hex_m_hell

I keep finding useful ways of thinking about things as I continue to read Dawn of Everything by Graeber ( et al.)

The book outlines 3 basic forms of domination:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

The modern “state,” it argues, is an illusion. Rather than being a thing itself, it's instead the combination of these three forms of domination. Additionally, these forms of domination, historically, did not necessarily develop together. While this is a useful way to think about the past, I think it's especially relevant right now to explore Neoliberalism as an ideology, Trumpism relative to other fascist movements, and what we can do about this whole mess.

Using this framework, I would argue that Neoliberalism positions sovereignty within the entity of the state (as the abstraction of “the people,” expressed through, occasionally militarized but often not explicitly military, law enforcement). In practice, a sovereign, as Graeber eludes to, combines elements of an authoritarian parent and a helpless child: the sovereign must be obeyed without question, but also requires constant care (to be dressed, fed, driven or carried around, etc). The sovereign is, by definition, above the law.

The aspect of violence beyond the law aligns quite well with modern law enforcement and the legal apparatus, able to kidnap, restrain, and kill without repercussion. While we will revisit this later, there is another group under Neoliberal capitalism that demands both obedience and constant care: the 1%. (In the US, the elite are so jealous of parents paying attention to literally their own children that they have rejected the concept of parental leave almost entirely.)

In 2014 Princeton University published a study basically proving the US is an oligarchy not a democracy (do you remember? Pepperidge Farm fucking remembers). We all know that the desires of the elite are more predictive of what policy will be implemented than are the desires of the population. So we are told that “We The People” are the root of sovereign authority, but we all really know, at least on some level, that none of us plebs are actually of that “We.” (Yet, there remains a cultural expectation that one performs belief in that illusion.) The US was designed, from the beginning, to produce this exact result. One of the most interesting and relevant (to this topic) observations in Dawn of Everything is, in fact, hiding in a footnote and is, actually, a reference to another book:

[…] whenever one group has overwhelming power over another […] both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will be an 'official version' of reality – say that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only ever have the best interests of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insist subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event.

How much more accurately could we describe “the job creators,” demanding us to perform submission? What are demands like “return to office” and “use AI” but the forced performance of submission against all logic and reason? As private equity drove up the price of housing, the threat to tech workers became “if you want to own a house, to build equity, submit. Otherwise, risk being houseless.”

Capitalism, as pointed out in Divine Right of Capital (Marjorie Kelly), took the structure of the monarchy pretty directly into the corporation. Historically, the monarch was the physical manifestation of the state. The corporation itself has legal personhood, emulating the same structure. Those within the realm of the monarch were functionally property, and so, Marjorie Kelly points out, this leaks through the veil when a corporation is bought or sold. Physical property is listed, but so too is a thing called “good will,” which, she argues (and I think demonstrates quite well in the book), is actually people (employees).

Historically the liberal “left” has pushed for a balance between bureaucracy integrated into the state and externalized bureaucracy managed by “markets” (markets which the state is then also responsible for managing). The liberal “right” generally pushes to externalize all bureaucracy to those markets and also not manage them at all. The global plague of Neoliberalism that lead us to fascism is essentially a complete acquiescence to the later.

Private security and, even more so, private military companies add yet another layer to the sovereign control of violence and right to act outside the law. But whether in the state or corporations, both sovereignty under Neoliberalism is solidly in the hands of the elite while bureaucracy may be offloaded to the state (so long as it does not inconvenience the sovereignty of the elite).

The defining facet of liberalism and Neoliberalism alike, though, is that of charismatic competition (labeled as “politics”). Competition between elites for symbolic control of power is the very definition of “freedom” as understood by those who believe in liberalism as an ideology. The fact that the two parties are not bound by any laws or restrictions to operate democratically, that they are simply clubs that can operate by any rules they see fit, that they are transparently controlled by elites to artificially restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, is irrelevant to the ideology. Freedom to choose who represents one's masters is the ultimate freedom.

This, not the arbitrary use of violence, not the blatant distortion of reality, not being rooted in white supremacy and Christian nationalism, this is the most important difference between Trumpism and the oder he's trying to replace.

Authoritarianism eliminates the competitive element of politics while maintaining or expanding sovereignty. State Communism unifies sovereignty and bureaucracy. Nazism and Italian Fascism moved sovereignty out of the state and on to the leader, but maintained bureaucracy (both for the execution of sovereign violence, but also for some elements of social reproduction). Trumpism follows Neoliberalism in the complete externalization of all bureaucracy not explicitly supporting the execution of sovereign violence.

In this way, Trumpism becomes a power sharing system between the dictator and the oligarchy. It stabilizes, some elites may believe, the relationship between corporations and the sovereign. It can even allow elites to express their own sovereign violence, so long as they don't threaten the core sovereignty of the dictator.

This is almost a fun house mirror reflection of the pre-existing order. Where once the federal government delegated sovereignty to the states, and states to counties, and counties to cities, all having maximum sovereignty within their own domain so long as it doesn't conflict with the sovereignty of the container, Trumpism places the dictator as the ultimate authority, delegating to oligarchs, and they to their corporate underlings, each earning their position through fealty to those above. Fealty being a key word here, as others have pointed out that this is just another take on Feudalism.

While analysis is all good fun, it's not alone actionable and what we need, in the face of this horror, is action. What does this tell us to do about Trumpism?

Let's turn for a moment to the section of Dawn of Everything from which the earlier mentioned footnote comes.

Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a rule's actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don't want to do). If 'the state' means anything, it reference precisely to the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

Society is a ritual. There is a limit to the ability of any sovereign to force our participation in that ritual. The sovereign requires agents, who must, by simple resource limitations, always be a very small minority, to carry out their will. The agents must believe in what they're doing, they must get something out of it, it must be valuable to them to continue to do it. When it ceases to be valuable, they will stop. When the agents of the sovereign stop enforcing the sovereign will, the ritual collapses.

Then we have two strategies, in parallel:

1. Do not comply.
2. Make active compliance as unpleasant as possible.

Neither of these necessarily require violence. A system can collapse through non-compliance long before defensive violence is necessary. But the ability to absorb violence is critical as violence is the only tool of the sovereign who lacks bureaucracy and charisma. And violence may become necessary as sovereign terror, thus the capacity for defensive violence is always an essential element of non-compliance. But non-compliance is not always visible, and invisible non-compliance can be enough to bring a system to collapse.

Now, it would be absurd to claim that violence is not the fastest path to making active compliance maximally unpleasant. However, I don't believe that violence has a well balanced effort to result ratio. Violence has a tenancy to alienate less radical elements thereby decreasing resistance capacity. It also tends to reduce capacity by getting people arrested (some of whom may be the ones who carried out an attack, and many of whom are not). Arrests bring legal fees and defense organizing, all of which takes away from energy that could be invested in resistance methods with a better effort to result ratio.

It should, however, be noted that diversity of tactics is important. Reporting people to the police if they use a tactic that doesn't align with your own effort to result calculations is, in fact, a form of compliance. Cooperating with law enforcement in any way is a form of compliance that helps the regime. I feel as though this should be so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but some people apparently are ideologically incapable of recognizing it.

This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.

They also take on the aspect of the dictator. That is, through the dictator they become the projection of the character of the dictator. If the dictator projects the illusion strength, then they believe themselves strong. If the dictator projects the illusion of sexual potency, they believe themselves to be sexually potent. Openly mocking those those specific elements separates the micro dictator from the macro one. That is, it refutes their “right” to ritually embody the illusion. In doing so, it is a direct attack on their reason for participating in the ritual. Portland is nailing this one.

Acting outside of the law means acting without accountability. Trumpism (and to a lesser degree liberalism itself) asserts that only the state as the right to hold people accountable. Only in this way can sovereignty and the law be ultimately united. This is bullshit, as we've proved innumerable times in the past. There should be, and often is, a social cost to anti-social behavior (outside of the legal one). We have always had this power, and always will, regardless of Trumpist attempts to crush or belittle it. This is, of course, why they wear masks.

They wear masks because are afraid.

Then we turn to that most critical part of that so well known Ursula K. Le Guin quote:

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

The ritual can only continue so long as enough people participate in the ritual. The ritual is a collective illusion, a story we build together. Children pretend themselves into all kinds of world. Adults don't stop pretending, we simply forget that we've been pretending the whole time. Though a regime could even take your life, and force you to behave as though you were a believer, nothing on Earth is powerful enough to make you actually believe. That power, the power to believe the illusion, is in you alone.

The game we are choosing to play is one that has been given to us, not one we have chosen, not one we have crafted. Nothing stops us from creating a new game. Nothing stops us from playing something else. Nothing except the limits of our own creativity, and the fear that imposes those limits.

I awoke to the sound of a gunshot resolving out of the white noise of a fan near our bed. You can tell the sound of a bullet because it has a tail. I remember those nights after we first moved to South Seattle, listening and playing gunshot or firework. I bet most of the white folks gentrifying the area at the time couldn't tell the difference, but we could.

This is maybe the third or fourth time I've woken from a nightmare tonight, but it wasn't a nightmare this time. It was a sound… a sound that wasn't a sound. It took me a few moments to realize I didn't hear it with my ears, but with the skin above where my solar plexus was. There's skin there now, above the missing cartilage and bone, where there once, and for almost a year, was only a hole.

The next question, when we would identify a gunshot, was “whom?” You could hear the police shooting range in the neighborhood. Sometimes the sound was far off and ambiguous. Others it was close and there was no mistaking. Sometimes it was followed by screeching tires. Most of the time we didn't hear an ambulance.

If you were by the elementary school during recess as kids played, the sound of gunfire from the range would occasionally mix with the screaming of children.

I didn't hear the gunshot that night. At least, I don't remember hearing it. I didn't know I'd been shot until I saw the blood, then someone came up and told me. Those moments, of the actual shooting, were blank and remainded so for a long time. It took me years to put together what happened. Sometimes remembering is still a little like unscrambling an egg.

People want to know what it's like getting shot. When they ask, they're always wondering about the moment, or the time from the instant where everything stops making sense until it stops being interesting to them: when they knock you out in the ambulance, your first surgery, whatever.

Movies only seem to show those moments, and everyone knows, at least on some level, that they usually get those moments wrong. But even if they got them right, that's not what matters. That's not the experience. It's never that strange and narrow stretching minutes that feel like hours. It's the months that feel like days and years that feel like weeks that follow.

There is no easy way with sound and motion to convey the time dilation of trauma, the roller coaster of a long recovery. Nor is there a way any way to convey the spontaneousness of body horror that interrupts it.

It isn't the sound, the bullet, the blood, the shock, the moments that are important. It's the nurse coming in and roughly shoving you aside to change the sheets from under you, days or hours after surgery, leaving the gaping wide wound, from sternum to groin, agonizing and bleeding again, yet another reminder of the fact that your fragile humanity is an inconvenience to a world built to tighten schedules and drive numbers.

It's talking to a friend in the kitchen, a few weeks after getting out of the hospital, before you crumble to the floor as your muscles seize. It's waiting for most of the night to find out that, despite the fact they told you the it might be in there forever, the bullet was pushing out right then and had to be cut out. Fortunately there's someone who needs surgery practice, otherwise you'd have to wait, in overwhelming pain, until the next day.

It's the nightmare 6 months later about being hunted by a sniper, as you try to find place to hide, in a building entirely made of glass.

It's the anger the comes out of nowhere, the terror that surprises you. It's remembering, for the first time, being grabbed and held right before being shot, five years after it all happened. It's remembering the sound of the gunshot in your body more than 8 years later.

In the hospital, under ketamine, I was able to focus on my pain, to see it as signals coming from my nerves, to follow it down to my wound, and to watch the muscles and nerves weave together. Pain became healing. There were different types of pain though. There was the constant pain and there was a different nerve pain that would come and go, sometimes bringing memories.

I saw a language in my nerves, communicating between each other, signaling up when appropriate. Some nerves were severed by the bullet, others were walled off in my mind to protect my psyche from the enormity of it all. I imagined them screaming, unable to reach the rest of my body, unable to tell my brain. I imagine them reconnecting after screaming for so long. For years they have been trying to tell me that something horrible happened, and some new path opened up to allow the signals back in.

So here I am, waking up, at 4 am, 8 years after the shooting, hearing the gunshot for the first time as sensation in my body as. This is how you experience a shooting, not in the chaos of the moment but bit by bit, over the years that follow, as experiences in your body, as echos.

I have a shoe box full of cards from all over the world. If you wrote to me while I was in the hospital, I still have your letter. I read each of them. They were all really wonderful. I'm sorry I didn't write back. I was a little distracted at the time. Perhaps I still am. Consider this the thank you I never sent.

When I came down from intensive care the first time they were all set up in my room. There were some flowers. There was also a giant card signed by a bunch of local comrades. I still have that somewhere too. I've considered donating it to the labor history department of UW as a thank you to Anna Mari, with a few of the pictures we took for her in the hospital later.

One of the letters has one corners is cut off, but all the rest are as they were when I opened them.

The days in the hospital all blurred together. At the beginning it was easy to keep things clear. I was in the OR. My partner came to see me as soon as I could be seen. I think I was in Intensive Care for about a week. My tattoo was pretty well stapled together. I was impressed. Everyone thought I was healing really well. I do tend to heal well. My tattoo artist, the one who did the chest piece that got the bullet hole and all cut up in surgery, had said at one point while working on it, “you heal like Wolverine.” I do heal pretty quickly.

So after that first week or so, when they told me I would probably go home soon, I was a little surprised but not incredulous.

I came into that room full of cards, flowers, my loving partner, friends. I was hopeful, that first time out of the IC. We all were. We read the cards together. Everything was pretty good. But I did have a pain in my lower abdomen. I asked for a heat pack or something, and they brought me one. My partner and friends had left the room for a little bit. I don't remember the details. A nurse, I believe, came in and talked to me a bit. I mentioned the pain and she smelled my wound, then told me they were going to take me to imaging. After she flagged folks down she said something along the lines of, “No, take him straight to the OR.”

The pain got worse and everything became a blur. I remember leaving the room, but I don't remember what happened next. My partner filled me in later.

In that box there's also a note that I wrote. I think it was about the first night. They always keep you in the IC after that type of surgery, as I understand it. Being so badly injured, time really blurred. I was asleep, then awake, it was day then night. They came in every few hours to check on me, take blood, change my fluids. Every day or two they pulled my IV and gave me new one. Every few hours, I'd sleep for a bit and someone would come in, poke me a bunch of times, then go. Sometimes they'd move me around and change the sheets.

I remember it being dark, but honestly I have no idea. I wasn't fully awake at the beginning. I don't remember much very clearly at all, except the quiet and then the screaming, then the heavy sound of the zipper. It felt like she was crying for hours. The screams of agony, of despair, are not something you can describe. They started loud, loud enough to keep me fully awake, loud enough she must have lost her voice the next day.

It can't have been an expected death. Perhaps a parent dying early, perhaps a partner, or a child. Everything in her screamed at that first moment in response to the soft mumbling voice down the hall. Over time her screams became an exhausted whimper.

I heard another voice. “Yes. Yes.”

There was the juxtaposition between the business of death – this happened, that happened, sign here, what arrangements need to be made for the body – and the emotional experience of it. I imagined it to be a relative, perhaps a sister, taking care of this business and occasionally comforting her sibling. When the business was done there was some walking around, but the crying, slowly becoming quieter, stayed in the same place. The light came on so I could hit the button for more pain killers. In the first few days after surgeries, the pain was always right there. I hit the button and fell slowly back asleep. I think this was my first night in the hospital, so it was almost a week until I would spend my brief time back in the general care area.

When my partner came back to the room I'd just been rapidly evacuated from, they were already cleaning it. All the cards had been thrown into a biohazard bag. She was barely able to save them. There was an orange liquid coming out of one of the tubes in my body. We later talked about how my partner had to empty my guava juice pouch every day for some time after I got out of the hospital. One of the cards had been thrown on some gauze or something with some of this orange liquid and had soaked some up into the corner. She cut it off. The others were fine.

There was a carelessness and callousness to the business of the hospital. The room was empty, so it was cleaned for the next person. The humanity of the situation was irrelevant to maximizing the efficiency of bed usage. Capitalism does this too us all the time, but there are few times it feels so intensely visceral.

We weren't married at the time, and I was under a protective order because of all the death threats I'd been getting, so they wouldn't tell my partner where I was. She just came in and I was gone. I don't remember what they told her but I had to ask for her to be informed.

She told me that she screamed, and may have punched a hole in a wall.

I didn't die that time. In the following few weeks there were several times I didn't die. When I came back my wound was open.

There was another surgery where they gave me ketamine and little to no pain killers. so I woke up hallucinating that I was crevice, that I had been sliced up and was having lemon poured over the pieces of my body – all of which I could still feel. The tube was still down my throat, so I couldn't scream. I thought I was convinced I was being kidnaped as I came back. I signed into my mother-in-law's hand as best as I could remember, “help me.”

I think that surgery was from the other time I almost died, when my vision went orange and I collapsed onto the hospital floor. I tried to scream for help, but could only whisper, as I slowly bled out inside my body.

I would have never heard the screaming from my partner, but I know what it would sound like. Through all the craziness and chaos, those moments still come to me. I can't quite place the room. It's almost as if I remember myself floating in a void surrounded by those operating room curtains. I can remember, if I think on it a moment, the plastic grinding of the infuser. I remember beeping, but I don't remember if it was the EKG or if I'm just remembering the default hospital sound from a show or a movie. So much is blurry, far away, chaotic and confusing. The commotion is still amorphous, dreamlike. But the quiet, the screaming, the zipper, that all remains crystal clear.

This was the first reminder of where I actually was. I imagined myself in a place where people recover, where people heal. But this was also a place where people die. Recovery is not linear. I would be reminded of this many more times in the following few weeks, and year. All of the interventions, the x-rays, the plastic in my body, these were all dangerous. I'm still wary to take ibuprofen because of the strain on my kidneys and liver. Each intervention was weighed against my risk of immediate death. Each one could carve years off my life.

These treatments, these interventions, they would never leave me the person I was before. Trauma like mine doesn't work like that. Trauma always takes some of your life. Sometimes it ends your life right there, other times you can heal and have a long life before you fall into the hole left by those missing years.

Part of me has never left that place, floating in that curtained void, where I was both healing and near death.

The elite of today's America, those running the show right now, have lived their entire lives in a world completely dominated by Neoliberal capitalism. The function of American capitalism is to ensure that money and power are indistinguishable, to the greatest degree possible. Any time an American oligarch has wanted something done, they've been able to spend money to make it happen. Want a bigger yacht? Sure, what about a yacht for your yacht? Want to build a company? Put enough money in and it will happen. Want to destroy competition? Buy them out or run a loss until they give up. Money always wins. Want to change government policies to make sure you come out ahead? Give a politician a significant donation. Want to break the law? Yeah, “fines” mean “legal for a fee” and almost anyone can avoid prison for the right fee (pay a good team of lawyers, buy your way into being friends with politicians or judges, there's almost always a way).

The correlation between money and power has almost always been 1 to 1 for them, and for many of those reading this now. But This correlation has been maintained in order to support the illusion that power, like money, can be earned though work. And, circularly, it is exactly this illusion that is the primary tool for maintaining this correlation. “If I can earn money,” so the logic goes, “then I can earn enough money to be powerful. Then I should support the system that gives the rich power, because I, too, could be rich.” Insert cliche quote about “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” here.

The thing about illusions is, they don't maintain themselves. Money is not power. Money is a stand in for power under the current system, and only remains so as long as people believe in this system. But people have already started to see through the illusion. We have now have two generations old enough to vote who openly and vocally reject it. A whole subset of the political class has developed specifically around this lack of belief. Not only that, but the US has rejected the illusion multiple times. And each time the US threatened to fully reject the illusion, it has been offered a compromise… until Occupy. Instead of compromise, Occupy was crushed with overwhelming violence. The elite have seen the effectiveness of the police force they've been building, and have thus chosen to reject the opportunity for a compromise. They have instead chosen well funded violence.

“If we have all the money,” elite logic goes, “then we can pay people with guns to just force everyone else to do what we want.”

This system they've grown up under has given them access to essentially infinite financial resources. They draw money from taxes through contracts between governments and their companies, yet they pay no taxes themselves. They leverage their assets against debt, then use the growth of those assets to pay off the debt, thus have no “money” to tax. This illusionary wealth gives them access to political power, which they've used to manipulate the system to thereby increase their wealth again, in a “virtuous cycle” of increasing power. They have destroyed all competition and blocked out all paths for future competition. They expand their holdings, trying to own every home, all farm land, trying to extract fees from every aspect and second of everyone's life. Taking everything from everyone has made these elite godlike, more rich than multiple nations combined, untouchable, able to start their own space programs. They believe themselves super human, the rightful god-kings of the earth, saviors of humanity.

Why shouldn't they believe in the illusion? They are the most powerful humans who have ever lived, not simply a little bit but by an unimaginable margin. But they've painted themselves into a corner. The mechanism of debt leverage relies on infinite growth. They've already colonized all the land, they're already extracting all the resources, they've already pushed wages down and raised prices so high that they're eating their own. What's left? Taxes are, at their mast basic, the extraction of money from people with the threat of violence. There is only one path left for growth: robbing people at gun point. It's become necessary to take over governments, strip away everything except the infrastructure of violence, and use that violence to extract everything that could possibly be left.

The US is the richest country in the world. Having direct access to those coffers could be the answer that need to keep the “infinite growth” scheme going. And, as Garrison Davis paraphrased Curtis Yarvin in How The Federal Government Fell, “If you have all the guys with guns, who can physically stop you?”

Except they don't have all the guns. They have all the money, or so it would seem. But again, they actually don't have all the money. They have assets and they have to keep the up illusion that these assets have value in order to actually use them. Yes, yes, loot the US to keep that illusion going. But the thing is, the US isn't actually that rich. The currency is propped up by the belief in the stability of the US dollar, by the infinite tribute from vassal states, by a complex system of soft power built over generations. Spells like “Intellectual property”, “the reserve currency”, and “trade agreements” allow the US to simply demand foreign government simply seize the assets of their population to hand directly to US industry. Levies are paid on the sale of all hard drives and burnable media in Germany, among other countries, which go directly to recording industry investors. Vassal countries are forced to buy bonds to prop up the US dollar. As the global reserve currency, the dollar was always strong against other currencies. This drove down the relative price of electronics and other resources needed to build the most technologically advanced military in the world. Complex economic machinery and ever increasingly complex mathematical tricks have kept the illusion going… until Trump.

But generations of intellectual inbreeding have left the ruling class incapable of understanding the complexity of the system their ancestors built to maintain control. They simply cannot understand or operate it anymore. In order to siphon out more money, they've cut out and throw away their own life support system. Tariffs and dismantling soft power has annihilated the fragile and complex system of soft power that kept the US on top of the world. Crashing the economy so they can exploit the workers at lower and lower wages only works if the workers don't revolt. The money can only be used to prop up the illusion if all the complex math keeps appearing to work, if the “money” you dangle in front of people keeps coming and continues to be valuable… or, at least, valuable enough to keep people calm. Turns out, there aren't actually enough guns to point at people without using the military… and the military are not the cops. It turns out, those guns are only useful if there are enough of them and the people holding them will actually use them on command.

Now their system of control is flying apart. There were other wise elites who backed moderate compromise: corporate virtue signaling, small concessions metered out over decades, embracing the language of radical demands while ignoring the content. But the path of elite wisdom ends with their slow elimination. As the catastrophic crisis of climate change looms, as the necessity of eliminating the keystone industry that cements their power (oil) becomes obvious, as faith in the illusion started to collapse, the least competent have become the most powerful. They thrash wildly, trying to implement their unhinged vision, unaware of the illusions their power once relied on. They deploy agents to have them chased away by fearless unarmed citizens. They try to deploy troops, only to have generals delay and undermine. They bluster and threaten, only to be laughed at. They are becoming the martial arts master who, being used to throwing students across the room with burst of pure Qi, is knocked out with one punch when they fight someone outside of their cult. How long until the illusion breaks entirely?

Money is an illusion. It only has the value we all choose to give it. The power is in our labor. Not simply “paid labor” but reproductive labor, organizing, community, in everything we do to maintain the system both inside and outside of “work.” Real power is controlling food, controlling housing, and controlling what you want. You can only be controlled to the extent that you are not organized to resist that control.

Money and power were not always one. The illusion of money was built over thousands of years to where it is today. These two things can be separate again, if you build power by organizing against the dominant system.

So what are you doing to do to break the illusion?

We need to talk about “Western Civilization.”

But let's start by talking about a boat. Technically it's a ship, and it belonged to Theseus. (It's related, I swear.) For any not familiar, a few thousand years ago (give or take), Plutarch recorded the following:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and strong timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

• Plutarch, Life of Theseus 23.1

A millennium an a half or so later, Thomas Hobbes extended this paradox, giving us The Ship of Theseus that people contemplate today. This paradox would be covered in most “Introduction to Western Civilization” type classes and any basic introductions to philosophy. Folks familiar with the concept of digital immortality may have also run across it. (If you transfer consciousness into a machine, would it still be you?)

The paradox manifests from the disconnect between the ideas of subjective and objective reality. We believe that our subjective labels and groupings are somehow connected to an objective physical world. They are not. They are, in fact, arbitrary labels applied to arbitrary collections based on a combination of biological and social systems that evolved to help us order the world.

Those labels “ontologies.” The ontologies we use to order the world are the basis of our reality. There is an interplay between our ideological paradigm and our ontology: ideology shapes what can and can't exist, and we only things that we believe exist can shape our reality. While these restrict our thought, they also free us from the overwhelm of having to understand everything all at once.

A cyberneticist would say that these models exist to attenuate complexity. That is to say, they decrease the number of things for which a system (a person, a social system) must account. The greater the degree of differentiation, the more simple the model; the more simple the model, the less accurately it reflects real complexity of the set of things it's describing. It is necessarily true that embedded in any model is a trade off between accuracy and simplicity.

If we are honest, we cannot say that anything exists as such (outside of particles and the undifferentiated universe) but that it's existence fulfills a functional purpose for a system. Ontologies are created by systems to fulfill a system's objectives. Ontologies are (necessarily inconsistent and incomplete) models through which one can construct their own reality.

But these base assumptions are more malleable than ideology will often allow us to believe. To understand this one must only compare an address in Japan to an address in the US. Within the context of navigation, Americans identify streets as things that order space with buildings being largely unlabeled things where residences are identified by a combination of street name and number or set of numbers. A Japanese map generally doesn't label roads and uses a completely different addressing system in most cases.

The “self,” as a differentiated identity, is the product of evolution. A gene that produces things that have “selves” will continue to exist. Therefore, the “self” is a phenotype of a gene or set of genes, and the function of that phenotype is to replicate those genes. The self only really exists within the context of that genetic system.

But this most important object, the discrete identity of humans, isn't even allotted to all other humans. Rather discrete identity is reserved for those around us (our friends, our family, our pets, etc) and we create a other undifferentiated objects for everyone else (the crowd, the country, humanity as a whole). Of course, we must because the human brain lacks the internal complexity to model even a few thousand objects, much less so multiple billions.

Because the brain has a limited complexity, all objects we carve from the undifferentiated universe must serve a purpose. Then when we assert that something to exists, we must ask ourselves “Why does this exist? What purpose does it's existence fulfill?”

The existence of “two genders,” for example, is an ontological assertion, an intentional restriction of the continuous to the discrete. It simplifies a socially complex phenomenon into a simple binary based on a vast simplification of biological properties. What ideological purpose does that serve? How does that intentional restriction of reality shape what can and can't be? How does it constrain what we are and are not able to think about?

“Race,” by any scientific assessment, does not exist. Genetic variation within a “racial group” is greater than the variation between groups, showing that any classification as such is necessarily arbitrary. Race doesn't exist, the cleaving of undifferentiated humanity into discrete groups (with no definable boundaries between them) is an ontological construction that fulfills an ideological purpose. What is that purpose? All one needs to do to answer that question is open a history book.

Governments don't really exist. It's just a bunch of people making an ontological assertion, and some people with guns threatening everyone who doesn't act like they accept that assertion. Even these words don't really exist, except in our minds, after we learn to cleave them from the undifferentiated noise of the universe. What does and does not exist is always arbitrary, involves a conscious or unconscious choice, and fulfills some function.

So we arrive back at “Western Civilization.”

There are those who say that “Western Civilization” is collapsing, that it needs to be save. OK, let's start by defining it. What are the geographical boundaries of “Western Civilization?” Clearly “Western Europe” and “North America” are in the group. North America is easier to define than “Western Europe” because of the clear geographical boundaries of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Panama Canal. Except that North America isn't “Western” at all, but historically comes from a completely different tradition than the one claimed by “Western Civilization.” Sure, aside from the several million people and several hundred tribes that trace their identity to a lineage outside of “Western Europe,” sure, I guess North America is “Western.” Well, except that Mexico and “Central America” seem to have a much more complex relationship with that lineage, not to mention Caribbean nations who were kidnaped by those who are identified as part of “Western Civilization.” They are more likely to trace their identity back to the African Diaspora.

One of the defining things that “Western Civilization” identifies with itself is the concept of “Democracy.” While “Western” nations trace this lineage back to the slave states of Greece and the genocidal slaver empire of Rome, “Western Civilization” traces the roots of “modern democracy” back to American democracy. American democracy is largely copied directly from the Iroquois Confederacy, while the modern bureaucratic state that this democracy controls came to “Western Civilization” by way of trade with China and observations of how the Chinese state operated. The founding document, of course, was written in an alphabet that developed largely in the Middle East before being adopted by Romans (a people who were split between Europe and Africa). The predecessors to that “Latin” alphabet had originally modified Egyptian hieroglyphs to represent their Semitic language.

Those most staunch defenders of “Western Civilization” will also root their identity in “Christianity.” One of the most defining aspects of Christianity is the concept of “hell.” This concept is notably absent from Jewish tradition, but was a critical element of the most popular religion in the Middle East around the time Jesus is reported to have been teaching: Zoroastrianism. The archetype of a savior born of a virgin, who dies and returns to life, was a key element of the Osirus cult that spread via the same Roman roads as Christianity, and competed with it for converts in the pre-Christian Rome. John 1:1 is usually translated into English as “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” However, the original “word” is “logos.” The concept of “logos” is a direct reference to the Helenistic Jewish philosophy of Philo. That would be Philo of Alexandria. That “Alexandria” would be the one in Egypt… which is, as a reminder, located in Africa.

The interplay between cultures and groups is rich and bidirectional. Cultural borders blur as these exchanges make their way more slowly into the interior of an area we have arbitrarily labeled. Subcultures abound within borders. Dutch people will say that The Netherlands has a regional accent every 30 miles or so. Amsterdam is different from The Hague, and Friesland has it's own language. For the American reference, the country is somewhere between the size of Maryland and West Virginia. European borders, which North Americans tend to think of as more “real” and less “arbitrary” than, say, the Middle Eastern or African borders drawn by European colonizers, are just as arbitrary. Belgium is split between two languages. North Americans might expect signs in Spain to be in Spanish, but in Barcelona they may well be in Catalan. The Eurozone has almost as much cultural homogeneity across it as there is variation within the member states.

But what about Australia and New Zealand? Clearly these are “Western” nations, right? What about Israel? There have been debates about including it in the EU. North Americans may be surprised to know that Europeans generally don't consider England part of Europe since it's an island off the continent. “Western Europe” may be even harder to define geographically.

The choice of what we cleave from the undifferentiated universe is a political one. It becomes clear how especially political “The West” in context. Modern “Western” European countries are simply those that were not satellite states of the USSR. It is an explicit Cold War differentiation. The first reference to a differentiation of a “Western” identity was during the schism of the Roman Empire. These are mirrors reflecting an identity of conflict, of war, and, perhaps, of domination.

All this is to say, “Western Civilization” does not exist as such. It never existed. It never will exist. It can't exist. It is an arbitrary grouping of cultures and histories, an illusion, forged for conflict. And here is where we should loop back to another arbitrary definition: the self.

The self, this bedrock of our identity, is itself an illusion. We believe there to be an object, an entity, a persistence of experience, but there is none. There is only the experience of this moment, a side effect of a sufficiently complex system, that draws the illusion of persistence from memories that may or may not reflect a historical reality. It functions to pit the carrier of genes against the outside world. But we may, like so many other arbitrary definitions, return it to undifferentiated universe. In fact, this is precisely the goal of many meditation practices. Some mystics of Christianity, who share more in common with Buddhists or Taoists than with Evangelical Christians, might suggest this is exactly what is meant when one holds “Logos” within themselves.

Through psychedelics or meditation, one can truly “become one with the universe” simply by releasing this illusion of the ego. But what does that do for them? To release the division between oneself and the universe brings compassion, patience, and deep joy. It eases suffering and expands pleasure. Perhaps there are things which need not be differentiated, but are better experienced directly without the mediation of a model. Can we find the joy of simply being?

Perhaps, as one can improve mental health through the death of the ego, we should not try to avoid “the fall of Western Civilization” but rather experience the joy of transcendence through the death of Western Civilization.

The fascist obsession with fertility and replacement rates, and their solution (sexual violence and reproductive slavery), ignores or omits a deeper problem. Conservatives like to say that mass shootings, terrorist cults like Order of the Nine Angles and 764, and other antisocial behavior are caused by unwed mothers, video games, and the lack of prayer in schools. But the deeper truth is this: at some point a system becomes so toxic, so perverse, that it is no longer able to reproduce itself.

The streets of the United States have been emptied of children so that one of their biggest killers, cars, can roam free. The removed children are then confined to their homes, unable to leave without adult supervision. These homes become increasingly temporary and unaffordable as private equity forces more and more families to rent, to live on the street, or simply to die. Parents work longer and longer hours to pay for less and less stable housing, and less and less nutritious food, in a world that's becoming more and more hostile to human life.

How should one be a good parent, a present parent, a loving parent, when confronted regularly with pictures of dead children, the murder of whom has been funded by that parent's tax dollars? How can a parent not collapse in anguish, or explode in rage, at even the most brief and shallow observation of the world their children are inheriting? What parent can be kind and gentile, present and comforting, with the constant awareness that their children could be murdered by a mass shooter at their school? And what if those children survive to adulthood? What world will even exist then? What life will they live, under constant threat of natural disaster, in the tiny habitable band between the scorching center and frozen extents?

But this drawing is lovely. The glob of macaroni glued to toilet paper rolls is a marvelous display of creativity, I'm so proud of you. Yes, if you fling your body across the house you will probably get hurt, just like I've told you 1000 times tonight. Please go the fuck to bed already so I can spend the next 4 hours figuring out how pay my taxes, so I can figure out how to afford the higher price of everything, so I can try to figure out preschool for the 3rd time this year, so I can try to get insurance to pay for literally anything (holy fuck, what is it they actually do again??), so I can numb myself out so I don't have a mental breakdown… again.

I hope there isn't a drug raid next door. I hope the obviously mentally ill person who was mumbling and walking around on my porch last night doesn't come back again tonight. I hope the Nazi down the street doesn't snap and come murder my whole family because I put a sign up for that progressive mayor he hates. I hope I don't get caught in a protest tomorrow. I don't want to have to dodge rubber bullets to get home.

Did you know that tear gas can cause spontaneous abortions?

I wonder if the next preschool I choose will also be bought out by private equity and run into the ground. I wish my family could afford to live near me. I wish I had someone to help. I wish I didn't have to spend several hours more than every waking hour I have just to keep everything sinking slowly instead of sinking quickly.

How do you explain to a toddler that their preschool teacher was kidnaped by ICE?

And who would look at this all and think, “wow, that's exactly the life I want!” Better make sure you get a good house… or literally any house. Well, better make sure you have a good job. Well, better make sure you go to college. Oh, you took on an impossible debt burden and there are no jobs? You're not even able to manage your life right now? WHY AREN'T YOU BREEDING???

There have been times when people stood up, they opposed power, they fought for a better world. Sometimes they won, and that could never be allowed to happen again. The system will maintain control through escalating terror. The system will ensure that opposition is so traumatized that there can be no organized resistance. All rebellion must be crushed with ever increasing force until the people yield, until they crack, until they are broken. The trauma will escalate until you submit. That is how you break the will, after all.

Lots of animals don't breed, or don't breed well, in captivity. Lots of animals don't like to be caged. Maybe you've seen it at the zoo, animals pacing, swaying, pulling out their hair or feathers. There's a term for self-descrutive and obsessive behavior in caged animals: zoochosis. You can feel the bars, the walls, the chains, even if they aren't physical. You can feel the chains getting tighter. You can feel the walls closing in.

This system stinks of death. Though it rots, it shambles on, consuming the future to keep it's rigor mortis grip on the structures of the past. Here we are, captured in Goya's Saturno Devorando a su Hijo, feeling our stomachs turn. Are you turned on yet?

“What's wrong with you,” they say as they strip away rights to bodily autonomy, “Breed fucker.”

“We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine And the machine is bleeding to death.” – The Dead Flag Blues, GY!BE

During the transfer of power from a legitimate to illegitimate rule, the illegitimate power must maintain an illusion. It must maintain a belief in the persistence of legitimacy, running through the transfer and to the new regime. If this illusion is broken, the people become aware that their power has been usurped, a pretender has taken power, and the new authority lacks the legitimacy to rule.

To justify the illegal federalization of the national guard, Donald Trump cited 10 U.S. Code § 252:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

In doing so, he highlighted a contradiction within his justification. The specific justification was that the protests “make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States.”

After years of voicing support and meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian agents hack the Democratic Party and spend two years manipulating social media. After directly coordinating with Trump and his collaborators, the Russian government again hacks the Democratic party and escalates their social media manipulation campaign. When Trump is elected, he appoints Russian government assets to government offices. Before even taking the oath of office, Donald Trump begins violating the Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

The power of the federal government to enforce the law had been under attack for years. President Nixon was impeached for his attempt to subvert the electoral process, but the actions he took to forward his party's objectives were never reversed. President Reagan illegally bribed Iran with weapons to sabotage the hostage negotiations then under way with president Carter, in another clear case of illegal election tampering. Yet his presidency was never challenged, nor were any of his actions or appointments challenged or reversed. Post concession recounts showed clearly that President George W. Bush lost in 2000 to Al Gore, despite Gore's concession.

Russia understood how to exploit this power to take over the American government. While the federal government struggled to enforce constitutional protections before 2016, Trump's appointment of 3 Supreme Court Justices ultimately destroyed all ability to enforce any constitutional limitations on presidential power.

Given that the power of all officials in United States is explicitly limited by the law and no people are excluded from said legal constraint, one element of the legal definition of insurrection is the inability to enforce laws, the Constitution and all laws restricting presidential power has not been possible to enforce since Trump took office in 2016, Therefore Donald Trump is leading an insurrection on behalf of the government of Russia, has levyed war against the United States, on behalf of the Vladiamir Putin, the government of Russia successfully overthrow the US government in 2016 using Donald Trump as a proxy, There is currently no legal president. Given that Trump appointed officials to illegally maintain his power Trump selected collaborators to forward his illegal agenda Trump acted at the direction of Vladamir Putin as an agent of the Russian Government, Therefore all appointees and collaborators are equally participants in a successful foreign war against the US government. Given That a war need not be declared to be enacted, to overthrow a government on behalf of a foreign power is always, necessarily, an act of war by that foreign power, Therefore the Russian election interference that allowed Donald Trump to take power was necessarily an act of war against the American People.

Be it resolved that Donald Trump is not the legal president of the United States, and never has been legally the president, the last legal president of the United States was Barak Obama, Donald Trump is a traitor who levied war against the American People on behalf of Russia, Donald Trump must be tried for treason, all appointments made by Donald Trump since his election are necessarily null and void, all laws ratified by Trump are null and void, all land and property sold will be repossessed by the Federal Government as stolen property all land that cannot be repossessed or for which repossession is not pursued by the US government will return to the domain of it's previous authority, all executive orders enacted by Trump are null and void, all appointees and collaborators who interfered with the dutiful enforcement of constitutional restrictions of presidential power must also be tried for treason, a new president must be identified following the 25th Amendment process of succession. Any president who takes office must first execute these resolutions. If the president does not follow the above resolutions for any reason, succession will pass to the next in line who does.

Be it resolved that additional steps must be taken to address the vulnerabilities exploited by the Russian government. These steps are abolish the electoral college and elect presidents directly by vote count remove all judges appointed by Donald Trump remove all other Trump political appointees replace the Senate, as a body that represents each state with two members, with a legislative body that represents the nation by party-based proportional representation, all government elections, at all levels, for which a only a single candidate can be chosen must then use ranked choice voting, universal suffrage for all residents over the age of 18, regardless criminal or legal status, the constitutional definition of treason will be amended to include voter suppression and those who have been convicted of voter suppression will be classified as insurrections for the purpose of holding office, corporations will explicitly be not be recognized as people with constitutional protections

States that pass these resolutions will hold the Federal Government responsible for enacting it within 90 days of passage within the state, or, the Federal Government failing to do so, will secede from the conquered union and form amongst themselves a new union carrying on from the fallen state with vulnerabilities addressed.

I put the notebook down on my desk and let out a long sigh. The look I gave her only lasted a few moments but felt as though it drew on for days, “I think you mean 'Whereas' rather than 'Given That,' just stylistically I mean.”

“You know that's not what we're asking for.”

Straight to the point, always the spitfire.

“Sure. Yeah…. you could go farther. Why don't you nationalize the military industrial complex, make college free, abolish all debt, and summarily execute Thiel and Yarvin while you're at it?”

Her eyes cauterized as they cut.

“OK,” I replied carefully, with another long sigh, “I don't even want to be holding it right now. Do you have any idea how dangerous something like this is? I don't even know how much of this is legal right now.”

She flashed a wide joker's smile, “Shouldn't you?”

We always had good rapport, perhaps that's why she trusted me with this.

“High school teachers aren't known for their law degrees.”

“It doesn't matter. What's legal and what's not doesn't even matter anymore. Anything he doesn't like is illegal. Anything that brings him more power is. The whole system simply serves power now, and that's why this is so important right now.”

I crossed my arms, “I said this about W. It's different now, but in quantity not quality… You were in elementary school when he first took office…“

I nodded at the menacing portrait of Our Leader glaring down at us. I could feel the grey hairs sprout as I trailed off. Every year under him had felt like 10, and I was already old enough without the help.

She got up and leaned across the table, “A constitution is a contract between the people and their government. It grants the government the monopoly on violence and the license to define and enforce those laws using said violence. However, the violation of that contract without mitigation or redress nullifies it. Without this authority, the perpetrators of violence are little more than petty tyrants. The violation of this contract authorizes the people to redress their own grievances against those who illegitimately wield authority in the their name.”

Two other students were in the room. One sat leisurely at his desk, the other curled up in the window sill. The one in the window sill wore a studded leather jacket a size too big. The leather squeaked a bit against the window as they leaned forward, “You almost sound like one of those slavers who wrote the original.”

“Dee,” I remarked as I held up my hand and they smiled a bit, “let's stay focused, please.”

“This,” I continued hesitantly, “can't be a citizens initiative. This lays out the legal basis for a civil war. Do you have any idea how dangerous this is right now?”

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to keep going like this?” She stared with amber pools of rage, “We should actually be able to vote on this. When I finally get to vote, I know for a fact that it won't mean anything. At least you got to choose between two puppets, we don't even get that. He's looting everything he can and leaving corporations to steal our futures.

“You act like there isn't already a civil war going on right now,” she raged on, “You act like there hasn't been a civil war since before he even took office.”

“If anyone found out you wrote this, you could be arrested. Your family could be arrested.”

She smiled a bit, “'For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.'”

“You could be sent to the camps.”

”'He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.' But who would he send to arrest us again?”

I sighed deeply and sat back in my chair.

She pointed out the window at a group of troops outside, “'He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.'”

I tapped a pencil on the desk and thought for a moment. Her curls bounced as she sat back down. After a long pause, I spoke again, ““Even if I wanted to, I couldn't submit this. I couldn't ask for signatures. Someone would probably kill me before I was even able to collect enough signatures if I tried. It will be censored by the algorithm. We would all be arrested immediately. What do you expect me to do with this?”

“I don't care if we're arrested. We're going to die anyway. It's probably already too late for most of us. 'It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees'”

I hadn't noticed the Che Guevara shirt she had been wearing, nor did I realize those were back in style. She wore the uniform of a young radical. I wonder if she will also look back at that shirt and cringe. Then it struck me, I wonder if there will be a world for her to look back from.

The studs tapped against the window a bit as the student in the window sill shifted again and spoke up, “Enlightenment thinkers dogged censorship by presenting their ideas as stories and dialogs. You can never really tell what side someone is taking in fiction. The 'savage critic' was one of the most popular literary modes of the period.”

I looked over to the window, “You've been reading Graber again, haven't you?”

They smiled a bit and and settled back in.

“What are you even doing with something like this? Aren't you an anarchist Dee?”

“Yeah, aren't you Mr. Brand?”

I leaned forward a bit, “Don't say that too loud. I could loose my job. I've never talked about that for a reason.”

“You do on your Mastodon,” they replied slily.

“How do you know about my Mastodon?”

“Dee is a furry,” the curly haired girl piped up again.

“Ez,” I snapped at her, “not everyone on Mastodon is a f-”

“Mr. Brand, that's not important right now” Dee cut me off. I hadn't noticed the Kitsune Luigi shirt under the leather jacket until now. Cleaver. “I know you're a bit of a writer yourself Mr. Brand. I suppose that's expected for an English teacher.”

I sat back again as they continued, “We won't survive if this keeps going. We're cut off. The crops are rotting in the fields with no one to harvest. If we don't starve, you know we'll all die in the camps. It has to break. It has to stop. These changes will destroy both parties. We have an opportunity to not only survive, but come out the other side better.

“During the first Civil War, progressive states were able to pass a lot of legislation after the Rebel states left. This government can only collapse. If a few states pull out, it may be enough to topple everything. When the rest of the country joins the New Union, we could have jumped decades forward.

“To be honest Mr. Brand, I don't know how much time I have. You know people like me are pretty high on their list. This doesn't fix everything, not even close. But I think it gives us a fighting chance. They're not going to exterminate us all if they can't even keep the country together.”

The boy sitting leisurely at his desk adjusted his sweater and sat up. “I just want to know my parents will be safe. I want to know I'll be safe.”

Ezra leaned back in her chair again, “Honestly, I just want a chance at a future. The current road leads to death and I'll do anything to get off it. Will you help us Mr. Brand?”

I sat for several minutes and thought about the question before answering quietly, “Yeah…. I'll do my best.”

“Notice the sensations in your body. Do any of them have an emotional charge?”

I went to a meditation group this evening that focused on emotion. It was a group for men, put together by a men's group focused on dismantling patriarchy. Suppressing and disconnecting from emotions is deeply connected to oppression. The emotional burden of oppressing others is easier to bear when you feel nothing, as is the shame and anger of being oppressed.

Feeling people don't make decisions to ruin people's lives, poison the land, steal the future from their own children. Feeling people can't tolerate others doing the same. Numbness is the bedrock of authoritarianism.

“Put your hand where you feel the sensation.”

It's hard for me to notice emotions most of the time.

My dad was happy or angry, sometimes disappointed, or asleep. I saw him cry once, when his dad died. I love my dad, but there's also a distance. I don't really see him or talk to him much. I didn't talk to him for like 5 years.

I recently watched a video that resonated with me pretty intensely. My mom completely failed to prepare me for life, but my dad pushed me hard to be independent. I respect and appreciate him for it, even when I have some issues with it.

It took a while to find it, but eventually I did.

Anxiety.

I touch a scar on the left side of my belly. There was a tube there draining some fluid or other. It was the second one they pulled out, some days after the one in my right lung.

There's not really a way to describe that feeling. The tube was up against my intestines. It slid against them and hit them as it came out. There was a bit of pain, like the lingering ache after being hit in the stomach, but perhaps a bit less. The real feeling was anxiety… overwhelming anxiety.

Somewhere, somehow, deep in our animal brain, the feeling of even the slightest intestinal trauma is intimately connected with death. Any human, or almost any animal, who felt something like I had felt, any longer than, say, 100 years ago, would have died a slow and excruciatingly painful death. Somehow, even knowing consciously that I am safe, my body knows and can't help but bring this to my consciousness.

In the book “To The American Indian: Reminisces of a Yurok Woman,” there were a few passages about Yurok beliefs (as she held them) on death. The part that's stuck with me is roughly this. When a person dies, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they're not good people, the dogs will eat them and if they're good people the dogs will let them past. But sometimes, the soul runs instead. If it escapes, the person can come back to life. But even though they escape, for the rest of their life they will be pursued by dogs. Eventually the dogs will catch and kill them.

It's a pretty spot on description of the experience of PTSD.

Trauma tunes people to spot threats, to see danger. Under normal conditions, they see danger where there isn't any. But under extreme conditions, we see danger that other people are too complacent to see.

“Give the feeling space. Ask it what it needs.”

I'm afraid. I'm afraid and sad. My youngest is 6 now. She's growing up so fast, and I push her hard to grow up faster. I feel like I'm missing out on her being young, like I”m trying to race through it, and I know it's vanishing quickly. I feel guilt for pushing so hard.

A staple in my intestines came out. Before I came out of the bathroom, I hit the emergency button. I walked a couple of steps and then crumbled to the floor. I lay on the floor unable to move, trying to yell with all my might but barely making any sound. No one came as I struggled to whisper “help.” When they finally came, they picked me up off the floor and rushed me to emergency surgery.

The blood they put in me was cold. My arm was freezing as they put bag after bag of blood in to my body, and I bled it out almost as fast. When I was first shot, I didn't think I would die. I thought it was possible, I prepared myself for it, but I knew there was a good chance I would make it. I knew that if I did die there, I would be proud of it. It would be a good death. I could die peacefully, if I needed to, but I was going to fight because people needed me. When I was bleeding out in the emergency room, I knew I was going to die and I was terrified. It was a completely different experience.

I was shitting gallons of blood. I thought of the Don Hertzfeldt “My spoon is too big” animation. I thought of the part where the character says “my anus is bleeding” as the room fills with blood. It was slightly funny, but mostly an unimaginably horrible way to die. And I was sure I was going to die.

The anxiety never went away.

I push my oldest hard to be I can't know how long I can be there for her. They saved my life, but it's not that simple. The x-rays, the surgeries, the things they put in my body, all of it shortens my life. I won't live as long as my dad, and I don't even have a guess how long he'll live.

My dad was abandoned as a baby. He was left at a bakery where my paternal grandmother worked. A lot of their kids were adopted.

My dad went through some pretty crazy things. I can count the number of times I've almost died, a couple before getting shot and few in the hospital. He served in Vietnam, but even before that his mother was schizophrenic and deeply religious. There were a few stories of her trying to kill him because she thought he was possessed or something. She also saved his life once, or so the story is told, when she killed a rattlesnake, cut off it's head, and threw it in a creek. (Apparently the loggers in the camp wouldn't go near the creek anymore because they were afraid of the snake head or some such superstition.)

I realized later that it's not just that I don't know how long I'll have with her. I see how things are. I know there could come a time when she has to leave me behind, when she has to save herself. I will keep getting older. I don't want her to get stuck trying to save me and miss an opportunity to save herself.

My dad couldn't leave the US. The Empire broke him to prevent the threat of a good example. Now he survives off the crumbs they let fall to vets like him. As they dismantle everything, how long will that last? The US will be a death sentence for a lot of people.

Sadness. Grief, loss, sadness.

There will come a time when I'm too old to move, to leave, to support myself, to save myself, as the polycrisis continues to evolve. I want my oldest, no matter how much she loves me, to be able to leave me behind. I want her to be able leave me behind because I love her. I want her to be able to leave me behind like I left my dad.