So, as you may have heard, Atlanta is running out of water, and nobody really seems to know what will happen if the unthinkable occurs and drought persists for another two months. But it's not as if this is really a new thing.

It seems like somehow in the latter part of the 20th Century, we in the US lost track of the fact that we're actually quite small and powerless in the face of macro-scale events. Droughts and other disasters (some of them manmade) have always happened, and will happen again, but we've forgotten this. We seem to believe too deeply in our exceptionalism, that we're somehow exempt from history and the cruel twitches of fortune.

As Bukowski said, "The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed.". We have no feel for loss. We've constructed massive metropolises -- the fastest growing in the nation -- in the middle of deserts. There were dead cities in the same places when white people first got here. It's a failure of history and memory; hubris.

As Dick Cheney said, "The American way of life is not negotiable," and indeed it seems literally inconceivable to our leadership class that shit might not work out. I find this baffling and sad.

Politically I think this is part and parcel with the rise of post-modern conservatism. It's a particular blend of resource-intensive, non-scalable, non-sustainable infrastructure -- think exurbs, big lawns, etc -- coupled with a paradoxically anti-government philosophy (juiced with reactionary cultural backlash, of course).

It plays into the mythic trope of rugged individualism, but only really works as long as there's sufficient plenty to give people running water in the desert. When larger-than-individual-scale forces come into play, be it a drought, a hurricane or a terrorist attack, all of a sudden people recognize the vitality and necessity of collective action and shared responsibility.

This movement reached it's apex with the invasion of Iraq, I think; a massive and horrifically misguided collective (if not consensus) response to an individual-dwarfing event. We still don't really know why, for sure, that happened, but those two to three years have the feeling of a historical pivot. At the time it was disorienting and frightening, but the momentum is now clearly moving away from anti-government rhetoric and narratives of oppression at the hands of the state, and towards a realization that the problems we face and the choices we make are bigger than our immediate surroundings, and that ergo the solutions must be as well.

I do fear that in the transition period there will be more systemic failures as we discover just how frayed things have become. Bridges collapse. Levies fail. Pointless wars grind on because democracy itself is sputtering. A mini dust-bowl in the Southeast would be a tragedy. I also fear that should things continue without improvement that the momentum towards collective action will take on a fascistic tone.

Conversely, the great hope seems to be for a new-New Deal with a global scope. This would never be managed effectively (or justly) though a traditional federation of nation-states though. It would require actual cooperation among human beings from all around the world. In my wildest fantasies I think the internet could allow this, but it seems a long way off, and the next steps are unclear.

In the mean time, I hope we're able to rehabilitate the notion of governance and public service in this country, get ourselves that health care we all deserve, and shore up our social, economic and physical infrastructure so that we're better able to deal with the trials and tribulations to come.