The Perfect Storm

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Start with a land-bound low moving east, run it into a strong nor’easter ridge pushing back and add the remnants of a hurricane; it has been called The Perfect Storm.

You don’t need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, said Bob; you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to draw the political parallels, say I.

Lowered expectations, economic collapse and divisive civil unrest; the perfect storm of our own, in which we shall equally be tossed, helpless, and presumably perish as those upon the Andrea Gail did.

Unless we can kick one of the legs out from this unholy triumvirate in time.  

The Cold Front from the West:

The will of the People is resolute. We wanted Health Care, we wanted out of War, we wanted our Civil Liberties restored. So, why the lack of direct action against these, and the other actions of a Government working directly against our will?

Naomi Klein has spoken to it, to those who have ears to hear it. We have been shocked, repeatedly and hard until we are no longer shocked. Others have called it the Overton Window. We have been trained by a serious of direct pressures to expect nothing.

At first people were dismayed, worried, angered by the fact the Government could spy on us, without warrant. But no one came to their doors. Nothing really was different. In their minds, they compartmentalized it to, “It must not mean me… it must be those other people, who deserve it. Besides, 9/11 was scary, and we must be safer now.”  Those of us who spoke loudly against it fell silent, not because we thought it unworthy, it is because the NEXT shock pulled our attention away. It has become so commonplace to see cameras at every intersection, every few feet along highways, we no longer see them. We joke about the NSA messing with our computers and phone calls to defray the very horror that every keystroke and word is being monitored. We moved on.

There was much to move on toward. We were shown images and heard rumors of torture, while being told, “The United States does not torture,” a meme that quickly turned to, “It works!” Eventually the image of the man in a hood on a chair with wires became so commonplace it no longer turned our stomachs, it became to the masses, “Yeah, yeah, that again. Like a Phil Collins song in the 80’s, even what is worthy of notice becomes boring. To those of us who did not accept the premise it was okay, to those of us who howled against the inhumanity of it; our answer was total silence. Nothing was changed. We were given Guantanamo while other facilities took over and escalated the dark task. We discovered that one cannot play whack-a-mole with the CIA and Special Ops people. We moved on, again.

To Wars, to Welfare for the Wealthiest, to joblessness and foreclosures, to Health Care, to individual scandals. Every time something bad happened, our rage was quickly refocused on the next thing and the next, and with no gains made against any of it, we shut down.

We are told women’s issues can wait, gay issues can wait, and facing a barrage of man-made “emergencies” we do wait.

Barrage people long enough, and we go into immediate survival mode. We curl fetally around our own. We keep our heads down. We expect NOTHING from “them” and give up trying to demand it. Our very reality changes. Our expectations are gone and we try to protect what little we have, in some twisted, damage control mentality, and think as long as we have “just this much” we can still be okay. We stop arguing about what has been taken away from us. We are too busy trying to not let them take the rest.

We begin to see the unimaginable as inevitable.

We begin to view the world as a reality of no safety net, and cling for dearest life to our last straws. Everything and everyone ceased to exist, as long as we are kept in the isolation of personal fear. Of falling. Of losing. Of imminent personal disaster.

Classic shock, and classic removal of expectations.

The Oceanic Ridge Pushing Back:

It goes further back into the Sea of Economic Planning than one would imagine. Unions had to be demonized, including infiltrating them with people who would abuse power, create scandal and then be “disappeared.” Jobs had to be sent to places where people had no wage expectations, or environmental regulation, and we had to be convinced it was good for us.

Most of all, as our collective wealth was amassed into fewer and fewer hands, the idea that we, too, could be one of them had to be fed as a hunger through the pornographic images of excess until we craved it like nothing else. We are all one number away from the lottery, one notice away from being a star.

The economic collapse was not an accident, in fact by those who created it, it was not even an error. Our workforce demanded too high a percentage of the profits, and had to be in utter ruin to be left thankful for scraps: “At least I still have a job/home/car…”

It was not a far push from that, to convince people that profits had to be privatized, and losses public. We were spoon fed the idea that if things were bad now, there would be tanks in the streets if we let the banks collapse. We must not bite the hand feeding us, or their would be not even a kibble left, nary a bit.

There was a concerted effort to hide fine print on every credit offer, to trick the poor into being unable to make the terms so that they would have to pay the 18% interest rates; since the wealthy would never miss a payment, and profit could not be tapped there. There was a plan to befuddle homeowners into taking loans they were not told were variable rate.

All of this was allowed by the deregulation of the banking industry, and the idea than ANYTHING goes if it turned a profit. This allowed for hedge funds and phantom stock and the intentional creation of a ponzi-scheme market in which the wealthy few reaped massive profits on the naivete of the masses.

This collapse is far from over, as inevitably the people themselves just cannot pay their loans back.

There has been talk already, the inside word is to make all the profit they can before Christmas, and to lose as much inventory as possible; for the new year may see the widespread closing of businesses. There is already rumor of a new currency standard being set, making the cash we have hidden away useless.

Th class war has already been lost, and they can continue to manipulate things to ensure that their standard of living will never diminish, nor is there anything we can do to regain our former standard of living. No matter what, we will continue to produce for the company store, in what amounts to slavery without the whip, without the actual sale of people. Perhaps permanent indenture, with no health or safety rights figured in is a better analogy. Never again will a New Deal be offered. This, now, is still a Family vendetta for that occurrence by those who feel entitled to their whole pie.

This class war is the largest of the three forces, the driving on to which the others added, makes it a storm of millenia.

Hurricane Remnants from the South:

Mankind’s darkest nature is not created from the ether, but, oh, how very easily manipulated the seeds of it’s intrinsic nature can be grown.

It is not hard to set us upon each other, when tribalism is a the very core of our evolutionary directive. Put simply, we looked after our own first, in order to survive in our immediate environment. The problem? Our evolution has not kept pace with the fact our immediate environment is no longer, well, immediate. We gather and hunt globally, yet cannot think globally.

We are clan-ists, and cannot see that our failures to each other is the cause of all our woes.

In times of fear we still want to offer up something to placate the Gods, rather than take responsibility for our own conditions. Messianic religions always rise when times are hardest on people, when external pressures become overwhelming to them. This is the part of the Shock Doctrine most easily played upon, in this newer age of instant media flooding. We hear them point to all the bad things as results of our “sins” and allow the persecution of those not heeding a particular creed.

Religion is probably the ultimate curse of enlightened reasoning, yet certainly not the only one. Yet modern human religions are all misogynistic, and more so, homophobic, all a result of being sexual phobic in general. Love and sex are the one thing money and power cannot truly buy; so it must be controlled to the point where those in power own that too, can frame it as evil.

Less subtle is the genetic reaction to appearance differences, fear of other, that can be triggered into racism and xenophobia by external pressures. It is a way of placing blame, or feeling entitled to better treatment than another group by sheer physical traits and the gamble of genetics at our birth.

People are being encouraged to arm themselves, hate one another, and fight hard for the status quo that has betrayed them thus far.

The layers of division are always there, yet even those who should be united in the fight keep their separatist ways. The nouveau rich love their leisure time with equally white and well bred people. The academic elites speak only to their own. The transgendered resent the cis gendered. The hispanics resent the blacks, blacks resent the new polish and russian immigrants, and the whites resent everyone.

The only uniting tie in these times is the fact that we are all becoming, inch by inch, lower in class. The only thing that can save us is unity. The only thing that can make us lose is hanging on to our assets by any means necessary, and turning a blind eye to our own exploitation to keep them.

It is no surprise that words “Liberal” and “Socialist” are being re-energized as evil incarnate in our modern vernacular, just as the red scare of communism did after the Depression. People are being brainwashed into fearing it means “taking the little you have left” for those with less; rather than a reversal of theft from above they have suffered under the Elites. They are taught that the poor MUST be lazy, shiftless, worthless or stupid, or they would not have suffered their fate.  It is being encouraged more brazenly daily, to have extreme prejudice against any who would speak for a Social Good.

There is a genetic sheep mentality when people are in danger, to flock together for protection, and it is with full ill intent we are shown false images showing how many people show up at tea bagger parties and protests. Scared people may begin to think that if that many believe it, they must be right, must be trying to protect them. Just as the Ft Hood horror was framed in Muslim racist terms, rather than a man sickened by war crime cover ups and lack of mental health care for our soldiers… we are being maniupulated to fight one another.

Laced through all of this, as I opined at the start of this section, is the societal glue of religiousity that allows people to justify their divisions, and makes them feel entitled to set the rules. Laced through all of this is the Overton idea that deadly force be used against our own citizenry in this land – to kill each other.

The Perfect Storm:



The Class War is the War, but they hope it plays out in the Battle Field between us, ourselves, so that they won’t have to fight the few who have resisted the shock barrage and refuse to have our expectations lowered.

We have fair warning, many radars and portends, but who will listen to us? Storms within storms and wars within wars.

It is The Perfect Storm, and the three forces have not even fully met.

You’ve been warned.