First things first. It’s sad to think about it but the Soviet Union of my childhood has officially arrived in my adopted homeland. It’s here. One can point fingers at China or Russia but the budding totalitarian order is right here, all around us.

The other day, I saw two middle-aged women angrily bicker with each other on the overcrowded train because one woman felt like the other one shouldn’t have tried to get on. And that, I reassure you, is the very essence of the Soviet Union—angry citizens bickering with each other on the overcrowded trains and buses.

Are we just waiting now for the stuff to gradually disappear from the shelves, for the lines to get longer, and for the people to get angrier and lazier? Time will tell.

On my end, I am taking it day by day, enjoying every drop of life, and praying that the habit of entitled consumerism, out of all things, will prevent America from turning into a full-on Soviet Union. I think that the habit of consumerism and the guns are the only things that are currently stopping the totalitarians. But they, the state and corporate totalitarians, ain’t fools, and they are dutifully training the kids to look down on their parents, to blame their parents for Greta’s climate emergency (not the BlackRock investors but their parents), and to think that in the new, equitable society they would be in the driver’s seat (what a disappointment it will be for the kids of today to learn that their role in the new “equitable” society is of disposables).