WHAT DO WE DO WHEN unbelievably stupid behavior is rampant among people in leadership positions in this country? It’s amazing how fast a relatively strong country can be torn apart. In reality, everything is interconnected, so when people with ill-gotten power take their chainsaws and start sawing away, trashing agencies and institutions that are part of the vital infrastructure holding our country together, the whole shebang is going to fall, whether sooner or later. It’s going to fall. It’s going to end up as a pile of junk—a suitable monument to malignant narcissism. Litter. A complete mess. Which means that schools, hospitals, transportation, communication systems, manufacturing, and relationships with our allies—all of everything—is going to be severely impaired and, in some cases, nonfunctional.

This is so crystal clear, so obvious—but people in power don’t seem to care. Maybe what we’re seeing is simply stupidity in charge. But that’s too easy. Some of these people have some kind of intelligence. What is it that’s blinding them to the dystopian future they’re creating or making them not care, or, even worse, wanting everything to crash and burn?

We’ve observed this quirk in humans: when a person craves something, whether physically, emotionally, or mentally, that craving is often more important than anything else for them, including their own safety, or the well-being of people they think they love, or any rational concerns. People rationalize and blind themselves to possible consequences. They compartmentalize, putting their craving in one box and care for themselves and others in another, very separate box while keeping those two boxes as far apart as possible in their minds. No connection. They can have both. They get both the cake and the icing. We see this in addictions, as when someone loses their home to a casino or drinks and drugs their marriage and career away. We see it in cult behavior. We also see it in domestic violence, when a person stays in the relationship by compartmentalizing the violence and focusing on when times are good. Humans are flawed that way. We like to think we’re rational, but that’s a huge stretch of the imagination.

If people follow their craving for power into a pact with the agents of destruction so they can be hired or elected into an important position, the mayhem they’ll create, whether on their own or because they’re forced to, will not be important to them. They can blame it on someone else and, at least for a while, feel the thrill of all the power they wield. When things start crashing—“Well, that sometimes happens, you know. Systemic forces, or powerful enemies, or an alien attack. But it’s not my fault.”

So back to the question: what do we do? We fight back from every angle, as we’re doing. We sue, we march, we rally, we write postcards, we knock on doors, we talk to our neighbors, and, most important, we do not despair, and this is why. It’s because we understand that fast-moving, massive destruction of the sort we are experiencing will reach a tipping point. Something will happen. Mother Nature will retaliate even more than she has. Masses of people will begin to creatively mobilize, using every sort of action, as long as it’s legal, to bring people together to rebuild this nation. They will be unpredictable and unstoppable, but they will not stoop to the behaviors they oppose. Look at the courage of the Ukrainians and the Hungarians.

If we’re wise, we’ll prepare for this and for the inevitable victory. We’ll be ready with a plan of many stages.

• Stage 1 will be a strategy for cleaning up the wreckage and holding people accountable.
• Stage 2 will be building anew. It’s clear that the old status quo was deteriorating. It had become unsustainable, with loopholes in laws, policies, procedures, and structures that allowed the toxins to flow in, first in rivulets, then in streams, and then in a river. We need to determine what values are needed as the foundation for what we build; we need to look at what we had in the old status quo that we want to bring forward; and we need to use modern tools to create structures that don’t have those old loopholes and do have procedures to identify and close new ones that appear. The rebuilding must start at the bottom and flow to the top, involving communities across the country in a visioning process that feeds into final decision-making.
• Stage 3 will generate widespread ownership across the country as well as support from as many international allies as possible.

This will be a process that starts in our communities and then moves to the states, then to the federal level; it will ultimately extend its arms out into the world, which is hungry for such a model.

This is the blueprint. This is what we must do. We’ll all fill in the details as we go along. Each community will use the basic blueprint to envision how it applies to its unique situation. We’ll end up with that kind of functional diversity as part of a common thread.

Let’s do this!!!