2022: The Year America’s Basic Systems Started To Crumble

Washington chaos, chaos at the airport, holiday hangovers: It was all familiar enough for the first month in 2023. The cracks in our walls are what Americans might not be as familiar with.

Sure, Americans have long felt a decline — maybe a few shifts in the foundations; the yearly polls on trust in major institutions reflect that well enough. An uncle might say, “Wall Street’s a bunch of crooks!” You can also alert a neighbour. “Washington politicians are only in it for themselves,” or an old classmate who thinks. “Colleges are just a bunch of crazy activists these days,” However, the majority of complaints were resolved by the individuals who filed them. All was still working well enough.

And then it didn’t.

While politicians “the experts,” and their friends in corporate media managed to muddy the waters in the first year of lockdowns, by 2021 everyday Americans felt like they’d earned the right to wonder why their kindergarteners were in masks, or their local teachers still refused to teach. Modern homeschooling thrived like never before. Catholic schools saw a significant increase in enrollment for the first time since decades.

The easy and pervasive idea that you could drop your kids off at school and expect they’d get an education like you did back in the day was dead. It was assumed that you could trust the hospital administrator. Then came the idea that your favorite news anchor could trust you. The truth is that even pastors and funeral director stood in the way for the business and the salvation of lives, death, and the soul.

However, these were not people; most of them were rational. Or at the very least, these were institutions. These were, in fact, institutions. “unprecedented times” “we’re all in this together.” “The pendulum will swing back,” Americans are confident about their predictions. “This craziness will pass.”

Today, in the first month of 2023, we don’t have the luxury of thinking it’s all going to get better. It’s far from the year America changed its course and settled in. “normalcy,” 2022 was the year that the systems behind the scenes we depend on began to fail.

People had to struggle to purchase a car. Baby formula was sold behind locked counters where cigarettes were once sold. Friends and neighbors worked together in order to provide basic medicines and baby aspirin for the most vulnerable. While the contents of containers rotted, they backed up for many weeks. The American economy’s lifeblood was threatened by a shortage of diesel.

Even if you don’t have an infant or a child looking for medicine, even if you didn’t see the ships lining up the California coast or the Chesapeake Bay, or missed the growing unease in the trucking industry, you might have noticed the cost of meat fluctuating so greatly that some local restaurants charged “market price” for chicken fingers. Perhaps condiments or other basic items were missing from the local fast food outlets. Perhaps a friend sent you a text asking for help finding a formula that would be suitable for his daughter.

It’s simple: “Good Morning America” You noticed it, even though they could ignore them.

Washington Can’t Help You

Just as people noticed they can’t simply trust schools to give their kids a good education, people began to notice empty shelves — to notice cracks in the system. Plus: Nobody seems to be expecting the politicians to fix it.

For example, take the Southwest crisis. Sure, a couple of politicians from both parties threw the blame toward Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, wondering why the man ostensibly in charge of American transportation hadn’t taken stronger steps against increasingly unreliable plane travel. Was there any anger from the families who waited for days at airports to vent their frustration at him? But not really. Nobody believed that the former mayor of an Indiana small city would be able to fix their poor roads.

By the time the Federal Aviation Administration had to ground all flights across the United States for the first time since 9/11, citing a system outage, no one publicly even suspected a cyber attack by one of the United States’ many enemies. Blaming total incompetence did not satisfy anyone, even the most frustrated morning commuters.

Were we surprised to find that the FAA requested $15.2 billion to strengthen its systems, but it was being divided up for promotion? “environmental justice and climate change mitigation,” Fostering and adoption “more inclusive contracting and workforce development?” Or that the FAA had demanded an additional $20,000,000 on top of that. “to promote equity and inclusion?”

It wasn’t surprising at all. What’s more, we all understand that any agency holding priorities like these isn’t likely to fix its own house. So who are you to blame?

Not Mitch McConnell. He believes that sending money to Ukraine will fix the fundamental problems in American systems. “is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That’s how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.”

Joe Biden, could you save our foundations? The country’s oldest president ever rounded out 2022 by passing a trillion dollars in new spending and signing a federal anti-lynching law named after Emmett Till, who was murdered in 1955. This was a priority. Because the movie was made on it in the same year.

How about the GOP? Do they have the right skills? “The fundamentals of the American economy are good,” Fox News interviewed Sen. John Kennedy as the United States fell into recession in early 2013. His belief — a belief that is shared by most of his Republican colleagues — is that the only problem with America is the Democrats are in charge at the moment. But, would lower taxes and deregulation cure the disease?

No. No. The truth is that American industries have been sold overseas for decades by the financial and political classes. Combine the unemployment with the drug addictions, hopelessness, fatherlessness, abuse and other problems that result, you will see that the American society is deteriorating.

Our financial class isn’t the only one keeping American land in their sights. Powerful and popular oligarchs as politically disparate as Tim Cook and Elon Musk’s empires exist at the mercy of the deeply anti-American Chinese government. Billion-dollar fortunes don’t come cheap, but it’s hard for a country to remain sovereign when its own nobles are disloyal and, more than that, largely ignorant of the damage outsourcing and its ilk have caused.

Indeed, America’s political, financial, technological, and educational elites have seemingly been the last to realize how hollowed out we are. J.D. Vance was the first to write his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” They were shocked and amazed. He was invited by TED Talks to speak. Koch Seminars provided copies of his book for free. Yale University and Columbia University invited him for a talk.

Vance was treated as a prophet for telling the story of the present and the past — telling of what had been going on in America’s working class for decades. The folks at TED, the gang at the Koch Seminar, the crew at the universities — these people had had no idea how poor Americans lived (aside from the mentally ill drug addicts they stepped over on the way to work in the coastal cities where they lived — “but that’s just city livin’, man!”).

That book was published seven years ago now, and aside from the author winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, the situation is much the same — and the mumbles about this party or that party are as well. Soon, the mumbles won’t cut it anymore.

Different people may have different issues with Washington’s leadership, whether it was Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. We wouldn’t get the foreign policy we wanted or the taxes we preferred or this treaty or that spending bill. But this time it’s different, and we know it. We think when we see empty shelves in a store. “They were empty the last time I came here, and the time before that,” there’s a deeper problem than which party is best rewarding its donors from the White House.

Americans didn’t expect to have to think like this. We were able to appeal directly to Washington in years past and still had some hope that something would happen. We know that today, our petitions could as easily be ignored and thrown into the void.

The oligarchs aren’t going to save us, either, despite wielding significantly more real power than the aging legislative branch of the United States. We might place our hopes in the soft powers of Elon Musk or Tim Cook’s consciences, but the only entity that holds hard power over these men is China.

And the difficult reality is, in our current state the American people aren’t prepared to fix what’s happening, either. If you had told James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and their friends that America in 2023 was fiercely divided on both their history and their heroes, had lost its middle class, was no longer Christian or even very religious at all, disagreed on where they’d come from, and fought over where they were going, then asked these men what we could get, they’d reply in no uncertain terms: We can have tyranny.

The founders aren’t coming back to save us, but understand this: Even if they bent time and space to stand here at the heads of our government, they couldn’t fix our problems for us. It will be up to the people to solve our problems.

A Moment of Clarity

An addict’s first step toward recovery is acknowledging he has a problem. To get there, he has to hit rock bottom — what friends call “a moment of clarity.” Worse yet (and to the anguish of their loved ones), an addict’s idea of rock bottom is far lower than we would wish it to be. We might see clearly from the outside, but when you look out from the mind of the afflicted, it all seems murkier; there’s a reason for this or that calamity — an excuse for everything.

This frustration might have been felt by a worried observer in 2016. They could have easily tracked skyrocketing fatherlessness and historic debt levels, a growing population of mentally ill vagrants and collapsing officer morale. A porous border, multiple decades-long militaristic stalemates and increasing racial hostilities, mass suicides of despair, and a public so desperate for serious change, they voted between Bernie Sanders for president and Trump for president. One observer might have thought this. “Surely this moment will bring clarity.”

It didn’t, and less than four years later, our churches were forced closed, our schools turned away the children, our “science” Coopted. Our hospitals kept us away from our wives, our dying loved ones, and our cemeteries rejected our mourners. Our government collaborated daily with corporate leaders to censor any dissent and kept our neighbors informed about those who were out of line.

The systems that our corrupt institutions were charged with maintaining eventually began to fail. And maybe — maybe — we might wake up this time. Because that’s what we need: a major project of dedicated renewal by a people who understand the state we’re in and the stakes of our project.

While the American colonies may not have had the same level of knowledge as today, Shakespeare’s works and the King James Bible were widely known by the colonists. These are the kind of friends that you need when your goal is to rebuild your foundations.

Who are our friends of today? These great works still exist, but just as the founders won’t flick a switch and save us, neither will the works of an English playwright. There will be many more resources in an interconnected age.

These books might include a well-known book about the suffering of our working classes, or an essay After suffering, we came to the painful realization that our systems are broken by the untimely death of a child. These champions could be a public leader who fights against the corporations in their state or town, or a member the ruling class who opens the doors and exposes how corrupt their mansions really are.

They may not yet arrive. We are aware that our country can sink further, or continue existing, if necessary. What if this isn’t quite the moment of clarity our country needs? Where do we go from here

But, it’s possible that the beginning has already come. That wouldn’t be without precedent: From the Thirty Years War, to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, to the twisting start of the First World War, mankind has a knack for knowing something big is coming while still missing the spark that sets it off.

Whether it’s already been sparked or is still waiting for a light, dramatic action is coming our way. Our foundations have collapsed and our house is no longer able to stand. Although not everyone can play an active role, we must all be open-minded about the realities of our world. It’s not possible to blame Republicans, Democrats, the administrator, the bureaucrat or this error or that folly. We need to see the systems that are behind the people as well as our own. What do we see?

There’s a problem, and reading the Constitution on the floor of the House isn’t going to fix it. That means that more than book or politician or oligarch, we’ll need each other — each other, finally a true moment of clarity, and a revival.

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