Society's many facades are cracking, the surface flaking away, fabric threadbare. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora weeps.
Society: An inchoate collection of fictions: laws, rules, shared stories and nationality; authority figures benefit from a patina of legitimacy; civil society a thin veneer separating man, the most dangerous animal, from a Hobbesian all-against-all dystopia of naked reality and feral behavior.
Safe in your home? A thin pane of glass stands between you and a criminal with a knifeblade at your family's throat.
You go to a fall pumpkin fest fest with your spouse and small children, cheeks rosy in the cold, eyes alight with wonder, and then without warning you get smashed in the face with a whiskey bottle and your family is caught in a teargas-soaked riot started by bored white college kids looking for kicks. A crack in the veneer.
Racial hatred, the bandage ripped off, stoked by agitators screaming for socialism, reparations, deportations, communism, anarchy, racial supremacy. And stupid millions cheer them on, tweet, instagram and celebrate ideals that tingle their naive brains, overstuffed with pop culture and unable to see that their dreams realized would bring about the end of everything they enjoy, but *shoulder shrug* they didn't make that. Government will give me more, right?
Emperors with no clothing employ irresponsible rhetoric, music to the battered ears of nihilistic nutballs who riot and burn. The most brazen animals howl for murdered cops, and fevered brains answer the call.
A young black man, famous on youtube for innocent public provocations gets manhandled for dancing too close to NYPD officers on a city street.
Yesterday's broken taboos are today's rituals; cultural touchstones, society's new glue. Monkey see, monkey do, the contagion spreads at the speed of electrons, and we become more polarized. Cultural firebugs and societal vandals rush into the breach, nothing to lose, life has no meaning: a purpose in hashtags, marijuana freedom, jihadis self-actualize.
Businesses have abandoned whatever care and responsibility they once had for the community, corporations are anti-capitalist, Wall Street and Silicon Valley serve themselves.
Who pulls the strings? There are no strings, no conspirators, just myriad enemies, each with their own motives and agendas, watching it all in amazement, as millions of Americans, the least of us more privileged than 80% of the world, pick away at a million loose threads. Empty minds are the devil's drafting board.
Caught between a police state and anarchy. No respect for authority, and it's earned. What has 'authority' done for us lately?
Our government starts wars that do more harm than good. It leaks secrets faster than a Hollywood gossip columnist, people who steal government secrets are cheered as heroes, and Senator Diane Feinstein (D - War Profiteer) releases privileged government information in order to brass knuckle her enemies in the CIA.
We are a beast eating its own tail.
What's going on? The United States is collapsing into violence, stupidity, nihilism, and ultimately, farce. Senseless, meaningless, brainless, soulless.
"Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad."
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