The Process is the Punishment: America was already oppressive

I’m going to talk about trauma and PTSD in this one. It’s something I’ve studied a bit for writing and for personal reasons, but while I do my best to get things right, I am not an expert.

The US has long declared itself to be a beacon of freedom and defender of democracy, while simultaneously doing some of the most authoritarian and unjust things imaginable. I think perhaps the best illustration of this is the third verse of the National Anthem:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
⁠That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
⁠Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The slaves in question had taken up with England in the war of 1812, for the promise of freedom should the US be reclaimed by the British Empire. They had no hope for anything but slavery, torture, and early death, so they did what they could to get their freedom, and for that they became immortalized in this song as villains whose fear and death were the righteous outcome of not accepting their slavery. I feel a need to emphasize the level of sadism and cruelty that was routine for the United States, because no horror movie has ever come close to the simple truth of what this country was (extreme content warning for dehumanization and death by torture). The US national anthem was written in 1814, decades before the abolition of chattel slavery, or even the pretense of contrition for the genocide of the Native Americans. It was a land of grotesque, unrelenting oppression, and yet well-to-do white men declared it to be a nation synonymous with freedom, apparently without shame. To quote Frederick Douglas in his 1852 Fourth of July address:

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?

It many ways, the current Republican party does represent what the US has always been. It claims to defend truth, freedom, and justice, while it actively dismantles the infrastructure of democracy, erases history that clashes with its white supremacist ideology, and rolls back as many rights as possible. Segregation is a matter of living memory, and they want it back.

And at this point, I want to pause and ask: What does oppression actually mean? Like, on a practical, lived sense, what does it look like? I’d argue that at its most basic level, oppression is punishment without due process or recourse, often for words or actions that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a free society. An oppressive government will fine, imprison, or kill people for saying the wrong thing, for being in the wrong place, for organizing political resistance, for touching the wrong water.

When it comes to ethnic and/or racial oppression, the oppressed group tends to be made a scapegoat for society’s ills. They’re treated as inherently criminal and dangerous, and that treatment is used as proof that they’re inherently criminal and dangerous. In the US, the belief that it’s “the land of the free” has become its own perverse justification. If this is a free country, then clearly it can’t be oppressing Black people, and since law enforcement disproportionately focuses its resources and violence on Black people, well, they must just be inherently criminal and dangerous.

Because that’s the pattern, for Black Americans. Much of the US recently celebrated Juneteenth, in honor of the emancipation proclamation being enforced in Texas. That was a huge step forward, but the moment the war was lost, the former slavers began working to ensure that that “freedom” meant as little for Black people as possible. The KKK was formed to terrorize Black people and keep them down with brutal, sadistic violence, and the so-called Justice system was largely on their side, when it wasn’t just staffed with Klansmen to begin with. Reconstruction was sabotaged and allowed to fail, and a new regime of open, violent white supremacy was imposed. The 1898 Wilmington Massacre is a good microcosm, in which the duly elected government of WIlmington, North Carolina was ousted at gunpoint for being biracial, many Black citizens who didn’t flee in time were killed, and a number of Republicans were exiled from the city. Chattel slavery in the South was not replaced by freedom, but by a different regime of white supremacy, in which the violence was slightly less open and legal.

The end of Segregation was also a huge step forward, but it also came with a quiet adjustment to maintain racial oppression. That’s the period into which I was born, and in which I believed, for much of my life, that the wins of the Civil Rights Movement had marked a turning point for the US, beyond which racism had dwindled away to almost nothing. It was a pretty myth that I absorbed despite being raised in a fairly left-wing environment. The reality is that the United States never stopped being an oppressive nation guided by white supremacy.

This didn’t really sink in, for me, until I really took the time to think though New York City’s Stop and Frisk policy, in which minorities, mostly Black people, were effectively presumed guilty until proven innocent. What do we, as White Americans, fear from an oppressive regime? The invasion of privacy. The inability to go where we please without being harassed. The feeling that every encounter with an agent of the state is dangerous. The fear that we’ll be locked up in some torturous hell-hole and left there to rot without recourse. Dare I say, the fear that we’ll be treated like Black people?

Kalief Browder was 16 when he was accused without evidence of stealing a backpack “full of valuables”, and tossed into Rikers. For those who don’t know, Rikers Island is a prison complex that holds thousands of people in “pre-trial” detention. On the face of it, the notion of such detention is that if someone is deemed a risk to the public, they can be held until the speedy trial to which they have a right. For white people, that’s sometimes how it works, usually depending on their wealth. For black people, well, they tend to be deemed a risk to the public for being black. In most cases where people can’t buy their freedom pending trial, they are slowly tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit: the very thing that legal concepts like habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence were developed to prevent.

Browder was kept in Rikers for three years. He spent roughly two-thirds of that time in solitary confinement, a practice now widely recognized as torture for its devastating effect on human neurology. He was arrested in 2010, and released in 2013, by which time he had attempted suicide three times. In 2015, at age 22, he hanged himself, and died.

After he got out of prison, he made a statement about the effect that his imprisonment had had on him:

People tell me that because I have this case against the city I’m all right. But I’m not all right. I’m messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that’s not going to help me mentally. I’m mentally scarred right now. That’s how I feel. [There] are certain things that changed about me[,] and they might not [change] back. … Before I went to jail, I didn’t know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I’m aware, I’m paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.

I want to take a moment to go into what’s going on in this quote.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is what happens when a person’s nervous system locks into defensive mode in response to traumatic conditions. When discussing trauma, it’s important to understand that the exact nature of the reaction is going to change depending on the person’s neurology, on their life before, on the traumatizing incident, and on the conditions in which they lived in the aftermath.

For a personal example, I got a full-blown case of it as a child, after a full kettle of boiling water spilled on me. For a long time I had a strong reaction to boiling water, and if the sound was too close to what I heard while it was pouring on me, I’d get nauseous. In simple terms, my nervous system programmed in an automated response to keep me far away from boiling water, so it wouldn’t go through that again. I got over it with time and support, but I do still have occasional intrusive memories when I’m boiling water.

All that was from a few minutes of indescribable pain, and a couple hours of believing I was going to die.

When you expose someone to repeated or continuous traumatic events, combined with the belief that there is no escape, they’re very likely to develop what’s called Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). The effects of this tend to be farther-reaching, and more insidious, even when the traumatic events seem comparatively mild. Where the burn left me with boiling water as a severe trigger, CPTSD affects everything in your life. It can make it difficult, or even impossible to feel positive emotions, and it tends to come with anxiety, depression, shame, and various forms of self-hatred. It affects how you see yourself and others, it can be a source of suffering for a victim’s entire life, and it can be a big driver of self-harm and addiction. As with PTSD, the exact nature of the traumatic response will vary from person to person.

CPTSD is common for people who’ve been victims of domestic abuse, emotional neglect in childhood, systematic bullying (peer abuse), war, poverty, oppression, and prison. In all of these cases, the trauma is inflicted through relationships and interactions with other humans. That means that if you have CPTSD, your nervous system usually sees interactions with other people as a threat. It might not be all interactions, but the way CPTSD develops means that it often means most of them. When you’re in a social situation, your nervous system goes on alert at a subconscious level, and that quite literally drains your energy. Being “on alert” like that is a biochemical process that both consumes calories, and causes literal wear on your systems. People with CPTSD often develop other chronic health problems that plague the rest of their lives, and can lead to an earlier death.

All of this can also get worse over time, even without additional traumatizing experiences. The disordered emotional reaction sends the message that even benign or positive social interactions actually went badly. This can lead to self-isolation, and the reinforcement of the disorder as those interactions are interpreted as a continuation of the patterns that created it in the first place. Simply existing in society, untreated, can cause CPTSD to get worse.

You can argue whether the people running our jails know or care about trauma research, but the fact of it is, the US “justice” system depends on traumatizing people into waving their right to a trial. Some people take a plea deal before it gets to that point, but only because the threat is there. Everyone in the US knows that prisons are intentionally horrifying places, where abuse is considered routine.

Prison isn’t the only way for this to happen, either. Forced institutionalization is still a thing in the US, and it seems to require little to no process to force someone into a situation in which they’re forced to take mind-altering drugs, and told that the realities of their lives are delusions. As with solitary confinement, I would consider this to be a vicious and twisted form of psychological torture, and it sounds like something from fiction. In fact, I’ve brought this up in conversation, and been told that “If that was happening in the US, we’d know about it!”

The US is a free country, and therefor oppression cannot be happening.

I’ve written about this before, so I’ll just quote my piece on forced institutionalization from 2022:

In 2014, Kam Brock was pulled over “on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana”. People commenting on the story at the time noted that she was a black woman driving a BMW in Harlem, and that she was really pulled over for Driving While Black. This explanation is made stronger, in my view, by the fact that while they didn’t find any drugs on her or in her car, they impounded it anyway, and when she went to pick it up the next morning, they decided she was too emotional, handcuffed and drugged her, and threw her in a mental hospital.

“Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out… I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”

She responded pretty reasonably, in my opinion. She told them who she was, and asked to be released.

For eight days.

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Several jurors said that Brock was less credible than three doctors — Elisabeth Lescouflair, Zana Dobroshi and Alan Labor — and NYPD Officer Salvador Diaz, who all determined she was in need of mental health treatment.

The jurors noted that Brock did not call her father or sister to the stand. Both, according to testimony, had told Harlem Hospital staff that Brock had recently been acting erratically.

“We view this verdict as a total vindication for the defendant officer and doctors who sought to help Ms. Brock through her troubling episode. The jury rejected any notion that the actions of these officials was anything but appropriate under the circumstances,” a Law Department spokesman said.

While at the hospital, Brock was injected three times with powerful anti-psychotics. The experience, she said, left her traumatized. She frequently broke down during the six-day trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. At the beginning of deliberations three were in Brock’s favor and five were against, Rella said.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy

In 1979, an attorney named Malcolm Feeley published a case study called The Process is the Punishment. In it, he showed that the process of getting to trial was so onerous that the vast majority of people waved their right to a trial, to avoid an expensive legal process that would end up costing more than the punishment they ended up accepting. It’s a situation in which punishment cannot be escaped, even by the innocent. They can accept the punishment that police and prosecutors decided to inflict upon them, or they can insist on their right to a trial, for which they are punished through legal fees and sometimes pre-trial detention.

That remains the case today. It’s widely acknowledge that if every defendant were to insist on the fair trials to which they have a right under US law, the US legal system would collapse. Rather than trying to fix this problem by investing more in the system so everyone has the rights they’re supposed to, the US punishes people for trying to exercise their rights, as a matter of routine.

That’s the default. 90% of defendants don’t get a trial, and that’s been the case for decades. Meanwhile, US prisons have only gotten worse.

The US was already an oppressive nation, when Trump entered national politics. It never stopped being an oppressive nation, and that’s without considering the endless atrocities of US foreign policy.

There’s a phrase you’ve probably heard from time to time: If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone! MAGA shitheads liked to say that about Trump’s arrest and conviction, but it’s more correctly applied to the treatment of the people with the least power in society. If they can torture Kalief Browder to death, they can do it to you. If they can declare Kamilah Brock insane for telling them the truth, they can do it to you.

Because this is a society that has already decided this kind of treatment is not only acceptable, it is inevitable and necessary. The only question is who will be at the receiving end, and if you think your whiteness might protect you, you’re only partly right. It protects you until it doesn’t. Until you take up the cause of Black liberation. Until you take action to resist oppression. Until a cop having a bad day decides you’re looking at him funny.

America is a land of trickery and illusions. I don’t like it, but in many ways, a sadistic, abusive con man like Trump is a perfect reflection of what the nation has been, as an institution. The promises of liberty and justice for all were never intended to apply to everyone, and just as we’ve never had democracy without a ruling class putting its thumb on the scale, we’ve never actually had all the rights and freedoms that white folks thought we did. The stated ideals of the country have never been important enough to the nation as a whole, to be worth serious investment.

The fact that that was the normal state of affairs meant that when a fascist came to power, the machinery of oppression was already in place, just waiting to be used on a larger portion of the population, who didn’t understand that their freedom was always a lie.

None of us is free until all of us are free.

Happy Juneteenth!

No post today. I’ve been working on a kinda lengthy piece about the US legal system, white supremacy, trauma, and summary punishment. It’s not really appropriate for a day of celebration, but more importantly I want to take the time to do it right, rather than half-assing something on such an important and serious subject.

 

So for now I’ll just say happy Juneteenth, and none of us is free until all of us are free.

We missed our chance. Now what?

There are moments in all of our lives, in which we realize that we missed our chance to do something important, and no matter what we do now, it will affect the rest of our lives. It might be a relationship that was neglected till it fell apart. It might be a health problem we ignored until it became an urgent threat to our lives. It might be an accident or illness that left us disabled. It might be a choice that ended a job, or a career path. As we grow older, it gets easier to look back and see those points where certain possible futures ceased to exist. Those aren’t moments to give up, but they are moments beyond which everything is different, at least a little, and we have to change to account for that.

One of the mainstays of the climate “debate” has been the question of predictions and deadlines. If you’ve been paying even a little attention to the issue, you have seen headlines like this one from 12 years ago, saying we only had 10 years left to take real action, if we wanted to avoid catastrophe.

“NASA scientist James Hansen, widely considered the doyen of American climate researchers, said governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check and limit the increase in global temperatures to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

“I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change … no longer than a decade, at the most,” Hansen said Wednesday at the Climate Change Research Conference in California’s state capital.

If the world continues with a “business as usual” scenario, Hansen said temperatures will rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees F) and “we will be producing a different planet.”

We did take some action. There has been an increase in both energy efficiency, and the use of renewable energy since Hansen made that warning. Unfortunately, it was not enough.

I wrote a post in 2023 called “defeat by small victories” about the tendency to celebrate incremental gains in one area or another, for the sake of keeping up people’s spirits. I get the reasoning, but as we watch Republican fascists begin their next assault on democracy, and the AI bubble’s data center madness threatens to double energy consumption, I stand by my earlier gloom:

For me, the one that nags me the most isn’t one from my own life, but the time that’s been wasted on climate change. What would the world be like if governments had acted when scientists and corporations all knew what was going on, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s? I think it’s entirely possible that we couldn’t have “solved” the problem, but there’s no question that we had a chance for a drastically different future. If we’d been making the kind of steady, deliberate change that was being called for, the planet would be a cooler and less chaotic place, today.

We had a chance, and it was squandered before I was born. Worse than that, the same choice has been made every damned day since then, and so now big changes are all that’s left. Either we change our entire society in a major way, or it will be “changed” for us by the rapidly warming climate. The oceans are doing scary shit right now, and it seems like the powers that be are moving ahead with their plans to use violent repression to deal with the crisis they’ve created.

[…]

I feel as though I’ve spent my entire life hearing about small victories in one area or another, and how each one will help us a whole lot, at some point in the future. They never seem to deliver on that promise. Some of those victories did pay off, by reducing emissions, but they’re hard to notice because they weren’t enough to stop overall emissions from continuing to rise. The majority seem to just be empty promises, or doomed half-measures like trying to offset CO2 emissions with forests, which definitely never catch fire or anything.

Reading that today, I feel pretty comfortable stating that the situation has gotten worse. I’m writing this post because I didn’t have a clear idea for anything better, so I went with my fall-back of browsing climate science headlines on Science Daily, and these were the stories that caught my eye:

Antarctica is melting from below and scientists say it’s worse than expected: Hidden warm-water traps beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves may be speeding up sea level rise far faster than expected

Arctic Ocean passed a tipping point and scientists say it may never recover: Scientists say the rapid disappearance of sea ice is triggering a hidden chemical shift that is stripping the ocean of nitrate — a nutrient essential for the tiny plankton that support Arctic life.

Alaska’s glaciers have a startling response to rising temperatures: Alaska’s glaciers are proving to be highly sensitive to warming temperatures.

Rising seas could drown mangroves and release vast stores of carbon: Rising seas may push mangroves from climate heroes to unexpected carbon emitters.

Ah yes. It was 12 years ago that Hansen said we had 10 years left to make a big change.

See, the problem with these deadlines is that bad-faith actors often present them as “the world will end in 10 years”, and when it doesn’t, they declare the prediction to be wrong. That was never the prediction. Look at that last headline – rising seas could drown mangrove swamps, causing them to move from capturing carbon, to releasing it as the ecosystem collapses and the plants rot. Well, what’s happening with the sea level?

Sea level rise is speeding up and scientists now know exactly why: Earth’s oceans are rising faster than ever, and scientists say the forces driving it are now impossible to ignore.

According to the new study, published in Science Advances, global sea levels have risen at an average rate of 2.06 millimeters per year since 1960. But the pace has increased dramatically in recent decades, reaching 3.94 millimeters per year between 2005 and 2023.

Researchers found that warming oceans are the largest contributor, responsible for 43% of the increase. As seawater heats up, it expands and occupies more space, pushing sea levels higher around the world.

Melting ice has also become an increasingly important factor. Mountain glaciers account for 27% of sea level rise since 1960, while the Greenland Ice Sheet contributes 15% and the Antarctic Ice Sheet adds another 12%. Changes in land water storage make up the remaining 3%.

The study also sheds light on why sea level rise has sped up over time. Since 1960, ocean warming and reduced land water storage played major roles. Since 1993, however, the rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica has become a much larger driver of the accelerating trend.

Scientists warn these patterns are likely to continue for decades.

So for the mangroves, it’s not a question of if they will be drowned, but of when they will be drowned. If we wanted to prevent the world’s mangrove swamps from becoming a carbon source and adding to the speed of the warming, we missed our chance. That’s gone now.

We had the opportunity to change course, and we missed it because there are numerous amplifying feedbacks, in which aspects of our planet respond to warming with more warming. The mangroves, the increase in forest fires, and the thawing permafrost are all examples of how the rise in temperature is causing the natural world to increase its own greenhouse gas emissions, which will keep going for as long as the temperature and/or sea levels are elevated. Likewise, as the world’s ice continues to melt, it leaves behind bare earth and open water, both of which absorb sunlight that the ice was reflecting back into space.

The horrifying, tragic truth is that we are on track to keep warming for centuries to come. That would probably be the case if we were to stop all emissions tomorrow, but obviously that’s not going to happen. We’re currently trending in the opposite direction. It might be possible to change course if we dedicate a huge portion of the global economy to growing, harvesting, and storing as much fast-growing plant matter as possible. That would mean all the resources we currently spend on things like war, and indulging billionaires, and overproduction, instead go to growing and harvesting stuff like Kudzu and fast-growing grasses, turning them into charcoal, and burying them.

If we do that starting pretty soon, it might be possible to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough to slow, or even reverse the warming. Maybe.

Forgive my pessimism, but I do not think we are going to do that. It is too late. As I’ve been saying for years now, we need to plan and invest for surviving on a much hotter planet than the one on which we evolved, and on which we built what we call civilization. The alternative is dying on that hotter planet.

And if we’re honest, the current fascist nightmare is a good demonstration of what we can expect that “dying on a hotter planet” will look like. As ecosystems shrink in on themselves and collapse, and artificial scarcity becomes true scarcity, humanity’s current default setting is to turn to authoritarianism. We don’t have enough to feed “our own”, so we must keep out any refugees, even if our policies made them flee their homes. We’ve already heard the plans from the far right: Landmines along borders, and sinking unapproved boats, and endless war to protect what we have from anyone else as the lives we lead grow smaller and dimmer, until humanity is snuffed out altogether.

That’s the future offered to us by the right. Not living, not even surviving, but ending ourselves for the sake of preserving the power of our rulers, and the systems that gave them their power.

Or, somehow, we can build a society that values life, and values living.

We can build cities that can function without anyone having to go outside in deadly summer heat. We can build modes of indoor food production, from greenhouses to algae farms. We can use the wonders of modern technology to benefit everyone, and to build a future that’s better than our present.

Right now we’re doing the opposite. Right now, for all the small victories I’ve seen celebrated throughout my life, we are headed for catastrophe because we missed the deadline. We tried incrementalism and it has lead to disaster. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to avoid dramatic, systemic change. The longer we wait, the less control we will have over that change, because if we do not choose it, it will be forced upon us by the rising temperature.

Prepping, Famine, and Food Intolerance

This is, in a sense, a followup to the warning about the coming El Niño. If you haven’t already, you should start working on a food supply for emergencies, and you should start now. Further, you should look into how to do it properly, because it’s not hard to screw it up.

About 15 years ago, I helped form a “climate working group” intended to get Quakers in New England Yearly Meeting to take global warming more seriously. As a group, Quakers often pride themselves on their historical commitment to peace and justice, exemplified by their opposition to war, and their role in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. With that history, how could they not be doing more about this growing global crisis? So we focused on our region, and on having our community lead by example by using their resources as a mostly middle-class community to get themselves off of fossil fuels.

At the time, one of my contributions to our presentation was to encourage people to look into disaster prepping. The use of fossil fuels created a society with the capacity to be post-scarcity, or close to it, but in the process has set us on the path to a return to involuntary scarcity. As I’ve said many times, our entire civilization was built on a foundation of predictable weather patterns allowing reliable food production, and those patterns are breaking down. As the temperature rises, it has never been a question of if there will be food shortages, but when.

Well, the “when” seems to be sooner than I’d hoped. As I’ve said before, famine is often more a political issue of resource distribution and policy decisions, than it is an absolute scarcity of food. To that I want to add: those political considerations also affect the volume of food produced, which will be particularly relevant in the next couple years. We’re entering what is likely to be a severe El Niño, but while that’s often associated with worldwide crop failures, it’s not the only problem. The Republicans’ pointless war on Iran has not only caused a fuel shortage that has yet to reach its peak, it has also caused a fertilizer shortage, which is a serious problem for an agricultural system that depends heavily on imported inputs like fertilizer and pesticides to make things grow in over-worked soil and to mitigate the pest problem caused by monoculture. Throughout this northern-hemisphere growing season, farmers all over the world are trying to make do with far fewer resources than they normally have. Once again, America is “leading the free world” off a cliff.

I’ve been worried about my own situation, as our income is closely tied to the academic year, and we’re in the lean months now (sign up for my Patreon if you have the money and want to help me survive). That said, I think none of the world’s wealthy nations will suffer as much from this as will the US. Fascism is a death cult, and in their eagerness to punish powerless scapegoats for society’s problems, they have devastated the country’s population of migrant workers. Most of those who haven’t been rounded up by the GOP’s version of the SS are reluctant to go to work, lest they be put in a concentration camp, tortured, and possibly murdered.

So while the whole planet has to suffer because of the US slide into fascism, the US is facing problems that most of the rest of the world is not, because of that fascism. Of the crops that don’t fail, many will rot in the fields once again. I worry that this will be used as a chance to expand US use of slave labor, but even without that, hard times are coming.

Going back to my time as a Quaker climate activist, I don’t know whether anyone took my advice at the time (many seemed to think I was overreacting), but I maintain that it is something everyone should be doing, to whatever degree finances and time allow. I also advocate that people with the means account for their neighbors in said prepping.

Disaster prep gets a bad rap, I think, because it is primarily seen as the province of right-wing nutjobs who seem eager for civilization to collapse. The right-wing “prepper” mentality seems to be a power fantasy, in which the prepper will enjoy one of three scenarios. The first is that they will become the Lone Survivor archetype, in which their hoarded food and weaponry will allow them to survive in the wasteland, and fight off the savage raiders who will inevitably come for their supplies. The second is that they will become those raiders themselves, taking what they want from those with fewer weapons. The third is that either the food, or some other resource they’ve been hoarding will be their ticket to social power and acceptance. If I’m the only one around with a supply of iodine, everyone will owe me for protecting them from thyroid cancer in the irradiated aftermath of nuclear war.

I advocate for what I call “pro-social” prepping in which you are preparing to do what you can to care for your community in hard times, and intending to share what you have, rather than hoarding it, and/or using it as a source of power over others. I also maintain that I was right to start urging this all those years ago. It’s hard to predict when or how disaster will strike, and when it does, all you have is what you have.

If you have nothing stored up, then anything you get to fix that problem will be better than nothing. but as I’ve said before, having food stored for emergencies is not as simple as buying a bunch of rice and beans or MREs and forgetting about them until you need them. You can do that, of course, but it comes with risks. If you’re not regularly interacting with your food supply, how can you know if mice start getting at it, or if moisture got into your dried food to let it rot, or a bad batch of canned food is starting to swell? The only way to ensure you’re actually ready for hard times is to actively maintain that supply.

The best way to do that is to constantly use it. Make it a part of your normal diet, so that you’re always eating the oldest stuff, and replacing it with new. This also ensures that when hard times hit, you already know how to use the food you have, and you have what you need to prepare it. Hard times can be a little easier if the food is tasty, and I can say from (camping) experience that you don’t want to wait until all you have is canned food to discover that you don’t have a working can opener.

Five years ago, Tegan wrote an excellent post on how to build and maintain a pantry that goes into all of this, but I have a new factor to add in, and that’s food intolerance. I said earlier that anything is better than nothing, but that may not be true if the food you get is poisonous to you, specifically.

I’ve known I’m lactose intolerant for about a decade, but over just the last five years, I’ve lost the ability to safely eat a whole bunch of different foods. I had used garlic powder as a non-perishable source of flavor for most of my life, but now we have a decent-sized bag of it that I simply can’t eat. Canned baked beans are cheap and tasty around here, except that they’ve all got tomatoes in, and those cause problems for me. Likewise, we have a big jar of split peas that I can’t eat, another of red lentils that seem to cause problems. The scale of of the problem depends on the food in question. For lentils and wheat, the problems can be subtle, and less of a problem for a single meal. For garlic and peas, it’s severe intestinal pain, and other symptoms I’d rather not describe in detail. The list of foods I can’t eat is longer than that, but you get the idea. It’s also worth noting that if you are eating food that is damaging your digestive tract, there’s a good chance you’re getting less nutrition from the stuff you can digest.

It has taken me time to adjust my diet to remove most of my favorite foods, and learn to make tasty food from what I can eat. Thankfully, rice has yet to let me down, and beans do OK for me if I prepare them correctly, but hopefully you can see the issue. Tegan has been slowly eating through the pantry foods I can’t eat, and we can share them with neighbors if it comes to that, but what if I simply didn’t eat split peas in normal life? We’d hit a time of hardship, and discover that something in our pantry disagreed with me. Because few meals are made of just one ingredient, then we’d have to figure out what the problem was, and simply have less food available, at the worst possible time.

So my message is this: Hard times are coming for the world, and especially for the US. The best time to start stocking and maintaining your pantry was 15 years ago, but the second-best time is now.