Are you waiting for a launch party to understand and start acting accordingly? ‘Collapse does not mean you’re personally dying right now. It means y’all are dying right now. Death is sometimes close, sometimes far away, but always there. I used to judge those herds of gazelle when the lion eats one of them alive and everyone keeps going — but no, humans are just the same. That’s the real meaning of herd immunity. We’re fundamentally immune to giving a shit.’

>"I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I…"

This is a solid piece. It is striking in both how it captures the mood of the US over the last several months and how similar some of the themes are to stories I have heard of Lebanon when the troubles first started up there several decades ago (people calmly drinking tea or talking about how things will all settle down even as the smoke rises from car bombs a block or two away). There will be no narrator booming aloud: "this is it; it is happening!" AND YET it has already happened and continues to happen.

What does it mean

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