Step out of the rain
The old train-station awning
The downpour passes
To many, a statue is an idol stillTo see it as it is requires a willThey do not have; though no sacrificeIs offered to them, and in a triceWe see even Zeus the symbol he isAprhodite, Diana - more than this!In beauty we understand what delightOther men had and what insightThough partial, their ideas might give--Thus we must suffer the statues to live.
The Meaning of Collapse
It may be disappointing to some that the mythical Hobbsean post / pre society never emerged from the collapse of the United States. This is in part because the United States is such a large and distributed entity; while as a system it has failed, most of the parts still have life and energy enough to work, and to be dangerous.
Since as we know the United States is more of a free trade zone than a nation, failure may feel more like freedom than destruction. Needless to say, your mortgage payment will still be due (though it might have missed a month as coordination failed noticeably during the pandemic.) Yet we must account for what was lost.
The weakness of the federal government - at least internally - is shown both in its failure to act and the lack of immediately noticeable results in its collapse. The effort to remove Trump was an effort to restore the legitimacy of the United States Government. It failed because it had collapsed.
Additionally, the distributed conspiracy (which isn't truly a conspiracy) of the so-called Cathedral shows both its strength and weakness. Were it truly a centralized conspiracy of a certain ethnic group, much more would have failed immediately. As it is, the legitimacy crisis is reaching the nodes in the network in time and forcing them to cope with it. Not unlike plants when the fall comes, their response to the crisis is that their immune systems have become overwhelmed and the pathologies they were nurturing took over before they could re-evaluate what was going on. It of course was not possible for them to re-evaluate, as the whole system itself carried no outside signals at all, and no indication of the real pathology. An auto-immune catastrophe.
America and the West in general is a large creature, and its tentacles still have a lot of money. Yet, the time is ever more ripe to re-evaluate even the foundations of this civilization just outside of the reach of the dying animal.
Learn to think for yourself.