#there is almost never a moment when every single person simultaneously agrees 'oh now we're fucked'

[chamerionwrites]

(USAmerican politics discussed in grim terms, if you’re trying to avoid those)

I realize that plenty of people are simply processing their thoughts and feelings about this stuff in other spaces than Tumblr, so I want to be clear that I’m not trying to make one of those frantic why-is-nobody-talking-about-this-thing (which many people are in fact talking about) style posts. And I recognize that most of what’s going on these days has always been woven into this country’s history, has always occurred in some form or at the very least is the natural progression of everything that’s gone before. So I’m not trying to do context-free alarmism either. 

But I just feel the need to say, in the calmest and most matter-of-fact tone that I can muster - as somebody who reads history but also as somebody who spent a fair bit of time in a country during the immediate aftermath of a coup, and where the experience of dictatorship is a lived reality for basically every adult. Armed pro-regime paramilitary groups (which is what they are) openly roaming the streets of major cities is a relatively reliable sign of what paramedics sometimes crassly call “circling the drain,” when it’s a body breaking down rather than a society. It’s that stage of systemic failure when each thing that breaks makes it progressively more likely that ten other things will break before you can stabilize the first. It’s not a prophecy, it’s not a certainty, but it’s a very suggestive symptom. 

I don’t know who out there needs to hear this. And I’m very sorry if it piles on the anxiety for anybody who is already worried. (Connect in your community, protect your community, do what you can where you can; assess with realism but act with hope.) But if there’s anybody left out there who still doesn’t believe our house of cards is an unlucky sociopolitical sneeze away from toppling into full-blown fascism and/or civil war, I honestly don’t know what to tell you except that I - very earnestly, I’m not at all trying to be snide or patronizing here - hope like hell you never have any reason to regret it.