We sort of already live in a post-apocalyptic world.

  A plane crashes.  A human man says, it could be worker error; we just don't know yet.

  Ubiquitous blame?

  Not saying "the other thing"?  Could be a hack or other manipulation.

  Still standing, the man, and driving people to step up, claim authority/responsibility at work, at home, as a "national".

   In the first part of a discussion series on Totalitarian Novels, Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College focuses on George Orwell's 1984 and extrapolates (sp?) a thread between ancient tyranny and modern tyranny.

  The pleasure and pain of the tyrant is why, regime.  The entity attempts to control everything or "play God".  All ideas (be they coated in racism or propaganda movies) are meant to "perfect" the world.  Hence, some country mamas "protest" by encouraging play in the mud!  And, entire generations of Americans have worn "fashion" that is NOT "perfect".  Most people rebel against suppression of self, and try to make enough money to survive while surviving capitalism.  Besides, cleverly making a buck is a mark of ingenuity/innovation and like that joke about orange juice that goes over the head of a Khadaffi, we don't care if "they" don't get it.

  But we do care that in a world split like an atom between free enterprise and totalitarianism / capitalism and communism we are the people.  We're the ones the "head trip" is coming for.  We're the ones who need to parse data and stand with convictions and prove why our values (American and the West's) are better to live and worth dying for.  Us.  We are the people.

  If the people on the dawn of the U.S. Civil War woke up "stark raving mad" us contemporaries need to be "woke" to the crushing truths of what, for example, feeding the Chinese economy is doing to our own.  Like a fictional world where inhabitants are made into robotic drones, puppets, of the tyrant, things went in a direction other than us as a nation being in control of our money.  And we can bitch and moan about it all day, but that's wasting time and fouling up the air!  The new administration is quickly weeding the sell outs and not forging a new pack of lemmings of us.

  Reading...

  Passmore talks about how WW's I and II totally distorted gender.  I can't fathom what automatons will do to relationships.

  Yeah, I can see that.  What has to happen economically and some parallel to Jesus overturning the money tables in the Temple.

  Well....money is not our God, but what happens?

  NO MONEY

  THE RATS EAT YOU

  When I was a young person I had many bosses as I moved along the junglegym rafters of sales and customer service.  Those come to mind in instances.  One that comes to mind today is one who was kind of known to be an enigma.  And yes, I had to look up the meaning of the word and work through whether or not the other grown ups had said the boss (the seal on final decision) was "good" or "bad".

  The boss was an enigma for a couple reasons.  For one thing, he was in charge of one place in a chain of places and he was stubborn.  This forced people who'd gotten tunnel vision and screen eye from computering to actually talk at each other.  It was the beginning of networking as an important part of sales and service.  The concept wasn't new, but a lot of late Greatest Generation's and baby boomers' children had quickly distanced themselves from being human as workers force-fed media and digitalia.  Besides, he smiled, I might meet the love of my life.

  He was also shrewd but in the hospitality field.  As America lunged into the arms of tourism there was a lot of "puppy love" which idealized the professional fields and led to illusions of grandeur, or, at least maybe we can make it.  And alongside, the skeptics.  Buzz killers.  Those longer-view thinkers who point out stuff like...Do we really need more buildings for traveling sales force that's going digital?  Just as accused of being "cheap" as "wise about money" the boss brought people onboard a kind of frisbee that had to be as much bridge as we had between sales and service (which was becoming so competitive over the few dollars working poor thought we had, we were cutting our nose off in spite of our face).

  That boss also got along well with women looking to claim, reclaim feeling beautiful even though...

  Broke as hell.

  We don't have to act like it.

  He was a tall man in a sea change from politically correct to professionally correct.  And people sought out his thoughts on this and that.  He got chided not for bringing sexy back but for bringing some humane to bear on what was stacking up as the elimination of us having jobs.

  Now here we are thirty, forty years later in the undermining of the nation by a more-vague-than-clear threat...An army of Asian Automatons.  And us with us to confront.

  Other Western counterparts in academia and buisness were physically closer to studying the European post-apocalypse of being a world post- (after) World War.  In the 1980s and 1990s a vigorous youthful spirit took hold of the planet as a next generation came fully into adulthood.  The cultural "DNA" of all the past roared through everyone and came up against both stalwart and changeable.

  It was a "newsflash" to really get the whys of stuff.  Like, muscle cars and "sexy" women have appeal.  A lot of us went no shit Sherlock, but others were realizing hey, not everybody knows everything.  Some people got cozy with the notion of being an "educator" while others were absolutely shocked that they were conveying knowledge and example.  Awareness of self being in a world of transfer and learning/teaching was one of the "first steps" in mass-tending of the world we'd inherited.

  For a lot of us the craziness of the Vietnam War era had interrupted a solid education about the World Wars and so war got compartmentalized like advertising or studying piano-playing.  It went along with making the workforce into management and "other".  It even got us to discuss the seamless things happening in digital technology as part-ed--an out front and data bank, I can still here a salesperson trying for dinner if someone would just UPGRADE to a version with "firewalls".  Coupled with the inability to pay and pay more for sales and services to workers (finite pools of money in budgets), a general, mediocre settled on the country.

  Yet, we kept up an image of honky dory.  It was individual burden when somebody's spouse was angry all the time.  At best, a preacher might get through, or somebody'd seen about one person who throws up after every meal on a "talk show".  Even conservatives and religious people find most stuff good to know.  But televisions and computer screens make both a sea of glass and walls.

  Endeavors to mitigate a tsunami of information and/or to wield "it" like a supersword were like most attempts by Americans to deal with proliferation, veracity, and regulation.  Alcohol, drugs, "education", tobacco, food, sales and services all similar topic-wise to information and automation. 

  Some advertising has had us laughing at ourselves...people on a sofa just looking at a non-automated robot vacuum...pitch it at a Chinese robot dog?!?

  Assurances that it's safe "here", to come into a "therapy" room, and confront.

  There are knowns and unknowns about both such actions.  And there are with enemies and adversaries too.  We, as a people, are not just "kampy" about danger.  But neither are the serious-minded automatically "fascist".

  Back at the campground there was opening up, renewal, and boundary-respect.  People put their minds to brainstorming and envisioning.  Middle-aged people vowed live and learn, won't give up the good fight, gonna stand ground on x, y, and z.  People dug deep into why am I like that? Partly to answer the questions regarding getting psychotic on public land, and, in grappling with territory politics in public space.

  Some people wrestled some more with abuse and oppression issues, stark contrast to big skies and the freedoms to hike and live simply.  Others developed new "scripts" for the head, and tried out each others' professional voices.  The unemployed and in work shifts, reinventing, reinvigorating.

  Many, many people came to memorialize their dead.  Dead and gone from my life.  Drugs and disease were doing a number on the people living at that time.  We had deep grief, denial, anger, acceptance, and silence.  The common theme was respecting the space--which gave people the space to be, just be, just be you.

  As people focused for selves on all that had been happening in life, ideas and memories started to percolate.  Around the same campfires some mornings were masons, mechanics, PhD doctors of philosophy, business women just starting out....

  Index card business cards listed interests small and broad; people took cues from more experienced as to can say, cannot say and if I had the chance to do it all again.  People picked up some mountain-living skills and ways as well.  "It's always been that way...see..." unlike in suburbia, we don't see each the other but once or twice a season, so of course that's when we exchange recipes!  And, giggle, gossip.  Heard anything juicy since two days ago?

  In fact, the campgrounds and public lands were full of "news" relevant to all age groups.  And, the people not in the Work To Stay program or the Services dealing with the tourism of mountains, were shocked and awed by, for example, a fire line practice that uncovered plastic explosives, or how people had to practically go undercover and work together with area Social Services because a Chinese madman had roped people into a bit of a "cult".  "You don't say?"

  "Well, it's really true."

  "Naw.  You're making that up!"

  "Come on now.  You think people are gonna just come to nature space and not bring their shit with 'em." 

  Silence like a porch in the quiet part of the day.  Then, "A cult?". 

  "Well, it amounts to that when people trap people into selling or pushing their drugs, and," more people returned to camp, "And, you can ask them!"

  "I just might.  Might indeed."