If you start in a Texas city and zoom out, you can see how particularly hard the recession has hit the Rio Grande Valley. @mvenk82 did a great job documenting how that plays out in people's lives. https://t.co/yUSnjxYLsH https://t.co/HUSoayLl37— Brandon Formby 📝 (@brandonformby) August 5, 2020
People are supposed to run wild in the streets and anarchy is supposed to overwhelm us all.
I checked the map at the end of that article. It picks up where you are, and shows you by unemployment rate in that area. My neighborhood shows up at 12%, which is pretty damned high.
In parts of El "A" it's over 25%; in parts of Chicago, it's over 30%. That's a calamity on the order of the flooding of New Orleans by Katrina, because like New Orleans, people have no jobs, no hope, and are struggling just to get food.
And yet nobody is looting, nobody is rioting (except against the police and the federal government, and isn't it an irony that the state founded on white supremacy is now seeing people fight the cops in a two block area?), there is no wholesale collapse of civilization. We go about our business, we do our best. Nobody is trying to break into my house to get what I have that they don't anymore.
Maybe this whole picture of societal collapse and the dangers of anarchy that the movies and video games have sold us over the decades is....overblown? Is that possible?
Because goddamn....it is BAD out there.
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