https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/a-first-draft-of-the-history-of-2024-post-5645414A First Draft of the History of 2024By Jeffrey A. Tucker
5/7/2024
NOTE: when reading at the Epoch Times, either use "reader mode" in your browser, or DISABLE javascript using free add-ons or extensions.Excerpts:What will historians say about the current year ten years hence? I’ve tried my hand at a first draft.
Four years following the COVID lockdowns, 2024 was the strangest of all, with whole populations trying to behave as if life was normal, spending far more than they can afford simply because no one wanted to accept the dramatic change, much less that it was a permanent one.
Credit card debt soared just as it was least affordable to hold, even as news of government spending trillions upon trillions became something of a white noise of public life. The United States was fully at war with Russia but through surreptitious means: it paid its own military contractors to conduct the war and therefore never had to declare it.
Billions flowed to favored industrial interests that benefited from foreign conflict and away from the middle class and poor. Public support for Ukraine was not real but only a class flex: it indicated that you are on the smart side, not the dumb side, in a society ever more torn by strange, seemingly unpredictable, and mostly symbolic divisions.
It was the last days of seeming prosperity. The spoils were being divided.
The economy did not look utterly terrible from the numbers alone but that was because of data manipulation from the top. This allowed most people to pretend that life could become normal again, if they just ignored obvious contrary signs and behaved as they did in the past, whatever that could mean based on what people remembered of the before times.
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Eventually the luxuries too became less frequent, as the signs of prosperity widely shared only a few years earlier became available only to those who won in the years of the Great Reset.
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Service was worse everywhere. It was an unusual flight that departed and arrived on time. Amenities in every sector turned into opportunities for new charges. Bills became too complicated to understand as every company learned to hide new charges in financial statements that no one read. The whole goal of professional life became to collect as much as possible from others, like a polite pillaging that had the form but not the substance of market transaction.
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The most immediate priority became personal safety. In areas that were once safe and where stealing was unknown, crime became the norm. What was shocking at first became an expectation and people adjusted behavior accordingly. Businesses in large cities with street-level store fronts closed.
Major sections of cities were overtaken with tents, trash fires, and wandering addicts, creating apocalyptic scenes that only the brave dared film. Half of smaller businesses could no longer pay the rent on time.
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The apocalypse could be anything but it was obvious to all that the current system could not last. The candle was burning from both ends, financially and otherwise. The problem was that no one knew for sure how long it would burn.
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The signs of breakage were everywhere, from airplanes to websites to appliances, and ever less anomalous. In time, and given the trauma of the pandemic years, memories of good times past began to fade. What was once called high civilization gradually evolved into a gray and dull routine of surviving one more day, come what may.
Everyone knew it. But few spoke about it, simply because there was nothing to be gained by doing so.
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Rather than think about such big issues, it was far easier to recall life from only five years earlier and do one’s best to reenact that in the hope that something would change and life would normalize. We would surely remember what it was like to aspire to a humane and free existence, the very slogans that the president would periodically invoke even though no one believed them.
Such was life in 2024: the all-enveloping reality of one world gone and a new one created, but without announcement, without a public plan, and without any genuine public consensus. It all sort of just happened, somewhere and sometime in a confused mélange of masks, shots, screaming propaganda, and a prescribed strange dance to avoid a virus that everyone got anyway.
People did what they were told, by and large, and ended up with something about which only a few warned and no one promised. In the following year, even the manufactured illusion of normalcy gave way to something far worse.
More at URL above...Poster's comment:The additional writing between the [...]'s above is just as good.
A very good piece with keen introspection on "what's coming"...
