90 Seconds Until Midnight

The world is on fire.

From South America to Africa, to Russia and Ukraine, to South Asia, to the Middle East and the Far East, chaos envelopes the globe. Only in the West (America, Canada, Australia/New Zealand, and the European Union are things still calm. Buy calm. I don’t mean peaceful. I mean, the powder kegs of insanity are buried close to the surface in these.

We are closer to World War 3 than at any time in my life. The Cold War was scary, but it was “fought” by two nations that didn’t really want to fight to the death after the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If it did anything, the Cold War proved that anything can be negotiated if both sides are willing to give ground in some areas in order to make gains in other areas and in good faith.

Right now, America is sitting on the crest of a deteriorating fire break. The fire break that has protected the lower 48 since the end of the Civil War.

Distance means nothing anymore.

On the one hand, we are ruled (Ruled, not governed anymore) by an incompetent regime of almost exclusively old white people who won’t be around much longer anyway. They say all of the right things (sometimes), but in the end, they will do exactly what their paymasters tell them to do.

On the other hand, we have an openly fascist racist cadre of more old white people waiting to reign in 2025. They have made it exceedingly clear that they want America to become a fascist dictatorship, rolling rights, and legal protection to pre-World War 2 levels. They are talking about using the military against American citizens. They’ve discussed building concentration camps put west to hold all of the undocumented residents of the United States.

I could say a lot more, but I’m too disgusted to continue.

Read up on Project 2025 for more nightmare-inducing content.

My overriding question in all of this is, who would willingly reopen Pandora's Box and plunge the world into a thousand years of darkness.?

Oh, that would be the world powers, the multinational mega-corporations, religious fanatics, and the cabal of old white men who still run the world. Although to be fair, more Chinese and Indians have earned more seats at that table every year.

And why would they do this?

It's all about the race for power, and as many Benjamins they can get until they're worthless. These are the people who run the world. They have leveraged conflicts across the globe for centuries in the name of power and profit.

These people don’t care about anybody but themselves. To them, we are the crud their manservants scrape off of their leather shoes. To them, we are nothing more than property. The post-Civil War barons didn’t care if slavery was officially crushed. They just found a new way to keep Americans under their yokes.

We are cattle in our own land, led around by velvet and silk ropes.

By 2026, I believe the Middle East will have several slabs of nuclear glass where ancient cities once stood. America will be embroiled in an unwinnable war with China over Taiwan's right to exist. Palestine will only exist as annexed apartheid regions of a larger Israel. Ukraine will be crushed under Russian boots after NATO and the United States abandons them.

And The United States of America?

Unless things change sooner rather than later, I see a second Civil War in our future. The MAGA party will occupy the major cities, deploying the active duty military into the major cities. Martial law will be the order of the day, and many citizens will die trying to defend what America is supposed to be.

I don’t want any of this to happen, and I hope I am being hyperbolic and 100% wrong. I want the old people who control the world to sit down and ratchet things down before they explode.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Doomsday Clock. It’s a measurement of how close we are to Armageddon using a twelve-hour clock as the representation. It was created in 1947 by an international community of scientists. The closer the clock gets to midnight, the closer we are to the end of civilization. Or maybe the world.

I’m a husband.

I’m a father.

I’m a grandfather.

I look at my family, and I believe in my heart that the old men in charge love their families as much as I do mine. Or, at least, most of them do. I have to believe someone can send out the break men and stop this train before it derails, and we all die or return to a darker age of civilization.

It’s 90 seconds to midnight.

I have to believe.

Josh (12/17/2023)