We're Already At War

Welcome to the Reality War: a Civil War and a World War all-in-one.

When I close my eyes and I go to sleep, it’s down to the sound of full-on World War III. Image: Dall-E-3

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I’m sipping my scalding-hot morning coffee, trying to catch up on world news as much as my tired and aching body will allow, and I stop in mid-sip.

Yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that stopping aid to Ukraine could result in “dragging the United States and all of Europe into World War III.” This is a shocking statement, and yet, when I search my body for feelings of shock, I don’t find them.

What I find instead is vindication, and maybe a sense of relief. Not that the prediction pleases me, far from it, but a bone-deep “thank god someone else is finally saying it!”

My internal alarms have been shrieking nonstop, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m betting there are tens of millions of Americans like me; perhaps hundreds of millions of people around the globe whose sense and pattern-matching and intuition have been screaming a simple, terrifying truth for months.

We are at war.

Right now, as I’m writing this. It’s happening all around us, like a slow-motion car crash black hole nightmare we’re being dragged into.

For my fellow GenX Americans, this is our Day After, only it’s today, now. This is the howling void we grew up with, lurking in our futures, our dreaded mushroom cloud. War isn’t just nukes, now. War is disinformation, lies, and bending reality. We thought that perhaps we’d escaped the war of our childhood nightmares, and outlived it. Outsmarted it. Except we didn’t. Our stress, our exhaustion. Our never-good-enough, often overlooked insights. Our 3am sweat-soaked night terrors?

As Madge would say, “We’re soaking in it!”

Because this is two, two, two wars in one! We’re at the beginning of World War III and the Second Civil War.

The US election was a major battle, but because we didn’t know we were fighting a Reality War, we lost. Billionaires and oligarchs and power-mad tyrants won, and to the victor goes the right to spoil everything. They’re shredding the Constitution right before our eyes. Every day brings a new desecration.

Benjamin Franklin told us that the United States was “a republic, if [we] can keep it.”

We did not.

We lost the Republic. It’s being destroyed live on cable news right now.

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I’m watching MSNBC with my 83-year-old mother. I lived in the queer safety net of West Coast cities (Seattle & LA) for 30 years, but I’ve only recently moved back to Indiana to be close to family as my mom ages. We’re at her house; she’s recovering from a planned hip replacement surgery, doing fine, physically.

Emotionally, she’s distraught. We’re talking about politics because, in my family, we’re always talking about politics.

The hosts are discussing Elon Musk and his crew of junior felons mucking around with government information systems, and I’m yelling about what an incredible breach this is. (Okay, we yell about politics in my family, even though we’re all on the same side. I joke that we’re the last liberals in Indiana.)

Wide-eyed, she asks, “How big a concern is this?”

She’s dependent on Social Security. I know what she’s worried about.

“Mom,” I sigh, “If this happened in a big corporation it would be an existential threat. They’d have to shut things down and audit every line of code, and maybe replace every server. Heck, they’d have to rebuild everything from scratch in a new, secure information environment. In a way, we can never recover from this. We have no idea what they stole, and what they left behind!”

Her eyes get wider. “So this is something like treason?”

“Mom, it IS treason. It’s the biggest act of treason we’ve ever seen. Benedict Arnold, be damned. It’s more than that. It’s a coup. It’s an act of war. We are at war, and most of us don’t even know it.”

She blows out a breath and sits back in her rocker, nodding slowly.

“I always worried it was going to come to this.”

…

We are at war, and right now we’re watching a generation of failed leaders incapable of standing up to our nascent dystopian future. None of the people in Congress seem capable of calling a spade a spade right now, and we’ve never needed that courage and clear-eyed sensibility more.

This is not politics as usual. That’s over now, probably for a long, long time.

For the last nine years, we’ve seen the political conversation slide from disagreement into a gun-slinging information war. Facts are no longer facts. Science isn’t respected. Data is ignored or faked. The basis of our shared reality has been sundered. The folks at MSNBC talk about “Earth 1” and “Earth 2” to describe how we are fighting over the very boundaries of our once-agreed-upon reality.

There may be a plurality of people in this nation who think that nothing is wrong, that everything is fine. You and I know at a cellular level that this is not true.

Two weeks into Donald Trump’s second administration and already we have several full-blown constitutional crises at hand, on top of things that are — how do I put this? — just horrifyingly unprecedented depredations of people and policy.

The administration temporarily halted federal payments to ensure compliance with Trump’s (possibly illegal) directives, disrupting essential services. By single-handedly trying to freeze payments on grants and other crucial government programs, he has exceeded the role of the Executive branch by… infinity. By infinity plus one. This isn’t the role of the President, at all.

The Executive doesn’t have final power over money in our government. Congress does. That’s why the Framers made the Legislative branch Article I in the Constitution, and specifically defined its role.

President Trump, through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk, effectively shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Here’s the thing: USAID was created by Congress via the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Congress controls the budget and allocates funding for agencies like USAID. If the president shuts it down without congressional approval, it challenges Congress’s power of the purse defined in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution.

This is the definition of a Constitutional Crisis.

On February 4th, in a press conference fully dislocated from reality, Trump suggested that the US would “take over” Gaza, and noted that it could be rebuilt as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” This massive foreign policy shift was not done in consultation with the State Department or the Defense Department. It would be fair to say this is a demented and unchecked foreign policy, unlike anything else in presidential history — except for his proposal to buy Greeland, to take over Canada and make it the 51st state, and to take back the Panama Canal and… you get where I’m going.

These aren’t jokes. The fact that they’re all constitutional crisis-level events does not make them less serious, or less worthy of being addressed.

All of these issues happening at once is meant to overwhelm, but it cannot–it should not. This is a DEFCON 1 emergency, and the call is coming from inside our own house.

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We GenXers grew up with the looming threat of the Cold War. Two implacable powers, set against each other, capable of wiping each other out in mutually assured destruction. The short sampling above of massive Executive overreach has set the Presidency against the people, but Trump hasn’t stopped there.

Dozens of additional issues boggle the mind with their depth of callous cruelty, greed, and questionable judgment. The list goes on and on: targeting trans people and kids, the sudden ICE raids everywhere, the ridiculous tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and the steady enactment of everything in Project 2025.

These things would have destroyed any other presidency. They would have nuked any Democrat. The oligarchs, corporate media, Republican cravenness, and our feckless “opposition” have thrown the country into a Cold Civil War — a state of politics that can no longer be resolved through compromise and negotiation.

Sane journalists are beginning to acknowledge out loud that there is no going back. And it’s only been two weeks.

Will it take massive protests? Work stoppages? Sit-ins and slowdowns? Or worse — will it be bullets, and bombs, and anarchy? The loss of the United States of America as any kind of example or center of power in the world, dead by our own hands?

We are at war. Whether we like it or not, the rest of our lives will not look the same. The future will not look like the past decades of relative stability.

The American Cold Civil War is here. Zelenszkyy thinks that World War III is around the corner if Ukraine can’t receive more aid to fight off illegal Russian aggression. The Reality War is live on TV every minute of the day.

What a time to be alive.

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So, what happens next?

I think everything we’ve read in dystopian fiction is going to come to pass. From George Orwell to Margaret Atwood to Octavia Butler, these next two decades are going to be the worst parts of authoritarian fascism wrapped up with unexpected horrific technological and biological surprises.

Imagine Orwell with Chinese hypersonic weapons. Or Atwood with corporate social media like Meta and Twitter watching over our every move. Or maybe Butler being right about just about everything.

I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not. That’s why I’m writing. Not because I have all the answers. I have some thoughts on how we need to organize, plan, and stockpile, yes, and I plan to write those as well. But for today, as we sit shell-shocked and stunned at the pace and depth of the depraved actions to date from this administration, I just want to call it: this is war.

We are at war with reality. And we are at war with the Reality that Trump and his cronies are trying to create, to force it upon the rest of us, to replace what came before.

That’s why we feel so shell-shocked and stunned and scared.

It’s not just you. It’s not just me and my elderly mother.

Facing the truth is the first step toward fighting it.

Know you’re not alone. More of us are out here, and we can connect, and weep for our lost future. And after a moment of that, we can plan. We can organize. We can face the Truth.

But let’s face it — as GenXers, most of us knew this day was coming. We always knew we were late bloomers and that somehow we’d get called on to clean up the biggest mess in the history of the world, fighting off the new dark ages.

Let us be the light in the darkness together.