The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.

The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped as the world's reserve currency, plunging the United States into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its military machine.

Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power," by "a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg" that will "forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire."

Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. "In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China's would triple and come close to surpassing America's in 2030," McCoy noted. China became the world's second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world's leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the world's manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World." It found that the U.S. military "no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors," and "it no longer can ... automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range." McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.

Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.

This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire-the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike-"shock and awe"-would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this "unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy."

Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of "micro-militarism." The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation's few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.

"While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power," McCoy writes. "Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way."

Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This mystique-a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation-seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America's high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.

The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military's penchant for widespread atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.

The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world's prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population. Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump's election-a reaction to the corporate coup d'etat and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country-have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human progress.

"The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines," McCoy writes. "Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit-witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium's rubber lust in the Congo, British India's opium commerce, the Third Reich's rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe."

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, "empires become brittle."

"So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq]," he writes.

Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.

"For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness," McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls "insubstantial issues" will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.

A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global dominance-wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites-will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the corporate state.
(c) 2017 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Keep up with Chris Hedges' latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris-hedges.

THIS IS the story: at 7 o'clock in the morning, an Arab approaches the gate of Har Adar, a settlement close to the Green Line near the Israeli-Arab village of Abu Ghosh.

The man is a "good Arab". A good Arab with a work permit in the settlement. He lives in the nearby West Bank Arab village of Beit Surik. He received a work permit there because he fits all the criteria - he is 37 years old, married and father of four children. The inhabitants of Har Adar know him well, because he has been cleaning their homes for years.

This Tuesday morning he arrived at the gate as usual. But something aroused suspicion among the guards. He was wearing a jacket, though the weather was quite hot on this early autumn day. The guards asked him to remove his jacket.

Instead, the man took out a loaded pistol and shot three of the guards in the head at close range - two civilian guards and a member of the semi-military Border Guards. Two of the victims were Arabs (one of them a Druze) and one was a Jew. Another Jew, the local commander of the guards, was severely wounded. Since the assailant had never received military training, the precision of his shots was astounding. The pistol had been stolen 15 years ago.

All Israel was shocked. How could this happen? A good Arab like this? An Arab with permits? Why would he do such a thing in a place where he was well liked and well treated? Where he played with the children? And that after he was thoroughly vetted by the Security Service, which has innumerable Arab spies and is considered well-nigh infallible?

Something extraordinary must have happened. Someone must have incited him against the Jews and the nice people of Har Adar, who had treated him so well. Perhaps the UN speech by Mahmoud Abbas. Or perhaps some secret contacts with Hamas. "Incitement!" cried Binyamin Netanyahu.

But then another fact emerged, which explained everything. The man had quarreled with his wife. He had beaten her up, and she had escaped to her family in Jordan, leaving the four children behind.

So, obviously, he had become temporarily unhinged. In a state of mental derangement he had forgotten the kindness of the Har Adar people. Just a unique case, that need not trouble us further.

But it all shows that you can't trust the Arabs. They are a bunch of murderers. You cannot make peace with them until they change completely. So we must keep the occupied territories.

THAT IS the story. But there is another story, too. The story as seen by the man himself.

From his home in neighboring Beit Surik, the man - whose name was, by the way, Nimr ("leopard") Mahmoud Ahmed al-Jamal - could see Har Adar from his home every day when he woke up. For him, as for every Arab, it was a flourishing Jewish settlement, built on expropriated Arab land. Like his own village, it belonged to the Palestinian West Bank which is occupied territory.

He had to get up in the darkness of the night in order to get to Har Adar on time - 7.00 o'clock in the morning - and work hard until late in the night, arriving home at about 10 o'clock. This is the lot of tens of thousands of Arab laborers. They may look friendly, especially when their livelihood depends on it. They may even be really friendly to benevolent masters. But deep in their hearts they cannot forget for a moment that they are cleaning the toilets of the Jews who came to Arab Palestine and occupied their homeland.

Since most of the agricultural land of their villages has been expropriated for Jewish settlements, they have no choice but to work in these low-status jobs. There is no industry to speak of in the West Bank. Wages are minimal, often below the legal minimum wage in Israel proper (some 1500 dollars per month). Since they have no choice, they are not far from being slaves. Like the nice slaves in "Gone with the Wind."

Such a man may be at peace with this reality, but if something bad happens, he may suddenly become upset with his status and decide to become a martyr. Nimr left behind a letter in which he defended his wife and absolved her from any responsibility for the deed he had planned for the next day.

SO THESE are the two stories, which have very little in common.

The people of Har Adar are completely shocked. Since they live 20 minutes drive from Jerusalem, they do not consider themselves settlers at all, but Israelis like any other. They don't really see the Arabs all around them as people like themselves, but as primitive natives.

The Har Adar people are not like the fanatical, religious and nearly fascist people in some settlements. Far from it. Har Adar people vote for all parties, including Meretz, the left-wing Zionist party which advocates the return of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. This is not seen as including Har Adar, of course, since there is a consensus among Zionists, right and left, that the settlements close to the Green Line should be annexed to Israel.

Har Adar people can rightly be proud of their achievements. From the air, the place looks very orderly. It has 3858 inhabitants. Their average income is about 5000 dollars a month, well over the national Israeli average (some 3000 dollars). Their local council is the third most efficient in the entire country.

Located in the mountainous area around Jerusalem, it has a beautiful landscape. It also has man-made amenities: a library, a youth club, a skate-park and an amphitheater that seats 720 people. Even for an average Israeli, this is paradise. For the Arabs around, who cannot enter without a special permit, it is a perpetual reminder of their national disaster.

Of course, like other settlements, Har Adar is not located on land that was empty. It occupies the location on which stood a village called Hirbat Nijam, a village which already stood there in Persian-Hellenistic times, some 2500 years ago. Like most Palestinian villages, they were Canaanite, then Judean, then Hellenist, then Byzantine, then Muslim, then crusader, then Mameluk, then Ottoman, then Palestinian - without the population ever changing. Until 1967.

WHEN NIMR was born, all this long history was long forgotten. What remained was the reality of the Israeli occupation.

This now looks like the normal state of things. The members of Har Adar are happy, feeling secure and well guarded by the efficient Security Service, the Border Guard and local mercenaries, mostly Arab citizens of Israel. Neighbors like Nimr seem content, and probably are, if they are lucky enough to have a job and a work permit, even with pitiful wages. The historical grudge lies deeply buried within their consciousness.

And then something happens, something that may be quite irrelevant - like the escape of his wife to Jordan - to bring it all up. Nimr the lowly laborer suddenly becomes Nimr the freedom-fighter, Nimr the martyr on his way to paradise. All his village respects his sacrifice and his family.

Israelis are furious that the families of "martyrs" are paid an allowance by the Palestinian Authority. Binyamin Netanyahu accuses Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) of incitement to murder with these payments. But it is quite impossible for Abbas to annul them - the outrage reaction of his people would be tremendous. Martyrs are holy, their families respected.

THE DAY after Nimr's dastardly terrorist act and/or heroic martyrdom, a grandiose national ceremony took place in another settlement.

All the country's major dignitaries, led by the President and the Prime Minister, assembled to commemorate the 50tth anniversary of "our return to our homeland, Judea and Samaria, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights".

Missing in the list is the Gaza Strip, which Israel has evacuated, leaving behind a tight land and sea blockade aided by Egypt. In the Strip there are about two million Palestinians. Who the hell wants them?

All hell broke loose when the President of the Supreme Court, who was supposed to send a judge to represent the court at this ceremony, canceled his attendance because of the highly propagandist style of the event. She decided that this is party propaganda, in which her court would not take part.

ALTOGETHER, NOT a day of quiet in this country, a state without borders and without a constitution, where every story has two totally different sides, where nice and quiet people suddenly become raging martyrs.

Humanity yearns for a just and livable social contract, and will fail as a species if a global accord is not soon achieved. The biosphere, itself, shrieks and shudders under the contradictions of capitalism in its fatal, imperial stages. At the center of the vortex of impending annihilation is the United States of America, the Mother of All White Settler Regimes, ruled by a tiny cabal of plutocrats under the protection of the planet's largest and most intrusive police state, who are determined to impose full spectrum dominance under an Earth-wide, doomsday canopy.

U.S. rulers reject the very concept of reciprocal social compacts among peoples. Positioned at the apex of a political order founded on indigenous extermination, African enslavement, and global European privilege and impunity, the Lords of Capital claim "exceptional"status -- an exemption from all rules and norms of human conduct. Having never renounced a first-strike, Washington reserves for itself the choice of whether humanity perishes in a nuclear holocaust, or not. In the interim, the U.S. ruling class demands "freedom" for its corporations to extract unlimited wealth from every corner of the globe.

U.S. foreign policy flows from the logic of its lawless, expansionist, white supremacist history. The U.S. was born as the world's first fully bourgeois republic, a transactional arrangement among rapacious white men who, in about a century, parlayed the stolen land of one continent, and the stolen people of another, into the world's largest economy. The U.S. perfected and became the model of a racially regulated society, elevating "whiteness" to permanent social advantage while, at the same time, providing these denationalized Europeans with no identify beyond their relative privileges, and no social contract other than the right to abuse Blacks and other "inferior races."

The absence of a genuine social compact among "Americans" meant that rich folks had no obligation to their fellows of any race. The U.S. promised only the "freedom" (for white men) to make and spend money as they wished. From the very beginning, "Americanism" was a grab-what-you-can ethos, inimical to the very notion of social solidarity -- except on racial terms.

Such an ethos always serves the master, while morally abandoning the slave or wage earner.

Hyper-capitalism, blended seamlessly with white supremacy, became the American religion - which is why "Prosperity Gospel" is virtually a U.S. invention, and has nothing to do with "brotherhood" or "community." The United States has the highest levels of professed religiosity in the industrialized world, yet is demonstrably the most underdeveloped in terms of popular support for the social safety net. The near-absolute cultural hegemony of the rich, through their control of the means of communication and education, allows the self-worshipping Lords of Capital to turn human language -- which evolved to explicate phenomena and ideas -- into its maddening opposite. The rulers describe the vast dislocations and suffering of deindustrialization and financial meltdown as "creative destruction" -- destructive of the livelihoods of those without capital, but engines of opportunity-creation for the big capitalists left standing. They specialize in Shock Doctrine to exploit disasters at home, inflict Shock and Awe to facilitate aggressions abroad, and celebrate the destruction of whole economies and nations. They gloat over new opportunities for investments and profits before the blood has dried.

Most Americans accept and internalize this barbaric discourse. Only the barest social contract binds them together, based mainly on race (for most American whites, the default meaning of "American" is "white"). The social bond with those U.S. residents that are not perceived as part of the "America"/white polity -- Blacks, browns, Native Americans -- is weak, non-existent, or negative/hostile. That's why there has always been a White Man's Party in the U.S., whose mass organizing principle is white supremacy: the Republican Party, for the last half century. A vote for the White Man's Party is a rejection of any semblance of a social compact with Black people -- and that also applies to Blacks that vote Republican. However, the Democrats are also careful not to become too closely identified with Blacks, even if their standard bearer is African American, as evidenced by Barack Obama's eight years in office.

Thus, after more than a hundred thousand Blacks were permanently evicted from New Orleans following Katrina, a Democratic cabinet member could see a silver lining in the disaster, based on the imposition of charter schools -- classic Shock Doctrine, resulting in near-instantaneous gentrification and school privatization. The ongoing torture of Black Detroit, initiated by a Republican governor but facilitated by Barack Obama's administration, does not violate the social compact as perceived by most white Americans; clearly, such a compact hardly exists. And President Trump's callous attitude towards his fellow citizens in Puerto Rico is totally expected; he and his constituency -- and plenty of white Democrats -- do not view the island and its people as part of their "America."

The carnage in Las Vegas is, however, yet another example of the uniquely American -- and characteristically white - propensity to engage in mass domestic murder: crowd killing. It is the ultimate anti-social crime, most often committed by white Americans against their "own" people. It is true that mental illness is a given in such cases, but mentally disturbed people live in all countries, yet no nation comes close to the U.S. in crowd killing. I submit that such mass slaughter is dramatic evidence of the extreme weakness of the social compact, even among white people in the United States.

Majorities of white Americans are deeply racist -- as can be shown by various measures -- but that does not mean they share an intense bond with other whites. In a society that has historically denied the humanity of people of color, killing and enslaving them, and which has waged modern wars of annihilation against non-whites around the world, solidarity with other human beings does not come naturally. In a country where cutthroat capitalism is the national ethos, social compacts wither, or are still-born. Such is the collateral damage that white America has suffered from its failure to fight white supremacy in its ranks; it has poisoned its own soul, creating monsters that turn on their "own." (Of course, when the social compact is totally lacking, nobody is one of your "own.")

White Americans also suffer much higher levels of incarceration than whites in other developed nations. That, too, is collateral damage. Mass Black incarceration was politically popular among white constituencies all across the nation. A police and penal state was created to imprison as many Black people as possible, but such an infernal machinery cannot help but ensnare millions of unintended white victims, as well.

A summer night in my backyard not so long ago, deep in the woods of New Hampshire, still hot though the sun had been gone for hours, the humidity like a thud all around and the cicadas bellowing at each other from the trees. I stared into the perfect darkness feeling every open pore, and then it started. First one, then five, then fifty, then every firefly that has ever existed was dancing in the long bramble of my backyard, each blinking its own time near and far in swirling astonishment, like a galaxy came down and threw a Grateful Dead concert for me alone. Part of me is still standing there, transfixed. Every night since, I look outside, but they never come back just that way. They were there, though. I saw.

After midnight at the bar on the night Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, a good crowd of well-lubed regulars trying to shake it off, and Mariah was telling stories to cheer everyone up. "My friend had to dog-sit for this family that was going on vacation for a week," she tells the leaned-in crowd, "this big old Lab. Second day of the job, she finds the dog dead in the den. Calls the parents, they could care less, ask her to get rid of it so the kids don't come home to it. She's calling vets, animal hospitals, pet stores, the city, nobody wants this big dead dog. She finally finds a place that'll take the damn thing, but it's like an hour bus ride away, so she loads the dog into this big wheeled suitcase and off she goes. Bag weighs a ton even with the wheels. Guy at the bus station helps her put the suitcase under the bus and asks what's in it. 'Stereo equipment,' she tells him. She gets off, he gets off with her, helps her unload the bag, then punches her square in the face and runs off with the suitcase. Problem solved."

Before dawn more than 20 Novembers ago, and my frozen toes were a few scant feet from the lip of the Grand Canyon. Kevin is out cold in the car, but I was too keyed up for sleep. Wrapped in a blanket that isn't half warm enough, I stared up at a legion of stars. Not even the full moon dimed them, and stampedes of shooting stars sliced the dark matter in their celestial haste. Far too soon, the distant edge of the canyon grew a thin blister of red, then orange, pink, purple, I heard a long indrawn breath and realized it was me, and the sun erupted to the sudden trill of birdsong from the sagebrush. The canyon was revealed in its glory, and I realized for the first time in my life that nothing so sacred and holy as those moments could ever fit inside a church. We were in San Francisco the next night, covered in road dust and smelling like Kerouac's tube socks, and that's just fine.

All of this happened before the ocean came. It hasn't for all of us yet, but it has wrought tragedy upon some, and for the rest of us, it is coming. Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria have left in their wake battered, fallen cities like Troy without its walls. Odds are better than good that you know someone who knows someone who has lost everything to the sea recently, who knows what salt tastes like in their bedroom, who can tell you all about the stench of the water when our pollution becomes weaponized by the merciless tide. Cholera has appeared in Puerto Rico. This is what happens when the ocean comes.

Everyone has their stories. They are what makes us human. Our stories make us who we are, keep us warm when These Are The Days becomes Those Were The Days. Our stories are our wisdom, our shared consciousness, our understanding of good and evil, our way of sharing pieces of our strange selves to make friends out of strangers, so we can make more stories.

The ocean is coming, and the most powerful among us don't seem to care. Those who rule the most selfish species ever to occupy the planet have us sitting like a fly on a pork rind, waiting to be swatted. They won't fight for any of us, for our children, our homes, our friends, our vegetable gardens, our professions, our pets, our artwork, our books, whatever -- let it all drown, particularly if it exists in a place that's already poor and under-resourced. The largest thing on the planet is battering down our door right now, right at this moment, and we can stop it if we act … but those who could take action on a massive scale, immediately, aren't acting, and then we get wet, and we either lose everything or we die, and the TV cameras take it all in for the dwindling few who haven't met the ocean yet.

One of these days, there is going to be a bright brutal line drawn right down the middle of our stories: before the ocean came, and after the ocean came. The stories from after the ocean came will be grim things, few and far between, just like us.