The Apocalypse is Here, and I'm at Peace

5 July, 2025

Yesterday I protested at the US Embassy in Berlin along with a few hundred other expats and locals. We protested the rise of fascism in the United States and the recent budget reconciliation bill which will kill millions of Americans directly and indirectly by taking away Medicaid which will force rural hospitals, nursing homes, and other vital healthcare facilities to close. The bill takes away SNAP benefits and will cause a new wave of entirely preventable malnutrition in children. And all for what? To give more tax breaks for the ultrawealthy and corporations.

The GOP is trying to hide the devastating economic damage this bill will have. They’re cutting all of these social services in order to create the illusion that this is “budget neutral.” But our CBO(Congressional Budget Office) estimates that this bill will add 3.9 TRILLION to our debt. This is no less than a bill designed to destroy our society. This bill is a nuclear bomb of policy. This is a bill which is so shockingly damaging that if it had been featured in a movie ten years ago people would have walked out of the theatre saying how unrealistic it was for any US government to pass a bill that would be so damaging to the nation. This is the kind of bill a puppet of Vladmir Putin would pass to intentionally destroy the country.

At the protest I was given the opportunity to speak and I shared my story of how thirty years prior I walked into a US Embassy in Beijing, China and was given permission to come to the US. Back then Chinese thought of America as a literal paradise. I remember having the impression that the streets of America were actually paved in gold. That’s the way Chinese talked about the USA in 1995. It was a place where everyone was wealthy and you had unlimited opportunity.

I was so excited to get on the plane to come over. My parents filled my head with stories of how amazing my life would be in America, I think partially to help shield me from the devastating impact of leaving everyone; family, friends, teachers, the old lady who used to greet me everyday on the steps leading up to our fifth floor apartment. The thing I was most excited for was to get my own bicycle. I’d learned to ride that year and had begged for a bike, but we couldn’t afford one. I would finally have my own bicycle in America.

My story is not unique. This is the story of many millions of immigrants who have made arduous and dangerous journeys to the promised land of the United States in order to have the opportunity at a better future. If anything “Made America Great” it was this promise of opportunity. America, despite all of its faults, truly was a place where your hard work paid off in tangible ways.

Hard work is not unique to Americans. Hardly. People work hard all around the world. Desperately so. In Thailand I would see the same street vendors day after day. They’d be out 10 hours a day, seven days a week, working under the sweltering tropical sun. Employees working in hotels and restaurants in Thailand are expected to work six days a week. And for all of this they can barely get by. For many of these people there is no hope of upward mobility. Only this grind for survival until they become old, infirm, and die.

The United States was unique in that it was a place where in one generation an immigrant with nothing but a willingness to work hard could build a good life for their family. A place where an immigrant with no education, no language skills, no capital could work hard and send their kids to school and provide a real opportunity for upward mobility to themselves and their children.

We have lost that dream. Now those same immigrants are being snatched from their jobs on the construction site, from their street stalls, from agricultural fields by masked men armed for war. Now our elected officials gloat and crow at the nation’s latest monumental achievement of public works, not a library, or a school, or a homeless shelter, but a 5,000 bed concentration camp officially named “Alligator Alcatraz”. FEMA will reimburse the state of Florida for building this concentration camp. It only took eight days. The same FEMA which has denied funds to Helene stricken North Carolina and other states struck by recent natural disasters.

The president of the United States laughs on camera about how immigrants will have to learn to run in zig-zags to avoid being eaten by the alligators. Republican lawmakers and voters alike celebrate the cruelty that will be inflicted upon the immigrants which they hate so fanatically.

‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost

“We have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems,” said David Suzuki in an exclusive interview with iPolitics. “For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down.” https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuki-says-the-fight-against-climate-change-is-lost/

As I write this at least 24 people have been killed and more than 20 children are missing from Kerr County, Texas. Flash floods swept through this region in the middle of the night. This is an eerie replay of what happened in the Appalachian mountains last September when Hurricane Helene caused unprecedented flooding in the middle of the night causing rivers to swell 20-25 feet above their banks and sweeping away entire communities. The official death toll of Helene is now over 250.

Even if we ignore politics, climate change is going to dramatically change the trajectory of our lives. It will end many lives and cause war, famine, disease, and continue to compound immigration issues as humans escape parts of the world that are quickly becoming unlivable.

All of this is, in my opinion, what is driving our current politics. The rise of far-right authoritarianism around the world and the anti-immigrant dehumanization campaign is directly tied to the global instability caused by climate change. I think it is clear to politicians and the wealthy elite that climate catastrophe will cause massive civil unrest and rather than implementing difficult and expensive policies to address and mitigate climate change and further strengthen social safety nets(which would require taxing the wealthy) they have instead chosen the easy solution of building police states to crush dissent and passing legislation like the BBB to further enrich themselves.

The Apocalypse is Here, and I’m at Peace

Weirdly I feel a profound sense of peace. I think it’s because I’ve known in my gut that this is where we’ve been heading for over a decade now. I graduated High School in 2005. Back then I was still very much excited about my future. My dream was to build a secure life, make a bunch of money, then travel the world and make documentaries.

By the time I graduated college my future plans were already muted. Even back then I was seeing that I would likely never make so much money as to escape the rat race entirely and that I’d have to take a different tactic. That was what lead me to start hiking. I could control my expenses much more easily than I could control my income.

And since about 2018 I simply have not been able to invest myself in “normal” society. I’ve known, in my gut, that collapse was coming. The divisive politics has made it clear since 2016 that the US is headed toward a civil war. The lack of real action toward combating climate change has made it clear that we’re going to blow past every dire warning and enter all of the catastrophic phases even earlier than scientists predicted.

I’ve felt out of sorts with “normal people.” It was difficult to discuss my ideas with others. I was too negative, too pessimistic, just needed to focus on the positive. But now, finally, I think mainstream is catching up to my gut intuitions.

This is the apocalypse, and I mean that in the original Greek meaning of apokálypsis. The great revelation. The unveiling. The pulling back of the curtains.

I am seeing now that there is a movement of mass unveiling. People are seeing our nation for what it has always been- an imperialistic and deeply racist and bigoted place where black, brown, and indigenous populations have been suppressed and marginalized. The US support of genocide in Gaza has woken up Gen Z to the imperialistic nature of the US war machine and the complicity of both sides of the political establishment in upholding the status quo in a way that I haven’t seen in previous generations.

Gen X and millennials never woke up in the same way during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In fact, we were so heavily propagandized that we still hold the Special Operators and whoever else fought in the “war on terror” in very high regard. Troops who have now written hundreds of books and recorded countless podcasts retelling their heroics in a war where they fought men with AKs while our forces were equipped with predator drones, 500lb JDAMs, night vision, armored vehicles, helicopters, and everything else that the most funded military in the world can buy.

ICE and DHS were created after 9/11 under Bush. Obama funded ICE. Police departments entered into 287(g) agreements under the Bush, Obama, and Trump admins. Trump 1.0 funded ICE. Biden funded ICE.

People are seeing clearly now. I am not one to say that both sides are the same. Democrats are objectively less destructive and less harmful than Republicans. But both sides work to maintain the status quo and to uphold the interests of the wealthy class. This is the great apokálypsis occurring now. The veil has been lifted. We see clearly.

And that’s why I’m at peace.

Let Go of Clinging

There is no future where we are safe and comfortable. Climate catastrophe is coming. Social unrest and political instability is here, and it will only grow worse.

To cling to a future where we can all just retire in peace and live happy little lives with our white picket fences in a peaceful and harmonious society is to cling to a future which does not exist. We must see reality for reality.

The mental anguish of what is happening now comes not from what is happening, but from our resistance to it. No amount of clinging to a future that we want will make it so.

Let me be clear - this does not mean that we give up. Or that we stop fighting. But we must fight and operate with clarity and non-attachment. That is the only way which we can be effective. I think of this scene from Band of Brothers.

“We’re all scared. You hid in that ditch because you think there’s still hope. But Blythe, the only hope that you have is to accept that we’re all already dead. And as soon as you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function. All war depends on it.”

We are at war. We have been in a war. The rich and powerful have been waging a class war on the rest of us since the invention of capitalism. Their greatest tool of control is our fear. Our clinging to the promise of a good life. The clinging to the promise of a comfortable retirement. Their greatest tool of control is our fear that if we don’t fall in line and comply then we will lose the comforts of this life. Well I am here to tell you that this comfortable life is already lost. That the path we are on is inevitably leading to upheaval and unrest and the sooner you can accept this, the sooner you can function as a soldier is supposed to function. We are in a war for our climate, for our democracy, for our very right to exist.

Salvos have already been fired by the enemy. We have been blinded by our fears and our willful ignorance. We thought that if we just kept our heads down and stayed in our lane that we would be okay, even if people in the Middle East and Africa and South and Central America and Asia suffered the consequences of imperialism and climate collapse, WE special few in the West would be spared. And we could live our happy comfortable lives and retire with our 401ks behind our white picket fence and be spared the discomfort of watching the world burn.

I am at peace because I have finally rid myself of this delusion. I have accepted that my future will be fraught and perilous and uncomfortable, dangerous, and most likely deadly. I have made peace with this reality and now I will be an effective soldier in this fight for human rights, in this fight for freedom and liberty and the fight to save our planet from the destruction of man.

I urge each of you to let go of your clinging to how you thought your life was going to turn out. See reality clearly. Find peace. And then become an effective soldier in this war against dehumanization, against climate catastrophe, against the ultra wealthy who want to enslave the useful and dispose of the “undesirables.”