I've seen alot of calls for violence in America. Whether it be directed at the president or Federal officers, many people are advocating for an escalation in response to the current situation.
And believe me, I do understand. what I see happening in America is horrifying. But all I am imploring is to really think about what your asking for. Because you can't put the genie in the bottle once you've left it out.
If you're really gung-ho about it, go and ask a Veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan about it and see what they think. If anyone will know about it they will.
I am going to link a YouTube Playlist. Its the Associated Press Archives of the Bosnian-Serbian war. Because THAT is what will happen if wide scale violence breaks out. Except what will happen in America will be a hundred times worse.
The Bosnian war was pretty much broken up along ethnic lines. "Well it's going to be Conservative VS. Liberal" you say. Except it won't be. It will be anyone having a grudge against someone going after them.
ALOT of personal animosity will be taken out in the first few weeks I feel.
And I think the Seige of Sarajavo will be writ large in American cities across the country. Imagine having to dodge sniper fire on your way to get to your job at Wendy's.
Because that's the other thing no one is thinking about. You are still going to have to make a living while this is all going to be happening. And the cost of everything will skyrocket. Shipping will probably have to be escorted from place to place because people will be stealing or even blockading locations because they're "damn dirty libs" or "Fascist Conservatives" Fresh produce will become a thing of the past.
Canada and Mexico will close their borders due to all the refugee's trying to cross. so if you thinking of doing it, do it the moment everything pops off because otherwise you won't get in.
Basically Civil war is going to the worst thing to happen in America in a long time. and the only good that comes out of it will be Americans will finally have first hand experience of real war torn violence. And maybe that will hopefully last for another two hundred years or so.
If America even survives the outcome that is.
None of us want to live in a war-torn state. That's why I and most others voted for harm reduction. What we're facing now is terrorism. The USAmerican people are being terrorized by federal forces.
People are not calling for violence for a economic policy we don't like, which is what incited the Confederacy to begin the first USA Civil War. We're dealing with federal forces who are hell-bent on terrorizing us. What politically-aware people have been calling for, for the better part of a year, is the next degree of harm reduction. Targeted political assassinations. Fighting ICE agents. Storming the capital, perhaps. With each month, this government gets more empowered and more violent.
Violence terrorizes people. We all know war is terrible. No one thinks the USA going through a Civil War will be exciting. People see violence and they want it to stop, and they see massive peaceful movements that have not worked, in the face of a government that shows no hesitation in threatening or attacking its people; and those people are desperate.
What is the alternative? We let federal agents keep shooting and abducting people until some magical aspect of Democracy manifests and pushes them out? How do we actually envision that happening? What do we do for the three years until our next presidential election? Every person who is killed, abducted, disappeared is a life permanently lost.
For those who talk about peaceful protests and voting the fascists out, how do you expect to win elections when your voters are being killed? It's not just the ICE agents, either, though they certainly are violent. Consider: Layoffs, Homelessness, Imprisonment, Emigration, Suicide. The people here today are not going to be the same people here in three years.
The reality is, the people of the USA are under violent occupation. We are living the terrors of war. Violence does not require mutual-consent; and when only one side chooses to fight, you end with a massacre. That is what we have been living through -- a slow-rolling massacre. No one knows what will stop this, but maybe, just maybe, ICE agents would think twice before going on deployment if half of the last three squads never made it home.
While I generally agree with everything you've said...
This, what we have right now?
The early access alpha preview of what could potentially happen.
Try and imagine an actual artillery strike or JDAM strike on your neighborhood, or, all the water stops working safely due to either a treatment plant getting blown up or intentionally sabotaged and poisoned.
Health and sanitation just stop ... being things that exist and work, and soon half the city has some new plague, more or less indefinitely.
Oh you live in an enemy city, its really cold this winter, really hot this summer?
Click, boom, fizzle, pop. No more power for ya'll, have fun.
... it can get so, so much worse than what we are seeing right now.
This is all true, to which I ask, what is the alternative? I'm afraid that the future of the USA is one of two options: the authoritative oppression of fascism, or the chaotic hellscape of war. Both are intolerably violent. Fascism is targeted and ruthless; War is broad and destructive.
Oh I also don't disagree with the implication(s) of your question there.
This is a do or die moment, a hinge point or era of history.
I am just trying to make very clear that... now that we, collectively, have allowed the situation to get to the point it is now at?
Well now, instead of removing a small tumor or two, a bit of chemo maybe... now we're at stage 4, its likely terminal, and none of the options are good, easy, muchless guaranteed to work.
Changing the situation, solving the problem... is now simply unavoidably going to be extremely costly, in ways that... probably most people who regularly post on internet forums think they understand, think they are or could be ready for... but in reality they likely are not.
Reading about the horrors of a civil war, watching a documentary or movie or reading a book about it, ... that's one thing.
Living it is quite another.
... do you really wanna live forever?
... can you handle anyone or everyone you know, essentially randomly dying?
People are gonna actually have to answer those questions, at least to themselves, honestly.
And our culture is primarily one of consumerist escapism... so this is going to cause even more existential crises and psychoses than we have seen so far.
We're gonna see a lot of people's true colors.
A lot of people simply will not be able to cope, they'll implode, collapse in on themselves, or maybe explode outwardly.
And then, after that, we'll have to see how many people are actually any kind of competent and effective, at living, at resisting... after all the toys and treats go away.
I completely agree. I've been swimming in these realizations for the last year. I knew Trump's second term would be bad, but this has gone well beyond where I thought it would go.
I keep asking the question How did we get here? and Why?. None of those have any good answers. We've passed off-ramp after off-ramp over the last 20 years and now our nation is in a state of genuine peril, and yet so many people remain ignorant still. Even seeing fellow Leftists proclaim about the "Revolution" with joy makes my stomach churn. Masses of people are being disappeared. I get that these posts are probably a way to cope, but my mind tends toward the human side of things. I don't care about figures or standards; I see pain and suffering. These are lives we'll never get back. We're going to lose tens of thousands of people in the next months and every one will leave an impact on the people around them.
You raise a good point about the aftershocks. I've been thinking of that same aspect. Millennials and Gen Z already show signs of severe trauma across the generation. Social withdrawal, clout-seeking, AI/Religious psychosis, anti-social behavior (like TikTok public nuisance content) -- and that's from the living conditions before Trump's second term. Ironically, that trauma led Gen Z to become more conservative -- see trad-wide/manosphere content -- and to back the alt-right.
The USA population was already crumbling. Look at how many people are physically disabled, mentally disabled, emotionally over-burdened. Drug addictions incl. alcohol; Regular mental breakdowns; Compassion fatigue; Cyber harassment -- Our population is profoundly sick.
I worry for what will remain when whatever uprisings happen, happen. We're losing more people every day this regime holds power. 365 days. 365 days of suicides, mental breakdowns, psychosis, murders, new addictions. If standards continue to escalate, we'll soon be seeing bombs; which kill some and injure many. Whoever remains will be left with the momentous task of rebuilding a functioning society while caring for a population in which the majority of people are disabled, many are delusional, and all require constant food, water, and maybe medical attention.
I'm not sure if I'd rather die before the action, burn as the USA turns in on itself, or cling through the hell that will unravel and be left sifting through the pieces... if there even is another end to this regime.
I can't really think of much to add to that... you and I seem to very much be on the same wavelength.
Oh, I guess I can update some of your numbers.
I used to be the data analyst / db admin for a large non profit of homeless shelters.
The PIT counts, the numbers we use as our 'total homeless' count basis?
They're bullshit, the methodology is garbage, and the way its ... attempted to be implemented is also garbage.
I was at one point able to compare our much more detailed data set of ... need, number of people calling in basically, for some kind of help, vs how many we actually could help, or redirect to another non prof or something to get help... vs the PIT numbers for our area.
Long story short, a few years back, you needed to multiply the PIT by roughly 3x to 5x, to get an actual accurate number.
Carry that forward to now, the economic devastation that is occuring?
We are currently looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 5 to 10 million people homeless for at least 3 consecutive months, where homeless is defined as: you do not actually live at a location that you can recieve mail at, or you live in a homeless shelter, or you have been couch surfing (you're living somewhere you aren't on the lease for) for at least 3 months.
There are so many people who live in cars or RVs... because it used to be legal to do that. After the Grants Pass decision, it basically isn't anymore, anywhere in the US. So your 'home' can and will be impounded and you will become 'fully' homeless.
Living on the streets is now also just actually illegal in basically all of the US. Everytime you hear a cop say that some encampment was contacted and offered support services before they cleared the encampment?
What that means is the cops gave people the numbers of shelters that are compmetely full and have no excess capacity.
Hows that for spin phrasing, eh? Makes the people in the encampment seem voluntarily noncompliant, when the truth is the cops gave them either utterly useless advice, or commands that are impossible to follow, depending on how you wanna look at it.
So yeah. 5 to 10 million people are homeless right now, thats gonna get worse, and a significant proportion of those people die from exposure, starvation, disease, develop a drug addiction, die from that, or just fun ole fashioned physical violence.
And, last I checked, its basically 60% of Americans right now, who if they missed a one paycheck, or had one $500+ sudden expense, well they'd have to go (even further) into debt for that, so basically 60% of the country is one bad day away from a fuse that lights and then blows up 3 to 12 months later in a debt death spiral, now they're also homeless.
They'll likely end up in the DHS/ICE/FEMA gulag archipelago that's been hastily built to handle all the deportations, or basically its cousin or some specific subsection of it.
fuuuuuuuck I mean I knew it was bad, but.... fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck
Yeah.
...yeah.
Thats how bad it is.
I guess now maybe you better understand ... why I am attempting to describe and convey ... how bad it actually is and likely would get if things went 'hot' in terms of active armed resistance.
So hey, there, what caused this, how did we get here?
Full answer is complicated, but big parts of the answer are: vanity, selfishness, convenience, complacency, ignorance, normalcy bias.
Yeah, those are holodomor / holocaust numbers.
Thats how fucking bad this is.
Lincoln was the first presidential ticket with a northern pres and vp at a time when we deliberately had an equal number of southern and northern states and a bunch of territories to be brought into the union out west. Previously it was possible for a southern pres or vp to enforce this fake equality that couldn't last because the pres could veto and the vp could vote to break a tie. Once you break that tie you can't put it back you can now add more northern states without issue.
What were they worried about losing as they lost ground in the house and senate again? Their property and future earnings from that property. It's popular to quote Lincoln saying he would free none or all of the slaves if he could save the union but that doesn't tell you what the war was about. They went to war so they could keep their slaves and We went the war so we could keep the southern states instead of having an enemy on our doorstep.
To be fair, you also went to war because the fuckers shot first.