I've been thinking about the "burn it all down" rhetoric used by a lot of the individuals on this website. Like, the people that are waiting for the violent, glorius revolution to overthrow the United States so they can finally rebuild it as a better, functioning society.
The idea being that if everything keeps getting worse and worse, eventually somethings gotta give. It's gotta break, and then the rebuilding will begin.
This seems to be closely related to the desire to withhold votes for Harris/Walz, because all they will do is maintain the status quo. And while Trump is arguably worse, he will take them toward the desired "breaking point."
But something that I learned during the height of the Covid pandemic is that this is not true. Or at least, not in the way we think it will be true.
Covid, to me, felt very much like a kind of apocalypse. It was definitely the kind of thing that would have been an apocalypse, if real life was the like the movies.
Society collapses, mass panic as all our systems fail and the world returns to disorder and chaos and life starts to become purely about survival. Streets are empty, you're scavenging for food, the world of polite society has ended for good.
Obviously that didn't happen. It was like, this horrible disease tore the world apart, the apocalypse happened... but nothing really changed. I mean, it did. The whole world changed, and it will never be exactly the same as it was before.
But everyone just kept going, too. There was a stop for some people (white collar workers whose jobs could be done remotely, mainly) but not for everyone else.
And everyone kept having to pay bills and taxes and do their laundry and walk the dog and buy groceries and whatever. We were just doing that all as the world felt like it was ending around us.
Like that's what movies don't tell you about the end of the world. It doesn't end. Not in a big way, a huge explosive way. It's just a whole bunch of little endings where the world just gets shittier and harder to bear in all these ways. Your job becomes harder, your life is literally threatened every time you leave the house.
Certain services just shut down and don't come back, new mandates that make everything harder and shittier are put into place, people die in masses but you're still expected to get on the bus to work every day at the same time.
But all those little endings and the all the ways the world got worse and worse and worse, they never add up to the one big explosive apocalypse that the movies promised.
Where life stops being about paying taxes and scheduling dental appointments and paying bills and starts being about learning to shoot a gun so you can kill your dinner and then take shelter in an abandoned Cheesecake Factory before the zombies show up.
In the real world, the zombies are eating your friends and family and your boss still expects you to clock in at 9 am like usual. And you do it because what other choice do you have? The zombies didn't get you today and you still gotta pay all those bills.
And I think that's just what the world is. I think that's just life, to an extent. The world as we knew it ended forever with Covid, but it also kept on going (not to be like "we were the zombies all along" but the comparison is tempting).
It seems logical that something can only bend so much before it breaks. That the world can only get so much worse before it blows up completely. Capitalism, at least. It's a self cannibalizing system, it's not sustainable forever.
But I don't think it will die the way you'd think it would. With the big satisfying explosion, the absolute end where it all burns down and paves the way to rebuild.
The big revolution, the huge overhaul of it all.
What's more likely is it will just get worse and worse and worse in a bunch of smaller ways, until we redefine our tolerance for suffering to accommodate it.
Because that's what we do. We think "this is rock bottom, it can't get worse." But it does, because it can, so we get our jack hammer and go lower because the bus is waiting and we've got bills to pay.
I think we could do that for a long time. Not forever maybe, but decades more? Almost definitely? Another century? Who knows. I won't.
"Burn it all down" may never come. Just smaller deaths, little apocalypses happening all around us every day.
I see the appeal of burning it all down. It almost feels like it would be a relief, at times.
It's much, much more tiring to try and find all the little ways we can build it back up right now. While it's still standing, maybe a little worse than it was yesterday, but functional. To find the cracks and seal them up, plaster over the holes and find a way to repair the little deaths.
Because it gets worse in little ways all the time, but it can get better, too. And it does. In small ways, every day. Good policies are passed, bad ones are repealed. People make connections and campaign for positive change and there's no big, splashy "we saved the day and ended all evil for good!" resolution like the movies, but the little wins do exist.
The thing about real life is that there is no big apocalypse. Not for everyone. And there is no happily ever after.
But there is small happiness, small victory. Small change, small fights that can be won. And just like the little deaths add up to a world that always seems to be getting worse, the little victories add up too.
The trick, i think, is to not get so caught up in the way it's worse that we stop seeing the ways it's better. That we get so entranced by the romance of burning it all down that we forget all the smaller ways we can and should be fighting to build it back up.
Because at the end of the day, you're still gonna have to go to work tomorrow. Might as well do what you can to make it better in some small way, instead of waiting for it to all get worse.
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