There's that scene in Titanic, soon after the iceberg hits, where the upper-class passengers are milling around the lavish foyer with the grand staircase. The string ensemble is playing a rag-timey tune to calm everyone.
Tonight I watched the film again, for the second time since it came out.
Connectivity here at the cabin is a new thing. We never had a telephone. Broadcast television couldn't find its way over the Continental Divide. Running cable up the road was too expensive.
Those cows behind me probably think they're living in paradise. They don't know they're going to be rounded up and killed in a few weeks. (I wasn't thinking this thought when I smiled for the photo.)
This post is part of a series:
Part 1: Smoke on the mountain
Part 2: Unmaking a forest
Part 3: When the water comes rushing in
Until a couple of years ago, the place just had an AM radio. Sometimes on summer and autumn nights, I'd stand on the porch and listen to the stream rippling across the road. Besides the moon, the only light within a mile was the glow from my living room window. Then I'd go back indoors and twist the knob on the single portal that allowed me to hear another human voice. It was thin nourishment, but it filled a need for connection, hearing the play-by-play of a baseball game announcer after dusk or the murmured conversations between the late-night talk show host and his conspiracy-minded callers.
Among the realignments we all made to our lives after COVID, mine included deciding to spend more time up here. I still needed to earn a living though, so I set principle aside last year and got Starlink. This summer I bought a cheap TV to use as a computer monitor. Aside from my laptop and the satellite dish, it's the only appliance here that's made of plastic.
In that scene on the Titanic, some of the passengers have donned life vests as they were told to, while others are ignoring the vests and instructing their servants to prepare hot tea in their staterooms for after the panic is over. The lead character, Rose, has an exchange with Thomas Andrews, the designer of the ship.
Thomas Andrews enters, looking around the magnificent room, which he knows is doomed. Rose, standing nearby, sees his heartbroken expression. She walks over to him.
ROSE: I saw the iceberg, Mr. Andrews. And I see it in your eyes. Please tell me the truth.
ANDREWS: The ship will sink.
ROSE: You're certain?
ANDREWS: Yes. In an hour or so... all this... will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.
The disaster has hit, but most of the people don't yet understand the magnitude of the destruction. The ship's already dead, and most of the characters are dead too, save the ones who will act to save themselves.
Life this summer has felt like walking among the characters in that ill-fated room, although without the diamonds and the mink stoles. (People might wear those kinds of things in Aspen, but not in the ski town that's near here.) It feels as though we're treading on a platform that's about to sink beneath our feet, and most don't even realize it.
Some aspects of the destruction are going to feel abrupt and acute.
When the water comes rushing in – not through a breach in the lower decks, but perhaps through the gaps between barrier islands in a hurricane – FEMA won't be there to coordinate the search and rescue, or to help people find housing afterward. There won't be much effort toward recovery.
When a terrorist cell engineers a mass casualty event, there won't be enough staff in our counterterrorism and counterintelligence agencies to notice it in time to prevent it.
When the next novel, highly infectious disease sweeps through our communities, there won't be adequate teams in place to detect it in time to get ahead of it. There won't be the capacity to develop MRNA vaccines to suppress it. There won't be a central governmental source of information about how to avoid it.
When a farmer in Wyoming learns he needs cancer treatment, there won't be a hospital that's still open within a four hour drive.
When your parent or grandparent falls and breaks a hip, there won't be funding for home health aides, and Medicare won't pick up much of the tab for a nursing home. They'll be moving in with you.
When the next opportunity comes along for us to blunder into an intractable war (or worse, a war of conquest or empire-building), you can be sure this regime will handle it in the worse way possible. That's likely to get a lot of our young people killed.
Some aspects of the disaster will roll in more slowly.
Everything you buy from retailers will keep getting more expensive – groceries, gadgets, cars. That will be due to disruptions in international trade, declining wages, and a scarcity of jobs. It will be made worse through attempts by the regime's cronies to devalue the Dollar as a means of herding people's investments into cryptocurrency-denominated Ponzi assets.
Your health care costs will keep rising. If you're an individual insurer like me, they'll go up by about 75% next year. Drugs will be more expensive and possibly harder to obtain. More healthcare institutions will go out of business.
Young people will find it harder to enroll in higher education, and the breadth of choices will be more limited. Career opportunities will be fewer, partly because of the economic sabotage and partly because of the deployment of unregulated/misused AI tech. There will be a robust job market for young people in the expanded Homeland Security forces though, for those who are willing to become enforcers.
Your ability to be accurately informed about national and international news will diminish as the major news organizations consolidate further and align with the fascists regime.
There's a high risk we will fall into either a condition of severe inflation or (more likely) a long period of intractable stagflation. High prices, scarce goods, low wages and little economic growth.
The mobsters who populate this regime will use law enforcement as a tool to persecute their opponents while leaving themselves unfettered to gain wealth through corruption. Already, Trump, his offspring, and the offspring of Michael Luttig and Scott Bessent are taking world tours full of bribey deals and self-enrichment.
Right wing tech lords will consolidate their control over media and platforms, and they will move to replace government functions with lower-grade privatized versions. This will probably decrease the quality and maybe the availability of healthcare and K-12 and university education, among other things. Meanwhile their influence will encroach even more into all parts of our lives, consolidating a much larger amount of data about every one of us than is currently done – our media intake and online comments, our travel, our social contacts, our behavior. They will target their information collection and delivery to monitor, predict, and manipulate people's opinions and behavior on an individual basis. (Note, this development will make it virtually impossible for a society ever to extricate itself from fascist rule.)
Immigrants and other out-groups will be treated ever more harshly. There will be more exclusion, more kidnappings, more detention/imprisonment, more violence, and possibly worse. This will cause terror for your immigrant friends, your trans neighbors, and your LGBTQ relatives.
We'll probably lose any chance of addressing carbon pollution and catastrophic climate change. We're almost out of time to prevent the loss of huge swaths of the planet's ecosystem, and the regime and its allies are determined to ensure that there cannot be a solution. Without exaggeration, they're forcing us onto a path that will result in billions of human deaths.
There are no lifeboats.
That's all pretty bleak. The world they're pushing us toward is going to look so different from our present day that it will feel like we're at the bottom of the Atlantic.
The tragic and unforgivable part is that the destruction is intentional. It's coordinated. It's following a plan, described in part by Project 2025, and it's succeeding.
There are no lifeboats.* We need to take back the ship.
The writing at Daily Kos is produced and read by people who know how to make a difference. We have experience mobilizing our communities. You can learn more about the coalition to remove the fascist regime by visiting Citizens' Impeachment. The project needs letter-writers, coordinators, and local publicists.
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* There are no lifeboats other than the ones Musk is planning to build, which he imagines will take his future subjects to Mars.
