As he matures, a man grows to accept that there are some things in life with which he’ll simply have to make his peace with, as there’s nothing he can really do to address these issues. Moreover, at a certain point he’ll realize that he’s going to fuckin’ die and something will eventually get him. Nobody escapes, but sometimes when you’re young the finality of the final outcome, which was never in doubt, just isn’t in your head.
It’s nice to be young, and of course, this is a relative term. Just like the size of a cargo ship is relative to the canals it was built to transit. At the end of a long day, I was sipping a glass of scotch and scrolling through the news when I watched the footage of the ship nail the bridge pile in Baltimore dead-on. “Poor bastards,” I shrugged to myself.
It looked to me like they were aiming for it, but there was some pretty serious DIE stuff going on with both the harbor and the pilots association. Remember how the WEF said there would be cyber-attacks a few years ago? Nonsensical fear mongering.
Why would anybody waste their time with a cyber attack when they could just sit back and watch the show? Some people like to think there’s always some Jack Ryan intrigue going on. The reality is a bit more simple.
I’m not a callous man but if I met my end this way, well fair enough, if someone scrolling on his phone shrugged me off as a poor bastard, too. You can only care about so much, and as the evidence of America’s collapse begins to mount and becomes ever more dramatic, this emotional self-management will be critical. Do you want to live your life in fear of a plane plunging out of the sky, or go about your business as best you can until that day comes?
Dying can be a rather slow and unpleasant process, while you probably wouldn’t even see the 737 plunging towards your head. There’s an upside to every situation, please keep that in mind. Personally, these dramatic incidents are more comforting than the receding rule of law. If you’re going to die suddenly, it’s much more likely to be from a stray round fired by a colored gentleman somewhere between the age of 5 and 40.
Cheer up though, your chance for a swift demise as a result of a wild accident that wouldn’t happen in a functional country are going up by the day. America still has all sorts of infrastructure to collapse on you and there’s still plenty of large machinery transiting our roads, skies, and waters to take you out.
As the human capital required to keep these things operating declines, this will have an inverse effect on the volume of fatalities. As a country, we can’t just stop operating all of this machinery, so we’ll have to tolerate more and more people perishing in accidents. It’s either that, or we go back to the Stone Age.
Perhaps they’ll be able to work out some sort of mathematical formula for how much we should expect and how often. In the very least, it probably wouldn’t be hard to correlate the increase in diversity at a particular company or industry and the increase in accidents.
Insurance companies can say whatever they want about diversity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re trying to get a grip on this sort of thing behind the scenes. This is just where we’re at as a nation, and I don’t expect anything better from America. Just be glad that there’s so much to potentially go wrong that it’ll always keep us on our feet until we’re under 6 of them.
Have a wonderful day.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
Seems I should have waited a couple more weeks for my “Competently Incompetent” article. The bridge collapse would have been a perfect example for it.
I love Shack’s articles. Witty, pertinent, insightful – and wrapped up in seemingly effortless writing.
“seemingly effortless writing”. Very well put, and I agree with all your points.