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The republic is dead. Not sick, not dying, not failing, or in a gradual decline, not waiting to be resuscitated, but already stone cold dead.
There seems to be no effective way to save or restore the republic, no way for any individual to even begin to solve the problem of our late 20th and early 21st century imperialism. I tend to agree, and the wisest observers in these pages warn, as Chris Floyd does, "It is pointless ¬ and counterproductive ¬ to simply throw yourself under the wheels of such a monstrous machine in futile spasms of rage and despair. The machine doesn't care. It will gladly chew up your life and move on."
A book I read a few years ago, entitled Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales, offers a helpful perspective on our current condition. In studying the question of who lives and who dies in extreme survival conditions, Gonzales found that survivors shared a sense that, in fact, they were not going to live. While they wanted to live, to go home again, and to be secure ¬ they recognized that they were so royally and absolutely FUBAR'ed that they would die, probably quickly and perhaps horribly.
Now, obviously those who actually died in these disasters could not be interviewed, but the behaviors and actions of those who lived and those who died were measurably different. The survivors recognized the ugly truth of their own imminent death quickly ¬ and this early recognition of reality ¬ however harsh and frightful and depressing it may have been ¬ was also at once incredibly liberating, in some ways exhilarating.
The survivors tended to reach this point of reality sooner than did the victims. They grieved for themselves, their hoped-for futures, their now impossible dreams. Then they rolled up their sleeves and got started on the hard, and very likely pointless, work of survival.
Living In An Imperial World