The End Is Not Near

I’ve gotten some emails from folks asking my opinion on “How’s it all going to end?” As in, what major crisis is going to finally cause the American Giant to fall down and go boom? Guess what? There won’t be a major crisis that does it. It’s going to be a slow cascade reaction of crisis and disasters. What’s more, it has already begun. We’ve already seen several of these disasters. More are on the way. The end has begun and is upon us.

Now, if you want to see what it will look like, have a look at Detroit. Here’s a city that was THE epicenter of American vehicle manufacturing. The pride of American can-do hoo-ha and all that jazz. In fact, I’m going to coin that phrase into a word to describe American arrogance: American Candohooha.  I know, it sounds like a river back east, but let’s use it anyway. American Candohooha supported a population of over a million people in Detroit. All kinds of snazzy buildings and houses. They thought it’d last forever. Kind of like the ghost towns you find out here where I live. They thought that would last forever, too, and now you need a topo map to find these places.

Detroit now has about 700,000 people. They had something like 70,000 abandoned buildings. People starting fires left and right in them, sometimes up to 30 fires a night. The fire department was stretched to the limit and finally, a new fire commissioner said let fires in abandoned buildings just burn. Don’t fight them. Wake up, America: This is your future. Detroit declared bankruptcy. This is where all major cities are eventually headed. American Candohooha is the past. What, the federal government is coming to save you? Did they save Detroit? Think about it. If the federal government really cared about Detroit, do you think they’d have let an epidemic of arson like that continue? No. They’d have called it “terrorism” and there would have been tanks and troops patrolling those neighborhoods with orders to shoot arsonists on sight and they’d have sent in a thousand fire engines and an army of federal firefighters. But Detroit has no value to the feds. Obviously.

The federal government knows something many of us don’t want to admit. Eventually, several regions in the United States are going to cascade into collapse a lot quicker as they gain momentum. It’s like an avalanche. It begins with the loss of manufacturing economies in cities where that is the lifeblood of that city. Once that’s gone, the tax base that supports the infrastructure goes away. Thus, you can’t really afford to take care of it anymore. Then with all the abandoned buildings, the fires begin. Before you know it, the place looks like Berlin in 1945. That’s what happened to Detroit. That is the future of America as a whole.

The feds are probably trying to figure out exactly what they’re going to be able to hold onto and consolidate as the “United States”. Some regions are probably going to slowly move towards secession not because of political ideology, but for mere survival. Look, the feds sat there and let Detroit burn night after night and couldn’t care less. Not every state or region is going to accept that from them. Not the Southwest I know. I would say we could look to probably Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and possibly Utah and Colorado forming a new nation of their own once their major cities start burning. California will be crapping bricks within a couple years because we’ll block them from the Colorado River water. Arizona is already saying we need to start pinching off California’s access to that water because of an epic drought we’ve got going on here.

See, some regions are going to have to shake themselves out into a new nation that can pursue its own economic future. The United States federal government is fresh out of ideas. What, another housing boom? Huh, that’ll buy them, what, six years at best? Let me say this: The feds are looking for their own survival, not the survival of the nation as a whole. Detroit proves it. That right there is what they’re going to do. They’re going to basically let everything happen and think they can hold on to some power center and the military and force us to pay taxes. That’s easier planned in the Pentagon than done.

The feds control nuclear weapons, yes. But understand this: Every state that has a nuclear power plant can build them. Yes, even the predominantly liberal state of California could have a nuclear weapon probably within a year if they decided they needed one. Delivery vehicles are not that hard to build, either. Any state with a railroad would be able to construct a basically un-targetable system such as the old MX was supposed to be. The military even studied using railroads for that back during the Cold War. Therefore, it won’t be the 1860s all over again like the Civil War. It’ll be a domestic Cuban Missile Crisis. But with a twist.

The natural resources are going to be up for grabs. The feds will want to control it, but they can’t. Not if autonomous regions spring up and declare themselves to be nations because the feds basically sat there and let their cities burn to the ground. Those states that become nations will control those resources—water, food, oil, and natural gas—and the feds based in the East will be SOL for the most part. Why and how? Because when a region declares itself to be an independent nation, they will probably build themselves a military alliance with Russia, who’ll get perhaps a naval base on the coast of Texas, plus an air force base. Would Russia do that? Why not? There would be a chance to carve the United States juggernaut into manageable pieces and negate them as a future threat. If a large chunk of what was America became an ally of Russia, so much the better for the Russians.

The mistake the Confederates made was not seeking a powerful ally before the war. They also didn’t have the industrial power the North had. But times are different now. The home field of the federal government—the East—is no longer an economic powerhouse. It’s a financial powerhouse. Once the federal money has no value beyond tinder, they will have no power at all, save for a few nuclear weapons they were able to fly into the area. They won’t have the industrial base they had in the past. Look at Detroit. The industrial power now is spread out. The agricultural regions are also quite far off. The feds will not hold on to power more than a decade or two once this process starts gathering momentum.

The end is not near. The end has begun. You wanted to know how it will end? Well, take a look around. You’re living in it. If you live in a major city, you already know this or suspect this. If you live in a rural area, you already know the federal government could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect you that much. We’re not going to fall into some dystopian dog-eat-dog future. We’re going to cease to be the United States and become a collection of different countries. The Southwest will be one. California will probably be its very own, or combine with Oregon and Washington state. The Midwest might be another. They’ll all gather up National Guard resources and abandoned federal military equipment and create their own militaries. Each will pursue international relations of their own. They might all sign a non-aggression pact, but California will learn the Southwest has them outgunned and have to find other water resources. Or trade for it.

The trade between these autonomous regions would be a true trade. Not exchange of happy meal toys for pieces of paper called “dollars”. Oil would be directly traded for food, food for water, and so forth. Each region would be able to create its own currency and here is where we’d finally see a return to gold and silver currency. I daresay other countries in the world would clamor more to trade with these countries than they did with the former United States. Lots of trade can be done without the feds saying, “You can’t do that!” or “There’s a 65% excise tax on that product!”

People have this idea that the United States must remain united. Why? Many regions have different interests. Like a relationship that went sour, this federal government thing was nice when times were good, but we need to move on. We need to see other people, or rather, see different flags flying above our state capitols. We’re different people now. That’s not a bad thing, it just means we need to stop trying to pound every square and triangular peg into the round hole. The federal government cannot administer this entire country anymore. Look at Detroit. Look at the blighted areas of every major city. Not to mention the aggressive nature of the federal government in terms of cataclysmic wars it starts all over the planet.

Soon, it will become apparent all over America that the future for them looks like Detroit. Detroit was the first sign of the terminal illness that will fill the federal government. In time, regions will learn they need to break away for their own survival. Political ideology will not sell people on secession. But half the supermarkets empty and the other half on fire will. Because the cascade towards that has begun and cannot be stopped. It’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing is permanent. Governments arise and pass away, like the Romans. Rome is gone, but Italy is there. The United States, too, will pass away. But new nations with better futures will arise.

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