An Inhuman Condition

The sustainability gardens are doing well this season. We’ve the resources and time now to do the proper planting. A few of the master gardeners are slowly teaching the rest of us how to grow our own food. The canned supplies and dehydrated goods are running out like we knew they would, but they gave us the crucial two years needed before we could see the splendor of our own effort. Last summer we didn’t have anyone that could grow corn, tomatoes, cucumbers; we’ve transformed these folks from single-heat-lamp-in-closet pot growers into actual farmers. I tasted one of the fresh berries yesterday and almost cried.

I feel like I’ve really done something here – made an impact. All of this was my idea, but I can’t take any real credit. Everyone involved has been essential to rebuilding, creating, defending our little city. We were very lucky to have the few skilled tradesmen join us and help to teach former gas pumpers, desk jockeys and assorted cog capitalists how to do real things – things essential to survival. They are the seed from which we are beginning to grow.

When someone new joins our collective, a sour taste builds in the back of my throat. Most often they have absolutely nothing to offer. In the first few months, they are useless; they only take. I was the same way back then, and it’s taken all this time to practice and learn the basics. The taste I feel is my disgust for the way things were before the collapse, before my little experiment. Most of us were just like that overwhelmed new face. We took and took, benefitting from the labor of others without a thought, and we were happy to do it. Textiles from China, cars from Japan, fruit from Mexico, furniture from Sweden – we didn’t do anything except move money, handle accounts and service one another. It may have worked, capitalism, if motion was perpetual and growth unlimited, but there came a time when we had nothing to sell save our currency. The empire makes no clothes.

Now I stand in the midst of the most effective independent town in Michigan. We have managed to build life from the barren, post-industrial waste that was suburban Detroit. We’ve given up on making automobiles and use what little gas we can find to assist with food production. Want and worship of cars and trucks is almost heretical now on the grave of what used to be the ‘motor’ city. It’s very refreshing to exit one’s door and take a quick walk to work rather than the increasing commutes of our former lives. We replaced time that used to be spent traversing bleak highways with a casual stroll. Instead of chatting on a cellular telephone or navigating commercial radio stations, we chat with our neighbors. I finally understand what it means to “whistle while you work” in a way that isn’t ironic.

It’s been a while since the government tried to intervene with us. The last time they made a grab was over nine months ago. I’ve heard rumors that Lansing itself burned from the riots. The Detroit police disbanded and led convoys out of the state for a while. One of them converted to our side after their last attempt to break us. He smuggled out a trunk-full of shotguns, shells and some lead vests. He thought he was bringing us an armament until he saw what we were already packing. “It’s no wonder,” he said, “You’ve got more guns than the national guard.” That was all part of the plan. Now we accept just about anyone, but in the early days, we relied on our founding members for supplies. Everyone came with their trunk full of guns, ammunition, medical supplies and food. Defending ourselves was something we had to do; after that, we just had to hole-up and wait for economics to do the rest.

I see now that there were a thousand chances for the system to fix itself. It wasn’t quite as ol’ Karl said it would be, but back then, I didn’t give a damn. Three years ago, I had a head full of foolish, liberal ideals, and honestly I’m surprised that everything has worked this well. I was just a college-drop-out, news-junky misanthrope. A religious man might have attributed this set of lucky coincidences as some sort of vision or prophetical foresight, but I’ve never been much of a religious man. I was a stupid kid who ended up doing something smart unknowingly. The system itself played a large role in the success of this small city, but if things had bounced back or recovered slightly, I would probably be in prison as some sort of kooky, end-times cult leader or buried under a rotting pile of insurmountable debt.

They say that victors write the history of any event, and I would definitely declare myself and my neighbors among the victors. My recollection of the events that transpired after buying our first house here is mostly from newspapers that wandered in and stories from people, so it may not be the pinnacle of accuracy. I do, however, remember the events that inspired me to start hoarding guns and rations, and there isn’t anyone here more qualified to tell the story of how we survived the capitalism-killing economic crash. The first sign of real trouble was the myriad problems of the banking industry and their crooked cronies on Wall Street.

The banks fell like entropic dominos. The first filed bankruptcy and another merged super-bank would purchase the portions. A bigger bank would then suck one of its rotting behemoth brothers down into its slobbery maw. All the institutions controlling money were slowly decomposing while the government and Federal Reserve were busy trying to patch up the economy. Every time a new loan, deal, bailout, incentive passed; another top 50 corporation would spring a leak. These massive multinationals were slashing labor, selling assets, merging departments, cutting off any limb to stop the infection.

The Treasury was busy throwing life preservers at money market investments, and the SEC was limiting some of the dirty business tactics on Wall Street that started the crisis. All the money lenders, usurers, loan-sharking suit-jockeys were scrambling to turn their mountain of feces back into gold. Everywhere one looked the government was throwing money at the money people. The same batch of bottom-feeders that bled fortunes from the housing boom of the 90s was cap-in-hand begging for tax-payer dollars. Despite the best efforts of the newly elected president’s socialism for the investment capitalist, aiding the financial industry was praying for terminal cancer patients – a sweet gesture but ultimately useless.

The economic mantras of the western world are what crippled it. Outside of the U.S., similar fallout in Britain stressed the European Union. English workers were seeing their standard of living plummet. Unemployment was astronomical at the center of the former empire, and citizens were placing blame on cheap eastern-European labor. The value of sterling had flopped in previous months plagued by growing instability. The Blue Monday blow to the Royal Bank of Scotland sent shockwaves through the largest UK banks. Investors rapidly dumped shares and billions of pounds as the dominos all fell down.

Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan – world governments were dumping currency into their biggest banks and strapping sieves around their limbs. It was an industrial-world recession, and everybody was bleeding at least a bit. Capitalist nations were rushing to nationalize their banks and do anything to keep currency afloat. The only countries relatively untouched were the poor bastards raped by empire for more than 300 years. This ‘developing world,’ as the industrialists called it, was relatively safe having little to lose anyway.

The cause of it all, the first domino to drop, was the housing market collapse. Economists showed that the cost of a house considering inflation and other factors had not significantly changed for nearly 100 years. In the late 1990s, homeowners saw the value of their properties increase quickly. People were snatching houses up everywhere they could, sitting on them for a few years, and selling them for profit. Sprawl areas saw farmland and forest leveled away to create new suburban subdivisions. It was the ‘American Dream’ at work. Mortgages were easy to get, and eager Americans were looking to make some money for nothing. The people who should have taken notice were too busy making money wherever they could, and thus the price inflation continued.

The stock market took a dive in the early 2000s resulting in a small recession. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to stave-off the effects of recession, and investors took their money out of stocks and placed those eggs into the still-booming housing basket. More sprawl, more houses, more identical neighborhoods, we manufactured ourselves into the ground. All dreams must end. The exponential rise in the supply of homes continued, but demand had staggered. Unsold homes meant lower prices; values dropped everywhere. Americans found themselves owing more on their mortgages than the value of their homes. Those who couldn’t afford their payments no longer had equity to borrow against, and many found foreclosure to be more cost-effective than paying off the loans.

Newspapers filled with an increasing foreclosure section. The list of failed investments and bad dreams grew to three or four pages. These were entire newspaper pages with names of neighbors, addresses of unaffordable homes, capital’s coffin nails. It became commonplace to know a few people up to their ears in debt to the banks as things got worse. I knew someone whose delinquent mortgage was passed between three different banks before he stopped opening his mail. Everyone I knew was in debt to someone and trying to pay back what they could with their meager means. The letters would arrive every day from the Law Offices of Mitchell N. Case, P.C. from Smithtown, NY; Recoveries and Management Services from Warrenville, IL; Continental Recovery Services from Concord, CA; The U.S. Department of Education from Greenville, TX; the local district court and anyone else that could try to badger, harass and annoy some monetary blood from dry, scabby stones. They could call your telephone until that was disconnected. They could stuff countless envelopes to send you letters until you were foreclosed upon. No matter how far you had fallen and how broken you were, you would remain in their greedy ledgers until you or their company were dead.

I could see that everyone was giving up. My peers were stuck with college degrees, student loans and fuck-all for job offers. People were moving back into their parents’ houses, living off credit, and trying to find under-the-table, cash-in-hand jobs. A good handful of my female friends were seriously considering stripping or hooking as viable careers. These were young, smart, beautiful girls with their whole lives ahead of them, and they were ready to accept rock bottom if it kept the lights on and food in their stomachs. Every time I heard some patriotic prick say this was the greatest country in the world, I had to laugh to keep from crying.

Misery had always been the wealthiest widget on the American assembly line, but the little shreds of happiness occasionally afforded by the working class were quickly disappearing. I was stuck watching the headlines and overhearing the pitiful discussions every day, and I was about to break. I had a monkey of debt on my back and I was one more sob-story away from buying a gun and checking out. That’s when I had the idea. With the cost of a house in Detroit as cheap as a new car, I pondered moving across the state on whatever cash I could muster and trying to survive in the rotting wastes of the great lake state. I talked it over with a few of my friends and the plan slowly mutated into starting a survivalist co-operative where we could grow food during the summer and split the cost of things among many. We figured if we could get a five-bedroom house and sleep two people to a room, even amongst the decay, we could get by on whatever money we happened to make.

I’m not sure if we were all naive enough to think it would work or if we were just sick of trying and ready to give up, but we sold whatever unnecessary shit we could and packed up the cars. Twelve-thousand dollars cash bought us exactly what we were looking for, and we easily furnished our new home with street-side furniture, garage-sale gems and dollar-store décor. We were there less than a month before our house had been broken into and two of our cars had been looted. Two car stereos, a cassette adapter, one hooded sweatshirt, three novels, and a mixtape were all they took from the cars, and we were flabbergasted as to why someone would bother breaking our windows for such worthless things. Twenty-three dollars, a record player with ten albums, some costume jewelry and two infant marijuana plants were taken from the house – we were at a loss. We reported the thefts to the police, and each time they told us it was happening too frequently for them to actually do anything. One of the officers gave us a speech that was essentially, “Well kids, welcome to Detroit.”

We didn’t have the money to pay for a security system, but I was determined to do something. I had one credit card left that I had planned to use only for emergencies, and I considered the safety of the house something essential. I saw an advertisement for a going-out-of-business sale at a local gun store, and decided to check it out. The place was a wart-in-the-wall, stuck-in-sprawl, mini-mall shop with brightly colored signs informing me that the prices were “insanely low” and that “everything must go.” With a quick look around, I became enamored with all the rifles and shotguns lining the walls. Every gun I picked up felt better than the one preceding. Some of them were under one-hundred dollars, and I had only intended to buy one, but I figured the more the better. I bought two .22 caliber rifles, two .308s and two 10-guage shotguns. I would have bought a handgun or two as well, but the eager gentleman behind the counter told me I needed a permit to purchase a pistol. I figured I was better off not getting in too far over my head. I bought two plastic, smiley-faced, thank-you-labeled shopping bags full of ammunition and headed out the door. I loaded the trunk of my white, rusted-out Honda Civic elated with my purchase and eager to go shoot my new guns when I realized that I lacked targets and a location to practice.

I went back into the shop and asked the owner if he carried targets and where one might go to shoot guns. He informed me of a nice open rifle-range that he liked and pointed me to his hunting-camping accessories section for targets. I found large Styrofoam targets, plastic deer with crosshairs on their torso and every shape and size of paper target that one could imagine. I grabbed several packs of cheap, sweetly simple paper targets and browsed through the rest of the camping gear. I found a section with canned and freeze-dried rations ranging from simple trail-mix bars all the way to whole, canned chickens. The advertised shelf-life on the packages promised that one could buy said whole, canned chicken now and eat it at one’s leisure up to three years in the future. I decided that we all might be broke by wintertime and struggling just to keep the house heated, so I thought I would buy some emergency supplies as long as they were so inexpensive. Before I was finished I had the car filled: trunk, back seat, floors, passenger seat. I maxed out the three-grand-limit on my card and drove home.

I built some make-shift shelves in the basement to house our new cache of canned bacon, freeze-dried cottage cheese, five-thousand calorie ration bars, and everything else. I took my roommates with me to the shooting range that weekend, and we used over a thousand rounds. Everyone was impressed with my purchase and eager to assist. Before long we made several trips back to James’ Gun’s for cleaning supplies, more guns, more ammunition, more targets, more backup food, portable heaters and stoves and two six-man tents. It was like we had all caught camping fever or were just enamored with the feeling of firing guns and hoarding supplies. Soon we had all maxed out whatever credit we still had and began the slow grind of delivering food, stuffing envelopes, serving as temporary factory rats, pumping gas and crafting Big Mac sandwiches. Our spare time was spent gardening, planning our next trip to the range, scheduling chores and swapping horror stories of economic collapse from our urban experiences.

Over the next six months, everything got worse. More banks collapsed, more large industrial manufacturers failed, more people were laid off, and more houses were foreclosed. The open wound in capitalism’s chest was spraying like a fire hose, and everyday people became desperate. Riots broke out in large cities: L.A., Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Boston. People tried to take anything they could. The city police were ill-equipped to handle the mass vandalism and lawlessness in their streets because even their budgets had been hollowed out over the past year. The President declared martial law, but the Army and National Guard were busy and overextended abroad. Individual states were powerless to keep the hungry, angry, jobless masses at bay. The 24-hour news coverage only fanned the flames of dissent and desperation as mass crime and looting spread like quick cancer to the suburbs. Policemen, military personnel – they started to lay down the guns, go AWOL, and give up their fight against helpless neighbors. In a matter of weeks, the urban centers of the republic looked like Baghdad. Businesses boarded up, power was sporadic, and soccer-moms couldn’t get disposable diapers at Wal-Mart without fighting for their lives. The whole of docile, American society burned up with a powder-keg and blasted deep at the core of our government.

Journalists were still covering the chaos, and I heard that rioters had been lining trees with politicians in Lansing. The United Nations apparently sent some “peace-keeping” forces, but we never actually saw one wink of their effort. Every paper we got hold of was filled with almost farcical nonsense. People were beaming with brutality, and the centers of civilization burned. After only two months of riotous entropy, we read that the President was strangled in his sleep by the Secretary of Defense.

The rest came pretty easily. Government was crippled, people were just struggling to survive in the shells of their former lives, and we were prepared in our fortified husk. Our collective had grown to the size of a neighborhood since the riots started, and we were busy defending our perimeter. Those of us who weren’t building and fortifying the fences were busy cooking food, fixing small things around the houses, traveling out on armed supply missions and doing whatever we could to strengthen our chances of success. There were serious moments of doubt and strict water rationing, but the basements and attics of all our homes were filled with supplies. We had expanded from a group of student idealists to attract some serious Michigan survivalists, militia members, co-op hippies, and organized labor radicals.

These bright, passionate people saw something worthwhile in our little experiment and used their last dollars and credit to buy more homes on our model. We shared labor, supplies and ideas like a real community. Back in those days, I had a moment where I realized I had become more than the disconnected, faceless cog in a machine fueled by my wage-slavery. We decided early that each house would organize as a free-associating cooperative. Every time major decisions needed to be made, we all took a vote. Having watched the bickering, fruitless politics of debate among the U.S. Congress, I was surprised how easily we could all agree on things. When the riots spread and worsened, we voted and worked together to build a shanty barricade around us. We easily and equitably decided on a schedule for patrols of our border to watch for potential threats. The weapons were usually threat enough to keep out would-be looters, but we had a few uneventful scuffles with law enforcement and armed raiders.

Time passes, and we are all preoccupied with living now. We’ve learned to rely only on ourselves, and it feels unbelievable. There is a certain pride in knowing and seeing where my labor has benefitted our group. These have become people I care about more than myself, and I finally feel like part of a larger, human endeavor. I can work ten or twelve hours at my own pace without feeling worn and vacant. It’s as if our previous lifestyles drained our spirit, poisoned our livelihood and spit us out spent at the end of every day. We all seem to feel the same, and new members seem to experience the rush when the shock of madness from the collapse finally fades.

I’ve heard rumors of other people setting up similar sites across the country, even among their current communities. We planned a bit and built something special, foreign and suited to the purpose of surviving this collapse, but they are forging their own paths without forethought and making do. There are probably collections of people reconnecting to accomplish the simple task of survival all throughout the country. They are probably learning the same lessons we are and providing things the government or corporations monopolized to keep our leashes taut. We take care of our own infrastructure, utilities, food, clothing, medicine and education. I feel like I’ve learned a more worthwhile things in just one month of being here than in my entire pre-collapse life. I think the most important lesson we all learned was that the premise of government, bureaucracy, progress, modernization was false. We don’t need any of those formerly prized and pointless things to live well and find happiness.

They used to talk about providence like the law of gravity, like it was hot solder bonding the United States to economic success for eternity. They believed that there was a divine hand underneath this country propping it up paramount to others. They thought that some god’s coddling could save them from the inequities and inadequacies of their economic system. In the end, saving them was impossible.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the future. I have no clue what’s definitely happening as close as Indiana, but I’m sure that people are awake now. I’m sure they know the extent of their abandonment. Fear breeds chaos, and as such, some people are still rioting. In another place, they continue to plunder. They are busy clawing at each other’s throat for one last slice of providence while the rest of us build anew. When these people sleep, their fear must manifest in regret – regret that the American Dream, like the American God, is officially dead. We killed both with one lucky shot, and I have never been this eager for tomorrow.