"Fighting like crabs in a bucket"

What some college kids have to say about our doom.

The baby in the stroller looked up at me with big brown eyes and two little teeth sticking out of the bottom of her mouth as her mom looked down and told her, “that’s Justin. He knows about tear gas too.” The mom is a few years older than me and this is her first child. The last time we saw each other was on a street in Ferguson, MO as the city burned around us and we caught our breath from running around all day and night in the middle of riots and protests. That was almost 10 years ago. We were younger then and didn’t know each other much better than we do right now. We looked around in that moment and just wondered, what in the hell has gone so wrong here? I remember she gave me a little packet of Maalox or some kind of creamy liquid in case I caught tear gas in my eyes like she had and needed something to ease the stinging. Now, we live in the same city and I met her for lunch at a deli where she ate a chicken salad sandwich and told me about her life since that strange time. We still don’t know each other that well but we have been through something together, which means we have a bond that can never be broken.

There are many people like her. But not that many in terms of the greater population. Maybe about one of every 1,000 moms you see with a 10-month old baby in a stroller standing in line for a chicken salad sandwich at a deli have seen what a riot looks like. But they’re out there. Ever since they saw it, they can’t forget. 

Whether the wars to come actually do come — which I think they probably will and I think this summer will be long and hot and violent — is a matter for the odds-makers in Las Vegas. What is more of a sure bet is that most people are not prepared for it. Most people are not as prepared as this new mother who knows about the tear gas herself and has seen what it looks like when all of the rules of society vanish in an instant. There are many men around here in these parts of the South who love guns and drive big trucks and think they’re ready for when something like what happened in Ferguson happens, but they will quickly crumble when they see crowds as big as the ones I’ve seen have take to the streets.

I see impending doom all around me in many forms. It’s an older woman I know who brags on Facebook about how she doesn’t read the “mainstream media” or watch the “tell lie vision” (TV) but is constantly posting reels and memes and other far-right garbage that’s being fed to her by the algorithm she doesn’t really understand. It’s the sitting governor of South Dakota hawking fake, shiny teeth for a business that isn’t even in her state because apparently being governor isn’t lucrative enough anymore. You know things are not looking good when the people who currently have the power are planning their next moves before they’re even out of office. I see our doom in the smiling faces of people posing with a photo of a murder victim because the former president autographed it and misspelled her name. I see our doom in their understanding that this woman’s death can be used to justify racial vengeance against entire groups of people. 

But that’s why I think America is doomed. Many other people see it many different ways. I don’t really know what those ways are and often don’t care but in a moment of attempted understanding I asked a friend of mine who goes to Georgia Southern University to ask some of his classmates what they think of American Doom. This is what they said.