Living Through Collapse
I was looking thru old photos and I’m like WTF was I doing? There was a war and it looks like I just drank through it. I wrote and protested and stuff, but the photos are mostly partying, interspersed with burnt bodies, heads in trees, and bomb smoke.
That’s what I write about in I Lived Through Collapse. The great banality of decline. As people from any messed up state can tell you, life goes on. I was a 20-something idiot and that proceeded on schedule.
I wrote that piece for Americans who are like ‘this is fine’ to tell them no, it’s really not. Anyone from Nigeria to Algeria to Bosnia can tell you. Even if your life goes on, your country has still collapsed. People still make dinner and drink and have sex while their societies collapse. They still go to work. It’s not the life that’s so different. It’s the death.
The amount of death Americans are living with on the daily is shocking. Roughly 1,000 people are dying every day. More than 2X as many people have died in 9 months (200,000) than died in 30 years of Sri Lankan civil war (80,000). It’s just, how do you live like this? But I guess I answered that question. This isn’t living. You’re dying.
