When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Five things to remember:

1. Fascism is so far from our biggest worry. We're not in 1933, and every time shit gets hairy in world history it gets hairy in a way that's completely different from the way it got hairy the time before, all that you can predict is that once the safeties come off societies, something will fuck up and the world dissolves in chaos. 120 years ago, nobody anticipated the 2 world wars. What everybody anticipated was a retread of the French Revolution and Napoleon. In some ways, they got it in the Russian Revolution and Stalin, but however dangerous and deadly left-wing dictatorship turned out ot be, right-wing dictatorship turned out to be the deadliest thing of all, and no bourgeois person at the time saw it coming. Today, the bourgeois is generally as progressive as they used to be reactionary, and so whatever the new biggest murder threat is, it's going to be a very different threat from what we currently anticipate.... By 1905, all the world knew in the leadup to World War I was that the world was clearly spinning out of control, but they had no idea how.

2. If you're thinking of leaving the US particularly because of fascism or civil war (and this is as much self-advice as anything else), don't. If you're gonna leave, just leave because you just don't like it here. If you like it here, stay. If you have people you love here, they need you. If you have abilities that make you a desireable job commodity elsewhere, use it here because there are so many people here whose lives will be better for the way you use your talents, and you may in fact be the difference for them between life and death.

3. There's still no guarantee that America will ever truly become a dictatorship, and if America ever does turn truly authoritarian, I guarantee America eventually brings a dozen or more seemingly unassailable democracies along with it, one of which you may have moved to to avoid the gathering storm here. And even if America or elsewhere really does turn to a seemingly permanent dictatorship, unless a dictatorship is truly totalitarian like Stalin or Mao, and millions of us get arrested and shot every year for shit we've already said or written, it's honestly not that different from life already. If you actively resist the dictatorship, then yes, you have to be very very worried, but ultimately the same people prosper, the same people are discriminated against, the same institutions are the same as ever, it's just that there becomes certain subjects and people you begin to realize it becoming prudent to avoid. If dictatorship goes to war against another world power, then yes, that's truly hell on earth, but Putin's Russia is obviously a dictatorship, and it has not yet gone to war in any way that isn't similar to the wars US already conducts all the time.

4. If something like civil war is coming, it's unlikely to be 'total civil war. It's just civil violence happening in certain areas of the country, mostly rural standoffs. A war like that may then stretch to terrorism or crossfires on streetcorners. But unless the US goes to war with another major world power, life still goes on for most people as it did before. The rest of us then just live with the fear that tens of millions of Americans in forgotten neighborhoods have lived with their entire lives, that the instability is coming particularly for us, and billions of people around the world have never known a day when they don't know that fear. The only difference in your daily life that you're going to live with more fear. Fear that tragedy is coming particularly for you, and it well might, but it won't right away and it won't all at once. Fear is a part of life, and people who don't live with fear every day are very very lucky. If you've been lucky enough to not live with daily fear until now, well, now you're unlucky like the rest of the world, but except for your general emotional state, the essentials of your life are likely not to change for a long time.

5. Global warming is so much more dangerous than Republicans, and Republicans are their most dangerous not because of who they are, but because of how they enable global warming and the billions of deaths it may cause. If you want to know how America becomes as bad as Hitler's death camps, it's not by establishing a dictatorship. If global warming hits at its full force, the climate itself becomes the gas chamber and the crematorium, and this is not an effect that will visit itself particularly on the US. There is no outrunning global warming to a corner of the globe where the effects won't be felt. The effects will literally be everywhere, and no matter where you are, it is still potentially lethal.

Don't be pessimistic, don't be optimistic either. Be realistic, and be pragmatic, try to be sobered and humbled by the enormity of whatever comes, don't fool yourself with fool's optimism, but don't lose hope either. Life is chaotic and it's sometimes very very dangerous, but however grueling, it does go on, and there are consolations along the way, and you are almost guaranteed to see many many many more of them. Amen.