the bodies of the rest—who are controlled for as long as they’re useful, then discarded when they aren’t.

We'll be a country committed to the unchecked spread of a deadly virus, not because halting it is impossible, but because halting it can't be made profitable, while spreading it can be made very profitable indeed.

There will be some semblance of something they’ll call “elections.”

There will be some semblance of something they’ll call “the news.”

There will be troops whose ostensible purpose is to protect our borders, ranging far from the border, and others whose ostensible purpose is to protect our citizens, occupying our neighborhoods; all of them creating terrors that comprise their only true mission.

There will be locations that will be called something less overt than “concentration camps”—indeed, there already are such locations, but there will be more of them, and they will grow more efficient, and more secret.

There will be many who will die because they’ll no longer have what’s needed to survive in a country that has been architected in such a way to digest and destroy unprofitable people.

Yes, that’s what they’ll do.

If not, why are they already doing it as much as they’re able? If not, why are they already doing it more and more, the more and more they find they’re allowed? It’s not comfortable to know, but those not knowing it reveal a willful effort to not know obvious things

And if we win? If he and his party lose? If we actually manage to halt their advance?

Well. If he loses, then a somewhat more hopeful matter, but not so simple. Because we’ve learned things about ourselves, and our country, and our friends and neighbors, and our systems of administration and authority, that we can never un-know.

We now know who will look the other way, and what they’ll look the other way for. We know who will find reasons to accept unacceptable things, or become confused about obvious truth and obvious lie.

We know now what people will stand for. We know now what people will cheer for.

When the chips are down, you find out what people are like when the chips are down. And then you know.

We’ve watched the message of an openly fascist, openly white supremacist president grow, and spread, a new strain of an old virus, against which we’d stopped being vigilant; optimized for a world of television and internet, a sensationalized version of our country’s oldest sins.

We’ve heard those who would cheer this spiritual infection of hate, who would gather in red-capped throngs to spread this soul rot between each other.

We’ve heard all the excuses they give themselves for all this. And we’ve heard all the threats they’ve offered, the war they’ve promised to deliver, if they don’t get their way.

And they aren’t going to stop cheering for it, even if we depose their beloved hate goblin. They’re not going to stop expecting it, or demanding it, or fighting for it.

They’ve seen the white supremacist authoritarian anti-democratic state that Donald Trump would bring, and they very much want it. They think it's great.

But there’s more.

We now know that, even though Trump is a disruption to the status quo in some ways, he isn’t only a disruption to the status quo. In many ways, he is a part of that status quo’s inevitable progression.

He’s the result you can expect to see, in a society that believes that we have no shared society beyond individual desire, that life must be earned, that wealth is how you earn it, and that violence redeems.

We can see that Trump isn’t a disruption to business as usual, but rather a pure distillation of that business.

In other words, even though he spread a virus, Trump isn’t a virus. He’s the first unignorable tumor—for those of us comfortable enough to have ignored the previous symptoms.

Yes, he’ll have to be removed completely, but afterward things are going to have to be different. If they aren’t, then we’ll find ourselves here again.

We’ve heard all the excuses the more comfortable among us make for not making significant changes afterward, for going back to how it was before, to not having to think about politics anymore.

And we’ve heard all the justifications they give themselves for all this.

They’re not strangers, these cheering throngs, and they’re not strangers, these complacent masses. They’re the people we grew up with and live around. They’re us. They’re generous, many of them. Capable workers. Well-intentioned. Happy, smiling, friendly.

"Very fine people."

We share a country with them, whether they’ll admit it or not. We share families and tribes and country and world. We are all tied together in a natural human system.

There are people who know about the virus of hate and what to defeat it, who know about the cancer of greed and want to fight it …

… and people who know about the actual virus and want to spread it, who know about actual cancer and want to profit from it …

… and people who have deliberately decided not to know, and are working very hard now to not know.

We know things about ourselves that we hate to know, but there’s no going back. There are two questions we have to face, now that we have this knowledge.

The first question is about conviction and confession.

It’s this: *How did we get here?* http://www.armoxon.com/2020/10/streets-0-next_30.html