Tell me if this is a normal conversation to have while standing with the other groomsmen at a wedding.
“Never before has there been a generation of Americans so disillusioned by the American Dream.”
“Maybe in the 20s? It’s hard to compare.”
“Totally broken down. You can see it on everyone’s face. We all know we’ve been had.”
I was fidgeting with my sleeves. I’d never worn a tux before. “Just going through the motions. So. What you been doing lately?”
“Mixing cement.”
I’m not sure it is a normal conversation, but who wants to have those? Beautiful wedding, otherwise, at least what I remember through the haze of pain medication. But he had a point, didn’t he? Arguably that dream was always a bill of goods leveraged by the blood and sweat of the poor, but never before has the general public so generally recognized that we’ve been had. Many feel the downward slope yawning before us, as peak petroleum, an Empire over-extended, and an unstable climate push us into a troubled and horribly wondrous near future.
Or so it might appear. Our future runs through our past. In the first century AD, there were revolutions within Rome that made its history seem bleak. I imagine in times like those, it seems like the entire world is about to end. As it turned out, those were the explosions that birth a sun, not its death throes in nova. That wouldn’t come for three or four centuries when the Visigoths helped dismantle an already collapsing empire. It should come as no great revelation that systemic change comes about...systemically. Call it the hand of God, if you want. There will always be “the Visigoths,” in one form or another. Just as it seems there will always be fascists, the great organizing principle of Empire.
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