Ancient Rome had Bread & Circuses. Today's Empire Thinks intolerance Is A Cheaper Diversion.
When the pandemic arrived five years ago and the Before Times ended, I stopped driving a car. It didn't seem worthwhile having one. Since then, outside of visiting my oncologist in Toronto, I travel only as far as my legs will take me.
I trudge, ramble and stroll across the seasons. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn, seven days a week, I am out there walking around 10km per day. In steps, during these past five years, I have walked something like 18 thousand kms or the distance many refugees from Central and South America, Africa, the Mid-East or Asia undertake when they make their journeys to Western Nations in search of safety.
My walking isn't like theirs- an odyssey through dangerous lands. It's a task to keep me sane and healthy. It's a way to meditate through all the noise that occurs when you are trying to survive an era when "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."
Whether, I am walking or standing still, after five years of living in this evolving dystopia, I don't think too far ahead. You can't make plans for the distant future.
It is about getting safely to the next morning, week or month. There is no other way because we are living through the end stages of the 1%'s counter-revolution against the Welfare State. It's now the mopping-up phase because fascism is normalised and an acceptable form of politics. For ordinary people, this is the most dangerous time for them. The entitled have no compunction to show us the vanquished mercy. Conversely, it is also the most dangerous time for the victors because when a population has nothing left to lose, they grow violent against their oppressors.
Our suburbs and downtown cores teem with homeless people. It could almost be the 1930s. Except during the Great Depression, cities still had slums to contain and house the working poor and those on minuscule pensions. In the USA almost 50% of the homeless are employed full-time. In Canada and the UK, food banks are used by those who work full-time but can't make ends meet.
In 2025, what were once working-class districts became gentrified assets rented out by corporations or affluent boomers. Today's homeless are jetsam from a Welfare State scuttled by politicians on the orders of the 1%.
Ancient Rome understood Bread & Circuses were necessary to maintain order in an Empire comprised of slaves, and an impoverished workforce. But 21st-century neoliberalism said to hell with Bread for the poor because intolerance is a cheaper diversion.
That is how the world became saddled with Trump. He is neoliberalism's circus and Emperor. Nero for our digital, reality TV age.
It's been seven days since Trump was inaugurated as President, as Harold Wilson said. "A week is a long time in politics."
On Monday, the 20th, Donald Trump boasted he brought peace to the Middle East with a ceasefire. By Sunday, the 26th, he advocated for a total ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. He resumed shipping to Israel 2 thousand-pound bunker-buster bombs. Obviously, Trump wants Israel to finish the job of eradicating Palestinians.
Unlike his first Presidency, there is an efficiency to Trump's chaos in this second term. It is directed and purposed not just with evil but with an ambition to wrest society from the many and return it to the few forevermore. He is determined on annexing Greenland and crippling the USA's freetrade partners, Mexico and Canada. I am tired of those who say, Trump is all talk because Hitler was full of talk too, until one day he wasn't. Joe Biden helped put to rest the concept of a Rules based International World Order and Trump is taking full advantage of that for his ambitions of autocracy and kleptocracy.
What is coming will test the strength of every one of us. I hope I am strong and courageous enough to dissent loudly, boldly and with every ounce of my spirit. It's a walk into resistence that all of us will have to make, if we want to salvage what's left of this planet.
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I agree that we are foolish to think Trump doesn’t mean what he says and that he will take steps to achieve his goals. Neoliberalism was the path to normalizing fascism. Regan knew it, Thatcher knew it, and all the leaders since them knew it. Fascism was their goal. Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration was a sign to their Nazi supporters that their goal has been reached and a message to everyone else to get used to it. The state and police crack-down in many western countries, on people opposing the Zionist genocide if Palestinians is just one more step to an authoritarian state.
Read Revelations. This is the end of the world as we knew it. We're living in Armageddon. This is the predictable end of the con game called capitalism. This is GOOD (Communism/socialism/anarchy) vs EVIL (capitalism). Wars, genocides, pestilence, plagues, famine, massive floods and wildfires. For you see, the advent of currency/money was the original sin that cost us our Eden 🌍 Capitalism is the antithesis of life itself.