I Predict Nothing Will Fundamentally Change Until This Happens

I’ve heard it told numerous times that when FDR did the New Deal, it wasn’t because he particularly wanted to. He just felt as if he had to.

The story goes that he told his fellow rich elites “Look, the people have been in this Depression for so long that they’re just about ready to revolt. So we have a choice: either give them something to placate them, or give them nothing and watch as they rise up against us and take everything we have by force.”

Fast forward several decades to the present, when many Americans are trying to live without adequate wages, without adequate healthcare, without adequate anything. However, most Americans aren’t ready to revolt the way they were during the Great Depression yet.

This is partly because the American propaganda machine is just that good, good enough that enough people are convinced elected officials will do right by them to keep on voting blue, or red.

It is also partly because despite so many Americans having to endure pretty horrible living conditions, a lot of other Americans are still comfortable. The comfortable ones won’t join in any kind of revolution, because they have everything they want. They’re not going to stick their necks out to, say, force the government to take care of the homeless.

So since we can’t get the kind of government we want by voting (I’ve been keeping track of this since 2004, and not once have the winners of those elections sprang into action to help out their constituents in the way they need to be helped), then we have to wait until the politicians and the elites they serve become at least as nervous about an uprising as FDR and those elites were back in the day.

Which means that before we get even some of the positive changes we need, before things get better…things will have to get a lot worse, unfortunately.

Things will have to get to the point where very few people are comfortable any more, to the point where the vast majority of people are suffering. Also, the vast majority of people will need to realize that nobody in Washington will do anything to help them unless those motherfuckers are scared shitless.

I don’t know if the human race will survive long enough for that to happen, because we still might end up in a nuclear war. If we avoid nuclear war, I don’t know if we’ll see Washington swamp creatures panic and give Americans something like another New Deal within my lifetime. (Which, assuming I live to be exactly 80 years old, will end in 2057.)

But I believe that if things keep going the way they’re currently going, we’ll see history repeat itself. America may be the most propagandized country on the planet, but even the most effective propaganda will only count for so much if, say, 90% of the population is miserable. If that 90% has heard all the promises before and knows that those promises aren’t worth anything.

With the system not even trying to take care of the people, with the so-called “good guys” doing nothing but making lame excuses for why their hands are tied, the percentage of miserable people in America is just going to keep going up, and up, and up. So no matter when the people might reach their breaking point, they will reach it. I’m confident of that much.