S o l v e d

Our number one enemy is ignorance.

-Julian Assange

The light of the distant stars touched us and we thought we would live forever!

You didn’t do anything. We didn’t do anything. It just happened. Didn’t we shower ourselves with stars? Didn’t we charge it all to our credit cards? At Christmastime, they bought us transformers and cabbage patch kids. Plastic toys, petroleum byproducts, the ultimate ritual celebration of an oil glut won by military might.

We handed ourselves a crumbling standard of living long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, when we ate at the fast food chain and shopped at the big box store because it was so convenient and what’s the difference, anyway?, gutting our microeconomies. Now the streets have been swept of vendors and small-time hustlers and mom and pop stores that are the real lifeblood and the cavernous concrete blocks that replaced them are drained dry. Oh look, there’s a new bank on the corner.

It’s not that petrocollapse is going to kill and bury America and we all frolic in the woods picking huckleberries, it’s more that the Dream will live on like a horrible undead cyborg kept preserved by glistening video games. The cement walls rot.

How the hell was this going to end any other way when rich people are bitching and moaning about offshore wind farms being an eyesore?

This is America and we are indolent and woke up too late.

T o u c h e d . . .