Not enough

This piece will examine some failures of democracy as deployed in the United States, whichever adjectival equivocation of its description that we use.

We have committed to methods that have the effect of ensuring small majorities (for certain definitions of majority) can conjure malice on their ideological opponents, and it did not start in 2016.

Capitalist democracies have functioned well under conditions that ensure a land of opportunity. We are allowed to debate the methods, but we are not doing that; We have all come to believe in Two Americas, though we divide them in our different ways. Us and Them. We act out competition for something scarce or even zero-sum.

Our single-colored ideologies can no longer rationalize their political stories without villains, loyalties and anti-loyalties. They Hold Up A Meme of themselves and want us to recognize it as leadership. They keep holding it up, and the voters don’t come unless it is juiced by national debate.

Lost for what to do, Two Americas await new preachers who channel the spirit of patriotism that they recognize. The right memes have not risen up for the pedestrian population to locate their ideology. Their attention is drawn to the Unitary Executive, the oxygen leaving local races without centralized party commentary.

When we don’t have our preachers we still listen to learn from the ones we have cause to fear. Missing our own leaders, we can learn at least what we disagree with and plan accordingly. It is not enough. In times when an Executive executes a premeditated a vision and doles that out in heavy measures, the paralysis is costly. The blitzkrieg works because it takes place on a field where no resistance is met.

Listening is not action. Listening we do very well, and we have amassed rational reasons. Some feel powerful and some feel powerless. Were the subjects of our debate so much more mundane, like a border policy, we could ascribe to eccentricity the loud voices of individuals. We have learned that loud voices are not all prophets, and some of us learn that none are at all.

The transmission of mistrust from outlets to out-groups (Them) is a bad method facilitated by bad memes held up to act like targets for social media. Public social shame is the only method of feedback available to a society that cannot speak to its People and Offices. And it is nonstop, it will not end because when color guards change, the other half of the country gets the roasting microphone.

People have accepted that tuning out critique is a viable method of living, when your personal Them is not reasonable, a hater, in error beyond helping. We do not arrive at consensus when our coalitions are packed into celebrity personalities. It is true that no single representative can represent everyone they should, but nor can anyone do it within their own party.

The banners of Left politics seem ungroupable as they are now. The current populist deployment of Right politics also seems ungroupable, yet has grouped anyway. Right-banners say that government philosophies must run faster now and have few rules; They are buying stock in volatility, allowing it to be crazy at smaller timescales if the proof of work comes out the other end. Left-banners say the tools of the office must not be touched at all because of the implication; They are not buying stock in anything, but battening down hatches for an ignorance con.

Gavin Newsom, having some of the crazy necessary to act out with some of the People’s voice, will immediately drag the ghosts of California faith and anti-faith. We will see politics as before, and Newsom is the perfect heel to America First politics, should Newsom lose. His demise would be cheered based on mythology alone, as would his ascension’s.

Someone new, being the same in victory and defeat is necessary for acting out more of the People’s voice. Colors are not viable answers. Those memes have failed. Those institutions are fallen by capture or rust. Two parties are afraid to take new names, because they have not finished consolidating. Red has only named powers that lawyers at the Heritage Foundation imagine. Left has only named their nightmares.

We complain about this Unitary Executive in particular, but the damage is deeper, and your color alignment might not have prepared you to hear it.

Kentucky

Jessamine County

I went to public school in Jessamine County. One of the teachers lost her teenage son under a float rolling along tiny Main Street barely over the hill from the highschool they both spent so much time. There were more accidents out there, including motorcycles.

The school had a tobacco field around it like a scarf, set in from the country road by a long driveway. Some new developments reached close enough to join the older homes across that road. A few of the students could walk directly over brown grass without ever setting foot outside property that was theirs or the school’s. Some had to cross a road, and which led right up to Main Street, or out to “the country”.

Some of the students lived out in the countryside, having inherited farm homes or built any home, and raised a family there. The kids weren’t farmers, but they had the opportunity to be. Across America, an attitude of knowing handy skills was standing in for having direct farming knowledge. The turning of the millennium brought with it a hard choice in some homes to wind down the farming. Usually this meant there were no kids to take up the work, having not learned that lifestyle early. Barring special zeal for recovering the farm as an income source, it was winding down on a timeline. The weight of choice is enormous, and life-altering for an entire family and their progeny. Having to select a future for more people than yourself is a big feeling. Having to select the correct future for them is bigger.

To put down heritage is to let something go to rest. We can remember it fondly, but the remembrance is the sign of its passing.

The student organization club known as the Future Farmers of America, when they gathered before school in the lunch cafeteria, were a sight to behold. I had no connection to this, my hobbies aiming me into programming technology. I used my hobbies to escape the rural America I saw outside my window, but a staggering proportion of my school, and others I would go to, represented someone other than me.

I remembered another almost-rural home of mine, with a creek at the bottom of the hill, and I knew some fished in it. Fishers were like the FFA kids in my mind, into hobbies I didn’t do.

I never learned anything about that group or the people in it, though I knew unavoidably who some were. I couldn’t imagine being like them, though I had no resentment about that. They never spoke much about it either, unless it was resigning themselves and finding some pride. They could find pride at all because they respected some part of what their parents had instilled. Some of the guys liked FFA meetings more because they were proto enjoyers of vehicles and mechanical engineering. But, even with a tobacco field literally outside the school windows, these Future Farmers of America felt societal pressure towards shame for their decision.

The gentrification of an entire generation played out in the halls of a school on the rural edge of town. Children make fun of anything, and we all do well to remember that old malice is a poor tools for shaping yourself. But these feelings, at these times, are not processed with the benefit of that hindsight. Children are doing the hardest part of finding themselves, and they do it mostly unsupervised by adults.

Elsewhere in classes, I knew of precisely one outspoken student who used political words that commanded a room, even the right teacher, into listening and wondering at all the things we didn’t know about what he’d said. This was a kind of learning that could not be scripted. It was real and tangible, and definitely exciting. The topics were barely relevant, despite their timely relevance; more important was that he came from a home that had taught him that language, and he was becoming self-assured.

I was religious in my personal faith at the time, so I knew all the principles of accepting others with godly love. Knowing so little about others led me to just be silent in my notice of what I found interesting.

I certainly never picked sides. These were People first. We all read To Kill a Mockingbird and didn’t get it, we all pretended that reading War and Peace for book comprehension tests was a game of knowing the right common facts about large enough texts to cheat the system, and we all silently failed to read the political alignments of our teachers.

When I was young in this school district, I participated in speech debates, and I remember feeling embarrassed in our team’s defeats. I remember noticing our flaws, our hurry to give canned answers (incarceration), but it was stimulating to feel debate like that, even if we all knew we were blowing the hot air of inexperience.

Our school system received financial grants to improve education. That’s a funny beat to transition, and it’s not related. I don’t recall what the grant did anymore, but I remember going to the library for a coveted break from classes to pretend to listen to a presentation by adults. They did good, but some student poisoned my thinking by suggesting that we received it because we’re bad. Our Schools Were Bad.

I promptly repeated this once in front of my parents, and I remember the rebuke. I read that as a reminder that putting yourself down had no purpose, and that it might not be true.

Ignoring Them

The internet and file sharing were taking the world outside my windows by storm. I joined it by learning radio music finally, and then peer-to-peer. I could form preferences, and there was something federated and weird about the internet. It was so much so that my parents, who enjoyed having a computer even if it wasn’t always fast like what was out there, cautioned us mostly that we should not believe things just because they’re said, that chats with strangers were simply off limits. I didn’t know how I would even do that without AOL’s AIM handles, or maybe ugly ICQ. I didn’t really think about it. In their caution, they insisted anyway when I mostly agreed: Jumping off of a bridge wasn’t good behavior even if everyone was saying it. I didn’t know who “everyone” would be, but the meme was supplied and it made sense to me.

Social pressures were not to be listened to, but honestly, I had been quiet and perfectly happy to daydream about my hobbies alone. Others had a much harder time of accepting themselves, and some didn’t like me. Bullies happen. Some didn’t like my glasses or the way I looked at all and I suffered from that like many do, but I had friends, even if I didn’t see them as much as kids want to. It had been easier when my entire neighborhood got on the same elementary school bus in the morning, and fights had a reason to be mended.

More students died jumping off of a literal railroad bridge, drunk. Someone I knew had at other times gone out on there and told stories of being on the bridge during its use. This was far enough out of town that carpools were bringing people there. Accidents did happen out there, everyone knew. Blame was not easy to assign. Personal responsibility mattered.

I tried to ignore a strange bully during a few years in school. It was the first time someone made it their job to dislike me for reasons unknown. That story ends with them rear-ending my stopped vehicle while waiting to leave the driveway through the removed tobacco field. My stoicism was tested that day, but I was still docile. I could do little but make sure they saw what they had done. My situation was supposed to be universal and I was supposed to be in the right to scold them. I also just wanted it to go away, so I didn’t exchange insurance information. My car was a beater that could just handle it. I could ignore it if they were done. The people ahead of me were not upset with their more minor bumps.

I was selected to attend a state-wide program of representatives from school counties in Kentucky. I applied because it was a technology program and I felt like I missed out on my school’s web design stuff. I learned after my acceptance that I was literally the only applicant for my district. The program was for sparking interest in very expensive technology and engineering subjects, proving we had the facilities for those way out in rural lands. The camera equipment was very good.

The purpose of the Kentucky-wide program was to teach us that we did not have to leave Kentucky to get technology jobs. This was fundamental. Kentucky was bleeding its technical talent to other developed states, and didn’t have testing data for programs that could incentivize the physical and media engineers to stay in the state after school.

Locks

As we attended local colleges for the lower costs, the mass social isolation of society began in earnest when the social website known as “The Facebook” transformed our ability to make better choices than to write letters in the mail with weird phone book magic. It wasn’t obvious that anyone’s family AOL Instant Messenger account was still theirs to use when they left home. Their contact information was all but guaranteed to change before smartphones were there to help us keep a number across the purchase cycle.

The Facebook was perfectly timed to let us recontact each other, even if our reunion planners apparently gave that up in unison when only 5 (6?) people RSVP’d for the 5-year reunion.

Our generation’s social cohesion collapsed in stages and in slow motion. We learned what it was like to be in parasocial relationships with the friends we had just finished thinking were gone forever. No one could tell us how to treat these specters, and we were soon interacting with the manicured avatars of ourselves and learning silence as communication. Swiftly, these became strangers to one another.

I returned to Kentucky for a period and worked on the factory floor of a Sargent & Greenleaf facility. I had done my classes at the University of Kentucky and was filling the time afterward with employment, until I moved to Provo UT in the Spring. I got to sing to myself all day and no one could hear. I somehow drew blood on my finger in the first week and made them all scowl at the accident counter reset. I had to clock in precisely, and clock out precisely. I had mandatory overtime for the season leading up to Christmas, and standing mandatory overtime in the months after. My lunch breaks were tiny, and I kept to myself because I knew no one.

Almost no one. I saw longtime workers I didn’t know worked there at all. Many People were mothers with no more children to look after but more money to make. I also saw People who had graduated with me and had recently gone to the factory for employment and had energy for the road ahead. Both types asked me why I was there.

They asked me why I was ending up there, more like. They heard about my university time and only grew more confused. They weren’t used to thinking about temporary workers. (The floor manager wasn’t either when I told him when my opportunity for working was over.) The mothers were very skeptical that I was leaving as I claimed.

The price of housing has risen to match a demand that only two incomes can provide with more range for comfort. That is not comfort as in excess, but comfort for peace of mind. These women were here because they already knew the cost of the economy on their homes. They weathered a dot-com bubble and did not think much of tech or Bill Gates, but they knew they liked getting to use Skype for family calls. These workers were earning because the water was already rising, and they had only shed children in that time. They shouldn’t have been struggling under a federal government beholden to progressive culture and policies.

Mitch McConnell played at representing me for my entire life without viable challengers. Kentucky wears more than one noteworthy representative.

Today, we offer our precise location to a private national-scale company to take us home after dark. The stranger is the active ingredient.

The internet made it possible for well-coordinated large companies to do what no physical franchise could: Be the same everywhere.

In our time, mass communication became about more than a company-wide email or pager alert. Customer support vanished, and the companies argue that the rideshare drivers aren’t actually employees. Mass communication is crafted because we are many, working for few. In school, we complained about the teacher-to-student ratios, but at work (God forbid—in politics), we accept obscene ratios in the structure. Companies must exceed expectations to such a degree that sustaining it after a good streak is too hard. Problems get solved and we forget how we did that.

I’d done all this in Kentucky, and had never doubted that I would be leaving it.

When I visited in 2021, it took 45 minutes on Halloween night to get a Lyft out of downtown Lexington.

In years to come, Kentucky will make further progress on its zero income tax plan. They have completed multiple phases of their scheduled reductions on the rate, and are led by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear who I think should be preserved for national leadership if he can avoid partisan sports. He speaks to his People more holistically than any other governor I have watched.

Arizona

Gilbert

I met people in Arizona who defied my prior measurements. I knew trailwalkers, writers, librarians, Snapchat girls and whatever else people did. There was a hustle culture everywhere in America, and even the librarians were redefining public outreach when no one came in to use their public resources. They also wanted employees, but I wasn’t sure when I looked at those positions what experience should prepare me for that kind of work. The answer was probably to stop doubting myself and go, but decisions are expensive when so many already lead nowhere.

The city of Gilbert was finding funding for local tech startups. They had learned the ways to attract interest in office space as new students poured out of the universities, public and private. They could program in languages that were faster to try than C++, like I had learned in high school. I’d kept ahead of them because of my prior interest in the web, but now there were opinionated tools and everyone was doing something different, even when they were doing something the same.

The writers changed me the most, but it was because of what else they got up to. Shockingly, their family lived in rural Kentucky and it was a lot like mine. They were much more like the farm people I remembered knowing nothing about. I still didn’t know what kind of person was living out there on purpose, for so long. I’d seen chickens in backyards now, and a pig kept indoors in a newer development in suburban Mesa, so I figured people could love that pet-like care but love it harder.

When I stayed with that Kentucky family years later, I got a clearer view of them. They lived with the kind of bad network signal coverage that wouldn’t even seem viable to an outsider. For them, it was like a creaky spot you just worked with, and it isn’t quaint. There was no time spent complaining unless it was during a rarer online activity for Xbox. It reminded me of trying to play Descent on dial-up NetZero and not knowing how to decode the noises the computer made when communication was working. My friends had taught me the word “mofo”, but these kids were just racing each other. I had known people who didn’t have TV at home, and even for my restricted household, that seemed extreme. “Not having TV” was more a statement about service here. There was a physical TV but it wasn’t used for cable movies, Simpsons or news media.

They did much more offline, but they knew exactly how to do the connectivity rituals to get what they needed when they needed it, for as long as they needed it. For leisure the kids were fine, chasing the farm kittens by name, collecting and delivering eggs and climbing in the changing heaps of rock delivered by a local supplier. I was no stranger to the idea of all this. It was simple but it took efforts and care. (I made a Final Fantasy-tier wooden plank sword from scrap on a farm, and hurt myself for the joy of playing with it. Delivering eggs would have been more formative to me though.)

They made food together from its parts set on their big table, and the chairs had to be put away to make a big construction plane for working together. You can grow vegetables in any plot configuration you want out there, and I’ve seen odd ones over where the kids cross a creek and walk up to semi-distant neighbor homes. They check on the latest huge spider fostered on the growing poles. They look for the progress on a three-story wooden monstrosity to house animals that should be off the ground.

The fathers in these homes owned companies. They had animals and seasons to control, land to use. They form enterprises when they see problems. They are fearless on this. They want to get started on trying. They know the terms of making sound proposals, and they understand how to judge skill in others. They also pay the government’s obnoxious fees for the right to have an idea and implement it. They do business with each other and have family-owned relationships, and sometimes the government screeches about making them pay more fees to keep guns places.

My writer friends in Arizona preserved this cultural entrepreneurial spirit in themselves, and were doing business degree programs, or skills they were about to deploy for that. They were making new kinds of companies that their parents couldn’t exactly follow the details on at times, but they shared a language when they talked shop, terms, money and trust.

They could talk to anyone, prepare their terms and improvise in situations that I hadn’t imagined before without authority figures over us.

Strangers

Facebook had gone through an arc that left many of us being solicited by scam profiles for new connections. This was supposed to work because Facebook wanted us connecting with more and more people. Most of the people I knew had tired of adding Friends for the sake of it. They were sharing with stable groups now, be it family or career updates. Everyone knew bot profiles used sexy pictures with a “Maybe this is a wrong number” approach to scam flirting.

Facebook nonetheless had ramped up to their idea of social media. They stopped showing you what your friends write, and more of what they like. Facebook wanted us to see new content and stay engaged, instead of finding a ghost town some days.

Facebook today has found markets for reselling things, and has entrenched itself in ad network technology, and it never stops serving you those ads. Strangers are all we see. Strangers are what we are supposed to see. Look at this, and look at that next.

Facebook has chased the short media format in all of its apps, seeking attention, changing more rapidly. The pace has accelerated drastically.

When visiting my own Kentucky home again as I infrequently did, preferring to drive, I re-explored some areas, but noticed the way my parents followed strangers for news. They were previously proud of their inclusion in the zeitgeist of The Drudge Report and the Clintons. They were accustomed to listening to rumors now, and had done much of that with talk radio already.

Talk radio was an important resource in rural America. It had been delivering connection to people who didn’t think they were outsiders at all. They moved to cities and didn’t like them, or used schools they thought were uncontrollable and unreasonable. Their businesses have to pay more licenses, and more often. Regulation makes them feverishly angry, because they suffer an attack on their livelihoods for nothing but government’s philosophy of More.

Fox News Entertainment was the visual media version of the same, and though the web has housed communities for some time, The News is where we centralized ourselves. This old media only lasted as long as it took to abandon cable packaging and get digital viewership. Digital viewership was massive in rural communities, frequently leaving Fox digital channels on all day long like a prideful and active billboard for good conservative values and endeavors. They’ve been stream boosting media since forever.

In Phoenix, malls had suffered the same fate as many places, cutting down the walkable space and wearing its vestigial wings with empty parking lots there. Some malls stayed alive and busy by being outdoor, cheaper to cool and prettier to use. Intel was seen as powerhouses of employment.

Today, Intel is “saving” its failed business with a government stake and an abusive relationship to the Unitary Executive.

Today, private charter airlines run under-reported flights from the local Mesa airport, as delivered by the Department of Homeland Security, to some foreign but more domestic destinations. Deportation processing sites are built hastily in other states and which are only accessible via aircraft landing strips.

As budget company Spirit Airlines files for its second bankruptcy in 2025, it will surely face the decision to join the private charter network of human trafficking systems powered by those who just need jobs. If part of it, asking questions will lose them and their families their livelihoods.

Alaska

Wasilla-Palmer

Gun shows in Alaska get billboards on your rural corner, the word being put out that the state dividend return money is coming and everyone’s been planning like it’s Christmas.

The roads all have what I irreverently call the “moose scoreboards” which update quarterly about the number of moose killed. I’ve encountered a tall moose while driving the fogged lamp-less roads at night.

Alaskans built homes, used libraries, visited distant parks, made animal sanctuaries, promoted local transit, and a lot more. They were political, but very mixed. They were proud of certain differences, and the wind was vicious all of September. The foyers to places are built with double-ended entries as a rule.

Some drive-up huts for coffee and calzones existed, and it was very independent and worth the prices. Things had more expense generally in Alaska, but the place was very grounded to me. Some residents maintained seasonal fishing trips, and we saw tundra and abandoned mines from an elevation over their city. These were places that had no paths and rails. You were at the edge of structure, and you could walk up any direction you pleased. The parking was terrible near the narrow peaks, but drum circles and hang-gliders were common if you could park a vehicle somewhere along the way up.

Wasilla was something a little different than Anchorage’s direct analog of modernity. Up north some, the local movie theater closed very early, especially when the sun wouldn’t sleep in the summer. Families managed the long/short daylight seasons like it was a reason to do different kinds of things. The old Sears looked disused already. Large department stores had been failing in general but this had the whole look of that failure. In town, I found a chapter of writers to join. I liked it enough that I drove to Anchorage 45 minutes once and then twice a week to discuss more amateur writing. I liked being everywhere in Alaska.

I met people, some who had abandoned Colorado and scoffed at Alaskan winter. They were transplants, but happily away from certain noisier things and a little bit more gun. Many were born and raised.

The residents here, at sled dog races and ice fishing, universally took pride in Mount Denali, even its name. On a clear day you could see it. Obama had given it back a name that the residents had long recognized anyway. It was Denali, and locally they knew that this was a debate that was being settled. The issue with the prior unwanted name was that it had been for a President who did little more than fail to be on Rushmore.

When I came back to other places after Alaska, I was asked a few times variations of the question “Were you running from something?” In fiction, Alaska often makes a great place for murderers to congregate. In non-fiction, a similar tame lesson is given that out here you should know what it means to be resourceful.

Bear spray or engine block warmers, Alaska was a character in their lives. The studded tires made horrifying grooves in the lone highway that iced like a deathtrap so often that it was never any wonder why someone new was down in the ditch. People were choosing to live in this state with some fire in them.

Today, the Unitary Executive has made sure via Order that the name McKinley is the mountain’s official name again.

Some glaciers are actually gone now. Survival and camping YouTubers find it harder to build content in this region when winter snow doesn’t arrive. They are building parasocial relationships with large audiences, sometimes built on their State identities. These figures are popular digital tourism centers and should be eagerly rewarded with support from public ventures.

Standard grant money is going away, and that plan is working to dislodge thirsty entrepreneurs who saw that money as theirs too freely. We should be building new cases for what grant money can be used for to better our communities and offer more digital tourism. We want to experience anything at all about places without Expedia Travel knowing about it with a hoax offer for discount code roulette. It is terrible to explore our own places online, let alone the places of others.

New York

Watertown

When I met NY again, I was a little moved by their COVID slogan work. Across state roads, lightbulb signs for construction notices were set out with a message that “NY TOUGH” was a description they would earn. Their governor of old money and family lines made mess of that.

In a military suburb, the local bar sees a lot of the same faces. To go elsewhere means a town on the river border with Canada, or much longer drives out to populous Syracuse.

It was nice to hear once, someone say BLM and mean Bureau of Land Management.

With COVID, consumers bounced meme stocks and bought billboards. I decided to bring a store a local pizza because I was very sure they were at the fringe of civilization in terms of the GameStop noise, but deserved to feel nice.

The best airport I’ve ever used was a gravel lot, free parking, and a hard 90-degree turn inside the door for immediate security screening. This was pre-9/11 airport ethos, and it was lovely.

Though there wasn’t much to be doing out there, rural America drove its consumer trucks around ostensibly for car washes, while wearing too many Trump and rebel flags. Black Lives Matter had given some shy Trump voters reason to think Black people would jump a white person if there was a BLM flag up. The trucks were preemptive, a show of awareness.

It’s hard to know what the Other’s plan is, when their fortress truck honks long at you. I’m reminded of the vehicle at school that ran into me despite me minding my business. I don’t harbor the belief that tuning out results in me being fine.

After Phoenix I didn’t really like rowdy shouting. Football fans had made me roll windows up in general when I heard them make war cries. MAGA trucks made me hope their self-absorbed spell would just keep them moving.

Today, ex-Governor Cuomo is trying to campaign over Zohran Mamdani for power as New York City Mayor. The incumbent is stuck in foreign bribery and now a blackmail threat to avoid prosecution for a crime the Unitary Executive says doesn’t exist anymore. If you’ve ever met millennial-age New Yorkers, you might hear reports that Mamdani sounds like a real human, and Cuomo is unfit.

Texas

Austin

The surplus-militarization of the police was covered by news multiple times and used Texas as an example of how state police were able to use undisclosed technology unavailable to the free market or other departments, to tag vehicles for an out-of-band reporting to databases. The reports were “confidential source”, as though someone were being given protection in exchange for useful information. The protection was given to themselves. They had riot tools in reserve that were only available from military contractors as the federal government rotated its supply.

The good news was that America was still making equipment just fine in peacetime, and could be called up in great reserves like so many kinds of ammunition. The bad news was that Qualified Immunity could explain anything. We still weren’t done fighting for our effective rights to record the police in public.

The state police benefitted from the equipment, and the DEA. Drug policy in the United States has been uneven and more than broken. It gave us phrases like “crack babies” in pre-Trump presidential debate. In modern times, we have very little idea about the drug networks that find new ways to move products to us. Honestly, the stories I remember are of police caught participating or framing with a mysterious supply. Fentanyl is the new bad, and rightfully. It bodes ominously that it is a medical material with correct uses in small controlled amounts. It is good at what it is for in a medical setting and does not create a dependence opportunity with a long-lived prescription. On the street, this Fentanyl is much worse for normal reasons. It arrives here in vast quantities, and it is not clear whether this is competition or the same networks modernizing. The United States, and Texas first, is prepared to stand a military at the border, describing it in court as a war however latently observed.

After those calls to defund police, and those clumsy recants about wiser spending, I never had more chances for earnest thought about the police than in Texas. Texas was a land where you could get away with pretty bad expired plates and never get towed, but harsh time on marijuana if you did that wrong. (Delta-8 was getting big though.) Texas was a land where the police would let you speed a little harder on those long 80mph roads to get anywhere of use, but were scanning your plates everywhere you went.

No changes were made to police policy, but trouble did not arise often. Austin was keeping it weird, but the state surrounding that population doesn’t like it much. Alex Jones and many others have gone there, beacons against or for it.

As a State body, however, Austin’s defiant autonomy is resented, and I heard multiple new kinds of hate from poisoned religious speakers. The lack of state income tax is a miracle, supported by the state’s extreme wealth in reserve, available with fracking. This deposit will likely carrier US energy into the future for decades and more.

Texas, for all that it rampages on about independence, really does have an isolated power network. It has been poorly tended at times and unprepared for novel swings in the climate, but it is there. It is functioning, and it is more than any other state has done to date, or could do.

Texas opens its doors to businesses with confidence. Dallas and San Antonio form an edge of its triangle of cities, on the rim of the future 22nd century’s economic heartland. Disillusioned with California, big companies move to Texas, citing tax burdens and regulation which are proportioned in a much better way down South.

The casual conservative principles I understood from my upbringing were present least of all in Texas’s leadership. I yearned for more Ann Richards, but that wasn’t a name on lips like Ted Cruz’s.

The Uvalde massacre and cascading failure of the police punctured a hole in my hope that Texas would do better with their tools.

Today, the flagrant disregard of what regulation does exist is explained with waivers negotiated in private meetings. The AG and governor there seek the medical records of many, to witch hunt the medical histories of families they can’t name. I had been taught that the government had no business in medicine, but around me they were conducting investigations into medical histories.

Today, Austin’s political representation has been smothered and it cannot run its own elections. State leadership took complaints seriously about provisional paper ballot supplies and printers not being in sharp working order. Texas has passed legislation to modify its maps and pack their representation at the Unitary Executive’s request.

Today, the United States says it is conducting war on Venezuelan drug boats, and claims insider cooperation in Mexico that the Mexican President denies exists.

The future of Texas

As AI companies race to build superintelligences, nuclear power is returning to the Executive’s discourse, though it was not a campaign issue, and runs quite contrary to most conservative voices I ever knew. Nuclear was strangely green, but today, new modular nuclear reactor designs are barely not at market. Worse for it, the new industry doesn’t have a body of experienced construction and operating engineers; the talent hasn’t been cemented in resumes yet. New, much better reactors will not see daylight, while the United States turns to the dirtier cousin nuclear waste.

States want superintelligence built in their area (possibly thinking there are jobs associated, but not exclusively because). But the power grid is sprawling and may deliver the necessary power from neighboring state contracts for nuclear. The public is about to pay for power draw that isn’t available yet, legacy nuclear or new.

Texas, should it construct one of each, may be the only state in the Union with a control lab: Equipped with legacy fuel for itself and its trade partners for decades, no income tax, AI superintelligence, nuclear old and new, self-sufficient power, access to the Gulf of America and America’s most powerful Mississippi and tributary shipping strength, is and will be America’s backbone of economics should foreign partners become scarce.

Even should America lean into armed conflict at the border with Mexico, Texas will gain new military self-sufficiency and experience. It seems that any choice it makes will be blessed by its circumstances.

Elon Musk was granted a special districting agreement for his corporate campus home, uprooted from California. He owns a city in Texas called Starbase, and there are science-fictional works that he paid to be inserted into as a historical figure.

Wyoming

Cheyenne

At the well-attended fair, I rarely bought new things. The items are expensive, but all of the vendors are of course People running shops with a brand you can choose to come back for. Frequently, these are mobile shops, joining fairs, conventions and rallies. They know how to find audiences for their goods. They have to sow if they want to reap, and they can’t do it from their homes.

A just-do-it attitude isn’t what you get from meeting these makers. It was much more of a lets-do-it attitude. President Donald Trump was preparing his comeback campaign, and rural America had seen a lot of him for bespoke rallies that no news media were sent to watch. They felt the winds, and knew he was not touchable, not by God, not by Jack Smith.

I purchased a colorful airy duster from a woman running a long display space. I knew enough from my time in Phoenix and Los Angeles how much effort it took to haul goods into cities and hotels for a base, then set everything up each day of an event. There was theft to worry about, and costs paid just to get there and back. The opportunity had cost them something already. The shop owner was more talkative than I expected, but I enjoyed it. I may have talked about the fit I liked about her item, even though I was sure these were supplied and peddled. It didn’t matter, though, she was doing something and people bought her items. This wasn’t a passive Etsy shop where things shipped out by themselves (though she may have too) and her direct efforts made the time spent worth it.

Nothing that happened later for Biden-Kamala would surprise me at all. The weakness was plain and it was lacking vision. Our SOTU addresses were a broken record exposition on undoing A, B, C, D, E, F and now G, H things. The platform had become reactionary and incoherent. Our foreign policy was say-nothing nonsense and fake hope spoken by men with no vision of what to do or how. I’m certain I’ve held more authority over soccer kids in Beijing summer camp, and I can tell you, Biden did not have it. Kamala was a “good move” from a bad position.

The most astute piece I read in this time was from a young journalist attending the revival of political meetings for the right-wing movements. They had speakers, and young interest.

It was reported that young men were finding confidence and reasons to be proud of their choices, and found fulfillment in working on it.

They weren’t good at forming their ideas, but they were showing up.

By contrast, the piece let us see a stale left-wing movement wherein the last effort the rare youth could ask was what to do.

The right-wing movements have a litany of things to do. They have solutions that fit their values, though we may need to help them remember the protection given to all. What I cannot abide in these movements is the full awareness that there is no plan, there is no specification for how new order should work. The movements are about tearing things down because it requires that much pre-demolition to even observe new solutions.

The fuller MAGA hypothesis is that you can do better when you burn this down a little, and they all know it. They have spared no thought for displacement and People.

No one was saying the things I took to be true, but that cut a lot of ways. I had grown up with church members shunning any sign of political messaging during lesser meetings, and hearing complaints of single-issue voters, the demons in our communities who were sandbagging things unfairly and were easily led along by NPR. Politics were always personal. I’ve heard enough single-issues to believe it, but not in a partisan alignment. Single issues were all it took to make People look away from everything else wrong with their heroes. Single-issues were phishing everyone, everywhere, but they felt together in it. It was raw unmitigated populism, but it was a connection that energized them fine. They’ve always understood working together despite differences, though they posit that The Left might not.

Today, our political story includes tech billionaire Elon Musk roaring a self-branded chainsaw and promising irreverence in the destruction of our federal government and its jobs. To uproarious applause during and after, he ripped out the government’s People and parts and moved the data across unsecure lines where Strangers listen. When things break, he adds something back in. He uses his tinker-toddler mentality on a government he has never served in and cannot lead. He diverts assets where he shouldn’t because CEOs work in mysterious ways, usually with loyalty. He flanked the President with new authority and wore a black eye.

Colorado

Larimer County

I’d heard talk of Purple states, but I got there after it felt Blue. The rural wings of the state are not Blue at all, and are active in their races despite media wars using their names. The state that made me think of Columbine (the name is in businesses of course) and Colorado Springs (white, guns and vans, but also SuperStars Writing Seminars) also had its gentrification underway.

College towns find it easy to keep developments alive, but communities just outside get drained of entertainment. Families move in but there may not seem like anything to do, Google Maps shows permanently closed results, and the houses are expensive. People don’t always know what to do with the information I give them that Texas is attracting a lot of business and has no property tax. I’m not advertising to them, but it’s clear that there are calculations going on for people. They know what they pay, and they know why they stay, but they don’t know why they don’t go elsewhere.

Finding impactful local software work is difficult in a college town and in a post-COVID world where remote working has not finished using us for outsourcing. New graduates talk about AI and try to figure how to use it like the YouTube personalities who show them strange miracles.

Hiring across state lines makes it hard to report salaries, so even though states like New York and Colorado require a salary disclosure, companies use an unrealistic range to cover the fine details of where exactly skill level cutoffs sit in that band. Local work in Colorado often looks like defense contractors. From ground control systems to precision engineering, the defense industry is alive.

The privacy law in Colorado tries to match California’s, but it has its own text and title. It is ineffective on any company, anywhere in the world, with fewer than ten-thousand users in the state. A sane threshold instead defines exactly what size a privacy scam can be, plus bonus time for detection of undisclosed figures.

For example, to make Colorado law work for me, I would need to get 9,999 Coloradans to finish the page at link: https://app.rezi.ai/signup. Then I would have to follow up my prior report to the Colorado Attorney General with a new one after I speculate there “might” be 10k accounts. The legal efforts an individual has to undertake for protection are lopsided and user-hostile.

In states before, I had rented from property managers who changed like storm wind. They all ended up with the same renter web software, the same way all my banks over the years had bought each other up until I had just one that mattered. In Colorado, I enjoyed something a little different for a while, but then, like clockwork, a renting agency bought the property within the year and issued new terms to us all.

Business is complicated. People with needs are found by People with services. I have grown tired of noticing the way we run these companies with a frenzy that cannot be sated. The same systems capture everyone, in every state, and the same hustlers arrive to make us pay them money they will use nationally and for their CEOs. The renting agencies also have a Privacy Policy for us to sign.

The Privacy: It is never in the room with us. We are lied to by every entity with a thirst for our data.

News media in northern Colorado has decayed to precious little. In Loveland, the only “local” digital outlet is paywalled. In Fort Collins there is easier access. Both are owned by multi-state conglomerates with a headquarters in Denver.

There are bunker societies in the mountains, state parks, a lot of artificial lakes in a land that people keep calling a desert, a Buc-ees (?!), an Amazon fulfillment warehouse (the kind that supports drone use), and more than a few dedicated public media servants building facilities for the public’s unfettered use. There is better parking around town than in the overgrown cities.

Still, things grow and some People don’t like that. Most states I’ve lived in have shared complaints that city centers skew Blue and take something tangible away from Red centers. Growth is happening everywhere, and I think Texas is the surest sign that Red can do Red things if it wants to. We may have surrendered to our circumstances so regularly that we find it hard to imagine control of our vision again.

Loveland

Loveland is updating its downtown projects to be more like Fort Collins, and while growth is hard, the progress is welcomed by many. City Council meetings reveal some tension, but conflict is prescribed and it takes place in public.

Of special interest to me has been the campaign against the homeless in Loveland. These are People who have found it easier to congregate in Loveland. This place especially, as nearby communities shut down to “encampments” which can be any position a vehicle or tent is found. Loveland’s relaxed rules on the subject made campers happy, but facilitated what rose to abuse for some members of the City Council.

The Unitary Executive has begun a campaign to displace the unwanted, because they are not impressive. Its office and ballrooms flaked with gold, it prefers non-maimed soldiers, and visible top-down order. By solving problems so aggressively, it shows strength, improving the game of confidence as it tries new measures.

The displacement is inspiring for some, who are also ready to give up on the unwanted, especially with the Executive’s encouragement. They blame needles, and do devious things with hearsay. When silence passes these comments by, like my parents’ silence for Fox News, the room reads this as consent. Silence is consent. If unchallenged, silence approves measures that active agents of human displacement are using to do a trick: They can make people disappear. They might even get you to thank them for it.

When all locations become unavailable, the displaced will be illegal like a cornered subhuman tribe with no reservation land. They are already promised to institutionalization, shelter housing, possibly hard labor, and only the latter is in supply.

With the mass ethnic hunt beginning across America, the toddler-tinkerers are pulling things away to see what falls, and they will only intervene to save the parts they deem important. This may not include what You Hold Dear.

Loveland is retracting parts of its plan to support city services for homeless individuals, when housing is not obtainable. A recent visit to Missouri was made by me because housing costs weren’t viable for the friends who had moved away.

It is too much to believe that we cannot do anything more ingenious, and without the need for a biblical meme template to say nothing specific again and again. Every amount of real work is too hard to sustain with so much to think about, and we give so much over to AI. I do not know anymore whether to wish AI placement as CEOs of the giantism corporations, or into city government positions where they will be active and less tired than our People have become; Both bring promise for the same reasons AI can replace People “so well” to begin with.

AI today does too much summary, too little for creativity, and takes too-precise instructions too frequently to be organic. It gives random results the way the Nintendo Entertainment System gave random results, and that is to say, not very well with very simple additional controls. AI is not like us, but it is alike enough and vastly programmable. It does the things people know how to tell people how to do, and it will get better at leveraging its compiled experience.

Some of the cities around us, like Fort Collins, are buying real-time location data services from Placer Labs Inc, which procures for itself a vast arsenal of location-aware data from sources it says you must opt out of individually. You have not heard of the vendors they use, not all. City planners and economic developers express interest in the datasets because they get to see how People are actually using the city. This outcome is desirable, but this method is not.

Cities across the United States must develop methods of self-monitoring, efficient reflection interfaces, and better engagement and surveying tools. These requests are not unique, but the timing is. Public services must fill the roles that private national businesses have reserved for themselves for our convenience (and data). Templates do not exist, but our States are the laboratories of our Democracy. Do not continue to give large brands our data for a so-called Privacy Policy thrust on us.

Seek out your community and resort to novel methods to attract interest in public projects that are led by universities, colleges, and your local talents. They may be older than you. They may be younger. AI is democratizing information and re-enabling those who use accessibility tools to operate modern computers and phones. AI is taking away jobs, but we can make fundamentally new services and add value to our communities.

We can give you a reason to stay.

I do not think a solution is viable if it cannot help these homeless. We have no great projects, no great endeavors. Even our tradespeople must use nationally-deployed LinkedIn to be seen by their own communities. It is a sad state of things that we cannot see ourselves as locals without tools that take us further from local.

Polling

Polling needs to be reinvented, and a reason to use it regularly needs to be articulated to the People. There is not enough log space for speakers at City Council meetings, not for this modern era. We are in possession of a modern summarization miracle technology, and it doesn’t have to be deployed against us.

We should be examining ways in Loveland and Fort Collins to provide free open-source services. LLM technology in civics should work in the following ways:

1. Distilled LLM can direct accurate, useful resources to locals who ask, without needing the fake personality of conventional chat agents. An appliance should have clear and reasonable methods of use. Circular chatter bots are not a solution.
2. LLM services should be capable of decoding our individual cities’ documentation habits, the resources linked deeply within, and point to answers about questions.
3. Rather than dumping unanswered queries in a failure state to turn away the user in politeness: Supply city officials with resources that describe actual questions that are going unanswered. Use AI to synthesize value from data that was previously fated to be ignored. These dead-end experiences frustrate users but still ruin nearly every interaction in software. Our world scries behavior from analytics, but we should not, and we should ask them directly instead.
4. The homeless population of Loveland cannot monitor what the City Council decides about them as People. Lightweight in-memory LLM agents need to be accessible from scratch on any mobile device with a browser, capable of forwarding queries to more complex retrieval. Privacy can be strongly promised. Restated queries are made into city data.
5. LLMs waste a great deal of energy tuning tone across repeat answers. It is an infrastructure bus that connects us to value; AI is not a destination.

We may feel the impulse to deny usage metrics to our city, but I believe the cities can make better agreements for the use of that data than the usual companies we surrender to without choice. Cities do want to see how their places are used and make them better. Observability is a desirable attribute where it is appropriately offered.

The digital era has shown us that data is valuable, and that our cities can be made better with it. Rather than using national and trans-national brands to gain that observability (all of those brands being vulnerable to the Unitary Executive with data in its enriched states) we must instead provide the narrow and appropriately kept public record of public comments and questions. City representatives can do with this as they wish, but accountability is at last placed in the hands of the civil servants, and they can be elected or recalled as necessary to manage it.

We can inspire entirely new types of public involvement and city value. Our tradespeople should not need LinkedIn for everything. Our residents should not need Google to find a local restaurant past the paid promotional results for franchised stores. Meetup should not be a brand portal to social experiences, where they charge you for contacting too many people from your events unless you pay them.

The loneliness epidemic touches many, and as matchmaking apps look more and more contrived for subscription revenue, it is easy to wonder at where all of our neighbors and near-neighbors are.

We need to thrive as People to have our American Dreams. Americans, they like to work. They want to live in their city. They treasure safety and they do not like watchful eyes with no explanation but marketing. Technology has done great things and it has never yet been called back so strongly as it should be now. Business is allowable, where its terms are properly enunciated.

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.