It's growing and growing, the ongoing crisis. Getting a little worse everyday.
What'll happen next is not known but can be guessed at.
Financial corporations are doing very well, but real companies—the ones that deal in making things, growing food—they're losing money. This gap, this chasm, seems to be becoming something the whole of the American economy could fall into.
It's a schisming. It's reflected in its people, who are set apart on two sides: those who wish to bring an end to police violence, especially against Black people; and those who support the police actions. However, this is simplistic, and perhaps not altogether quite what is the problem. It is history abutting with legacy.
The legacy of America is both slavery and genocide. The wealth and power of the former slave-owning states has never again been witnessed, and there is some sort of longing for a return if not to the specifics of that era than at least to the circumstances.
There is longing for the City on the Hill, but in hindsight, never such has ever existed in America. It's always been some sort of pariah for one reason or another. Briefly, after World War II was America any sort of model nation, but that has been lost. Slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration: these eras have drowned out any progress the USA has ever done during post-Revolutionary times, Reconstruction, New Deal, and post-Civil Rights Protests eras. It's like waves on a shore, washing away what has been drawn on the beach.
What is happening now is unique. Not that America would never have eventually done what it is now doing, but the speed of the collapse is what is setting it apart from all other crisis in American history. The Revolution happened over decades. Same with the Civil War, which really took about 30 years to begin from the first hints of schisming. The Civil Rights era was born out of the decades after World War II.
What is being witnessed right now though is resultant of 40 years of Reagononmics and Mass Incarceration. It took five months to build to this point. It feels as though this could well have taken another four to eight years to reach this point other than for the complication of Covid-19.
This illness has struck right where America is weakest: its healthcare system. From there, it spread into its old age care system, and then into its education system. All were vulnerable institutions to stress, and the stressor of Covid-19 was something that piled up intensely over a short period of time. It has bent if not broken all three, and American politicians have not yet seen this, pretending as though nothing has fundamentally changed.
Americans fled into their homes, but politicians began demanding a return to work. However, the emptying of the workplace has started becoming permanent in many industries. Jobs are disappearing. There are fewer and fewer jobs to return to, and so becomes stressed another institution: the already overburdened and underfunded social welfare system.
It really didn't take long for this happen at all. Covid-19 struck early in the year: fifteen cases. Within a couple months, there were tens of a thousands dead, and many, many more moderately and severely sickened. There is well over a 100 thousand dead in the USA, and it's not a stretch to think millions will die now. Failures had occurred at every level of government. Local, state, and federal decisions overrode the decisions of the medical system at almost every critical juncture. It was the optics of the politics which ruled in confronting the Covid-19 crisis, and there was nothing could be done about it.
In the midst of all this, a Black man was killed by police. Tensions were already incredibly high. The history of state violence against Black people is well documented. This was another routine killing by the police, and that was exactly the problem. Anger erupted across the nation, and cities started witnessing nearly daily protests for ending police violence. In some cases calling for the abolition of the modern police state.
Nothing was resolved though, and then it seemed rich white America moved on, even though the protests were now the routine in the cities.
The routine also involved doing nearly nothing to stop the spread of Covid-19.
And just recently, the protests intensified after the police shooting of another Black man, and also the killings done by a white teenager during a protest protesting the shooting.
There seems to be some sort of natural depression that settles into a society when there's an out-of-control pandemic going on. It could be instinctual. Hunker down, and avoid the worst of the disease. However, humans are prone to fits of madness during these sorts of times as well. Pandemics become the eras of both mystics and scapegoats. We're in a scapegoats phase now.
The stress of pandemics must lead to a streak of madness within groups. Death cults, as Chris Hedges named them, seem to grow in influence despite the irrationality of their claims.
This madness has met with the anger in the protests, and has created a dangerous mixture. It's high energy and unstable. And it's two forces opposing each other, so the mixture may interact, and then blow.
This sort of anger hasn't been witnessed in a long, long time. The period leading up to the Civil War; pre-New Deal; pre-Civil Rights. Times of great change, when the protesters then had to fight for it all. Now is much the same. The protesters are going to be drawn into fights again and again.
Besides all this is an economy that is spiralling downward. As to what'll happen there is anyone's guess. Mine is the USA is going to enter into some sort of deflationary spiral at the consumer level. Less customers means less spending. Stores will lower prices to chase sales, but there's still no money at the consumer level. Stores will demand lower prices from producers, which loops back to falling wages for people still working (not to mention all the competition there will be for for the fewer and fewer jobs there are left), which will in turn decrease spending.
This labour market uncertainty will then feed into the mixture of anger and madness creating an even more combustible mixture.
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