Welcome to Apocalypse-Land. Now Please, Shut Up.

Here's what needs to happen if we're going to survive the unthinkable.

First time in Apocalypse-Land? Welcome! Let me show you around.

I'm an Apocalypse Land townie — or whatever the bunker equivalent of a townie is. I was born here and have spent the majority of my life here. What’s more, Apocalypse-land runs deep in my blood. My ancestors were up in the Appalachian hollers being pissed off about corn taxes in the 1700s, and we've stayed up there — physically and emotionally — pretty much ever since. My grandparents and parents raised me into Apocalypse-land, appalled at what they felt were unimaginable infringements on their rights, and surrounded by waves of physical, psychological, and fiscal devastation. I grew up with guns in the drywall and ammo in the laundry room, and neither one of those things is a metaphor.

So this geography of Apocalypse-Land? It's real familiar to me.

Here's the best advice I can give you to survive it, and to help the rest of us survive it: chill the fuck out.

Yes, it's bad. Worse than you ever imagined. It's the end of days, at least the days of "before," if there were any of those left. And, unless you are actively, daily, working towards tangible, impacts-your-daily-life-and-that-of-your-neighbors solutions, do the rest of us a favor and — I say this as kindly as I can — sit down and shut up. Your indulgence in panic and insistence on flailing acts of “activism” in lieu of acting from even the most basic understanding of how to affect actual change in this current situation is helping no one.

You know what especially not useful in dangerous situations? Whining and fear-mongering on the internet. For all the LOTR, "I wish we didn’t have these times" memes that float around, I would have thought that people would get that when you are presented with such times, the answer is to rise to them. But so many people think that the appropriate or perhaps only response is to post yet more memes and share how very emotional they are ALL.THE.TIME. instead of feeling their feelings and then stepping up and doing some fucking work. Which has me wondering, is this still a game for you?

Even now, is the outrage machine just so fun to play with that you'd risk all of our survival on it?

Consider this your "snap out of it" moment, a well-intended (if frustrated) slap on the face.

Because here's the truth: if this is the first time in your life you've ever felt this scared and at risk, consider yourself astonishingly fortunate. All this, all the bad, the crazy, the chaos? Some of us have been living in it for decades, just as upset as you are about how the world around us has been going.

Think about the shock, the confusion, the grief, the horror, everything you're feeling right now. Now imagine it was happening all the time to everybody you know, for decades. Consider the deep wells of anger and despair that would be sunk in your body, your family, your community. And then think just how infuriating it would feel if, every time you reached out for help, or hell, any time anybody referred to you in passing conversation, they told you to get fucked, and that all your troubles were your own damn fault? Because you’re poor. Because you’re rural. Because you’re Southern. Because you're a felon. Because of your race. Because you didn’t learn the latest way Good People talk about whatever topic. Because you are imperfect, and thus cannot belong.

I went to see Cory Doctorow speak on prison tech (a topic near and dear to my heart) a couple months ago. He shared the William Gibson quote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." This, all this that you're experiencing, presumably for the first time, based on the sheer volume of dramatics and teeth gnashing I'm seeing?

Welcome to the future, baby. The rest of us have been here for a minute.

And that's why I'm so het up over all this. Because this Apocalypse? It's largely tourism, for you. Sure, it's scary, and unprecedented, and damaging, and harmful, and painful, and not at all what we wanted. But in terms of actual, tangible, physical effects on your daily life, right now? Maybe not so much. They might very well be in the pipeline. The potential for the spread of catastrophe is there. It may very well come for you and those you love. But for many of you, I'm betting … maybe not so much. Because you've got the buffers of geography, and education, and money, and the bounds of democracy, which for all the screaming, are not yet in total tatters. You have the very real care and support of people around you, people who are waking up every day and going out and holding the line on things so you can still live the life we were all promised here. In some cases, you have an actual, physical escape hatch in another home, another state, another country. And that makes you an Apocalypse-Land tourist.

I'm not dunking on you for laughs. I'm sure as shit not gloating in victory. I didn't want any of this. I wish nothing but ill-fortune and failure on the newly-arisen.

This isn't smugness. It's a desperate cry to look around you and please, for the love of fuck, learn something.

Panic and indulgence in helplessness only empowers the bullies. You get exactly zero points for virtue-signaling in Apocalypse-land. The purity of your theory and praxis is utterly irrelevant. The more time you waste on pointless bullshit so you can avoid doing any real work to help yourself and those around you, the more complicit you become in the very destruction you say you oppose.

The more you rely on platitudes like, "the cruelty is the point," or "they're just working out their trauma in unhelpful ways," the longer you bury your head in the sand and refuse to acknowledge that some people genuinely get off on hurting you, while others are doing what they truly believe to be right, even though it's nightmarish, while others again are just in it for the lulzs, the longer you reach for comforting stereotypes and thought-stopping cliches so you don't have to do the uncomfortable work of actually engaging with your own goddamn responsibility, the deeper this shitpile we're all in gets. And, until you're willing to work with people you don't like or understand to face off against those who actively wish to harm you, we're all fucked.

Last year in my town, a factory that had been fighting forever to unionize finally made it. It was one of the first major union victories in the South since the 60s, and you know how it came about? It happened because after all those years of campaigning, the organizers finally thought to reach out to the women and Black people, too. Before you think, "Wow, look at those dumbasses, how could you miss the obvious opportunity for collaboration and solidarity?" ... perhaps turn that gaze around.

Because me and the other Apocalypse-Land townies? We're going to be here long after the winds change and things get better and these years become a period of history.

Apocalypse-land will fade into memory. For you, at least. We'll still be living it, over, and over, and over again. It's what we've done for the past 200-odd years.

And until anybody deigns to get down off their high horse and give a good goddamn about what happens to us, we'll keep living it, and the country will continue to cannibalize itself. All you'll have done is bought yourself some time.