Monica,

If we never did idiot things, we would never learn anything. Which is not to say stupid can be cured, but it will be outlasted.

As people, we are driven by our desires and steered by our judgement. It is just that in this culture of monist idealism, the two sides, liberal and conservative, see themselves being on the one true path, not two sides of a larger cycle of expansion and consolidation. Trial and error. This is the future this society has been borrowing against and it has arrived.

Black injustice is proving to be the tip of a much larger arrow. Not only that younger generations realize they too are being treated as crops to be harvested, but the other side of the coin is that we live in a consumer culture, where any and all desires are magnified and glorified, as a way to sell anything, from products to political movements.

The consequence is a lot of dry tinder and all it took was one spark.

So, yes, there will be much destroyed, that was well worth saving, but that is the nature of fire. It doesn't sort as we do. The next stage will be the blowback, as enough people start to realize destruction doesn't create anything but ashes and dust.

So what will be saved? As I've been trying to argue for decades, debt really does matter. The country has been taking vacations on the equivalent of a national home loan since Reagan and are now kiting checks and cooking the books to keep up appearances.

We really are about at the stage of the Soviet Union, cira 1989.

Likely many of the people in charge are uneasy about the legal consequences of what they've been engaged in, that they will do all in their power to keep kicking the can down the road, even if it means changing narratives every few weeks. The end is nigh.

The problem is that we are on this side of the cresting tsunami, not somewhere where we can dispassionately observe it.

We are not going to print our way out of this mess. We are going to learn the hard way that charactor does matter. If we want respect, we need to be responsible. If those at the top feel the need to cheat on the rules, they will eventually find it was by those rules they came out on top in the first place.

Nature is cyclical, not linear. It's more a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, than winner take all.

My advice? Surf the biggest wave in history. We are living in the sort of times the historians drool over.

Nobody gets out alive anyway.