Endless Thread - Things Are Bad

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

With increasing political divide and heightened civil unrest in the United States, many fear that it will culminate in a second civil war. We explore the likelihood of that scenario and hear from someone who thinks America is already in the midst of collapse.

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What is up as I try to look for the little sparkly moments of joy in this time of darkness? Oh, man, me too. We need them. Boy, do I have a sparkle of joy right now? Are you ready? Please bring it on. Cover me in sparkles. You know my favorite thing to talk about with history guests, right? Do you remember this? How you're like a medieval history nerd?

Mm-hmm. Well, I hit the jackpot. I found a perfect example of my kind of person on Reddit. All right, and I am now recording on voice recorder. Is this your long-lost twin brother? This is Anarchy Squid, and I love him. And you will understand why in a second. My name is Nick. I'm 33. I currently live in a small town in southern Illinois. And I have a history degree from San Jose State.

And some of my interests include, obviously, history, of course. I'm a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is a medieval recreation group. Oh, of course. He is your long-lost brother. That's the club that you were a part of, right? Yeah. It's a special day. You found him.

My membership is technically expired, but Amory, as Nick says, it's always nice to meet a fellow skadian. That's what I always say, too. Do you want me to rein it in? Never. Okay, good, because technically my live action role-playing character did not own a horse, so I couldn't rain it in? Oh, God. You were just letting that medieval freak flag fly. I really am, but this is going somewhere.

Okay. I'm pretty active on the history part of Reddit, especially with groups like history, what-if, and of course, future what-if. So one of the big what-ifs on Reddit right now is not the sparkle of joy part, the medieval recreation stuff. It's more related to what a lot of people feel is this time of darkness. The question of what if we are having. headed for civil war. I asked Nick if he would say for sure whether this was a big topic on Reddit right now. Absolutely 100%. I would say there's definitely a lot more uncertainty. There's a lot of people asking questions that break down to if this happens, what might it

be like and how might this start? A lot of this discussion is happening in the history-focused Reddit communities. So on a post in future what-if asking just these kinds of questions, Nick recently gave his own answers. Scenario 1. The streets of every major city are clogged with protests. A liberal government passes a law or makes some change. An election happens. The left wins and the right claims it was stolen from them.

Nick's scenarios were pretty detailed and thought out, and they generated a lot of discussion. People seem legitimately worried about this idea that our country is so thoroughly divided right now, so messed up, that a civil war might break out. And people aren't just worried on Reddit. Earlier this month, one of WBUR's reporters, Quincy Walters, was covering a caravan of Trump supporters, traveling from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. All aboard. Easily over 100 cars are at the service plaza on Route 128. There are big Trump.

Quincy met a woman at that service plaza named Catherine Johnson, who was not thrilled to have stumbled upon this Trump train. I think I'm scared about what it implies. because if he is able to rally his supporters like this, with everything he is talking about, the fraudulent election, the coronavirus, the racial unrest, I feel like we're a tweet away from Civil War. I really do. A tweet away.

The WBUR and NPR program Here and Now followed up with her after hearing Quincy's story, and Catherine told them she's acted on this uneasiness. I bought plywood to board up my windows. I have all my important documents in a safety deposit box. I have weeks worth of supplies like I was going to be in a hurricane because I literally don't know what the United States is going to look like after November 3rd. I have never been so scared in my entire life. So the fear is real. And according to some recent events in the news, it might be warranted. Believe it or not, we were working on this episode before this happened.

We begin with stunning allegations about a plot to overthrow the state government in Michigan to kidnap the governor, attack the police, and attempt to ignite a civil war in the U.S. Domestic terrorist plots that are stopped are, well, just plots that are stopped. But should Americans actually be worried about a civil war? And another question is, can we even conceptualize what this kind of collapse could look like in the U.S.? If you're trying to carry on while people around you die, your society

is not collapsing. It's already fallen down. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson. And you're listening to Endless Dread. Endless Threads October series of scary stories about our fears, both real and imagined, all found in the vast ecosystem of online communities

called Reddit. Today's episode, things are bad. The Civil War, the One we know about from history class happened 160 years ago. So a very different time in many ways, but maybe not all the ways. They had two different worldviews. They consumed different media and everything like that.

So when you're talking to two different people about the same issue, they would have completely two different information streams coming at them about it. This is another Redditor. His name is Steve. He's actually talking about the north and the south in the lead up to the Civil War. Steve's username on Reddit, secession is illegal.

Steve is a self-taught civil war expert, and he was actually kind of a late bloomer to the topic. For me, it really came about during the Bush years. The George W. Bush years, that is. You know, the first

election I voted in was the 2000 election, and there had always been some partisan divide, but after that it just seemed to me to just go to a completely different level. Through all of that, I kind of got interested in what happened during the Civil War and, you know, it kind of gave me perspective of what kind of can happen when, you know, there is such a cultural divide on political issues.

The cultural divide leading up to the Civil War was on full display in two of the main newspapers at the time, the New York Tribune and the New York Herald. In the Tribune, they were constantly railing about what they called the slave power. And it was time to put it to an end because the majority in the United States was anti-slavery at that point. Whereas the Herald was saying that if the Republicans get elected, then it's going to give the South the excuse that they need to leave and that they probably should if that's what they want to do. And we shouldn't stop them from doing that. slavery just in general was so much a part of the southern identity, and it was so antithetical to what the North believed by 1860 that they couldn't really understand each other

anymore. The issues of today are different, but the tension and the inability to see each other's points of view isn't. So how do we know if things are going to escalate? In the late 1850s, and even in 1860 after Lincoln was elected, Did people actually think that the country was going to go to war? There was a lot of confusion, I would say. Even at the time that the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter,

there were people in the media, at least, who were saying that, you know, this isn't going to amount to much. There's going to be maybe a couple battles, and then it's going to be over. So I think that, yeah, there was a lot of people who didn't really recognize that it was happening until it really started to happen, until that summer when there were,

a summer of 1861, when there were, you know, considerable battles. This is a scary realization that if we are on the path to another civil war, it won't necessarily be obvious that's where we're headed. In fact, we might not even know until it's already here. And yet, it seems almost impossible for someone here to imagine what a modern civil war would look like or feel like.

That is not true of Indy. He's a writer who does not live in the U.S. My name's Indy Samarjiva. I live in Columbus, Sri Lanka, and I'm a writer. Indy wrote something on Medium recently that went pretty viral, on Medium and on Reddit. The headline is, I lived through collapse. America is already there. It's a bracingly direct and clear piece of writing,

and it's intended for a specific audience. I mean, you're reading this. You have the leisure to ponder American collapse like it's even a question. The people really experiencing it already know. If you're waiting for a moment where you're like, this is it, I'm telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says things are officially bad. There's no launch party for decay. It's just a pile up of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings

and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol. Perhaps you're waiting for some moment when the adrenaline kicks in, and you're fighting the virus or fascism all the time. But it's not like that. Life is not a movie. Collapses just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit. Most of it happening to someone else. That's all it is.

Indy's view of what's happening in America is heavily informed by his own experience, as a Sri Lankan who returned after living for years in Canada and the U.S. while his parents both worked on their PhDs. After finishing college in Canada, he felt the pull of home. And what made you want to go back? I thought it was a land of opportunity. Like, I had some sense that, like,

sort of the future would be, you know, in Asia or not in the West. And there was a ceasefire at the time, so I thought that would hold. But obviously it didn't. And then I was just, like, in the middle of war for, like, 10 years, which was not kind of what I planned on. But the thing is, like, once you come here,

like, ever since I came here, I could, like, never afford a plane ticket out again. You sort of end up here. Indy's been in Sri Lanka ever since. I live through the end of a civil war. I moved back to Sri Lanka in my 20s, just as the sea's fire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work. I went out. I dated. This is what Americans don't understand. They're waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That's not how it happens. This is how it happens. Precisely what you're feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news, the ever-rising outrageous.

People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you while you think about dinner. If you're trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It's already fallen down. Indy was recently looking through old photos on his phone from his first years back, and as he scrolled through, he was shocked. There's a burnt body in front of my office, then I'm playing scrabble with friends. There's bomb smoke rising in front of. of the mall. Then I'm at a concert. There's a long line for gas. Then I'm on a nightclub.

This is all within two weeks. Today I'm like, did we live like this? But we did. If you've ever looked at a map of Sri Lanka, it kind of looks like a giant tear drop. In between the years of 1983 in 2009, the top of it and the edges of the top were part of a kind of dualistic struggle between two groups that really runs throughout the country. The minority, the Tamils, and the majority, the Sinhalese, factions of which have been in violent conflict over the years. If you want to think of it like a sports team, the Singhalese used like a lion and the Tamil tigers use a tiger,

neither of which lives in Sri Lanka. We should say that Indy isn't a historian, and he wanted to make that very clear. After all, much of his early life was spent outside the country, but he's also thought and written a lot about what's happened there between these two main groups. Our populations are mixed, but also kind of not, because the Tamils, a lot of them live traditionally in the north and east. And under the British, the Tamils were a big part of the civil service.

They had a lot of the government jobs, a lot of places in universities. After independence, a lot of people from the single side ran on essentially racist platforms saying, hey, we're going to get this all back. And a lot of Tamil young people found themselves locked out of government jobs, locked out of universities. The majority Sinhalese put in policies like language requirements to get government jobs. Those policies made it harder to get into college if you were a member of the minority. Indy, who is Sinhalese, says that a lot of young Tamil people had a much harder time entering Sri Lankan society and its post-independence economy. There was a bunch of young people, you know, they would have been going to university, they would have been working for the government.

And all of a sudden, they're like sitting around at their parents' house. And then these guys, like, rather than starting a startup, I guess the thing to do back in the day was to do, join like an armed insurrection. Eventually, in the summer of 1983, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, a militant Tamil group, attacks and kills a group of soldiers from the Sinhalese army. And in the city of Colombo, a number of Sinhalese people have a huge reaction. And that triggered these horrific riots, which I was one year old at the time. But my wife's mother remembers this because they were driving home from the airport and Colombo was just burning. And there were people being burnt and killed in the street,

and my wife's family was Tamil, so they barely, like, got home. I mean, I think where we lived, like, a young man was burned to death just down the road. This violence would lead to a quarter century of civil war in the South Asian country. So my whole life, there was just a lot of war. I think Americans experienced maybe, like, essentially one terrorist attack, one major one, but we had stuff like every month, and they were pretty epic. So the suicide vest, the whole process going up to it, that was invented in Sri Lanka. That's, I guess, our greatest export, which we don't get enough credit for.

Indy's being flipped here. But he says that's what happened to a lot of people in his parents' generation on both sides. People who might have become entrepreneurs, inventors, executives. They applied their natural skills to the conflict instead. War permeated the culture in the country even as people tried to continue with daily life. It's weird because, like, you just get used to it. I think it's like, you know, if you break your, this is an analogy which I'm not using to elide the human parts of it, but you know when you like break your iPhone and then you're like still using it,

even if it's like scratching your face and you can like barely see. And sometimes your country gets like that, right? Like it's just like cracked. Like the whole screen is cracked. But you can still sort of make a phone call on it. So you just keep going. How do you think what happened in Sri Lanka during the Civil War there is comparable to what's happening? in the U.S. right now?

I would, look, I would say the one common thing is just death. So whether you die, you know, getting hit by a bus or like a terrorist bomb or, you know, through COVID-19, death is like what I think unites us all. So America's not obviously going through a civil war right now. But you've lost more people than we lost in 30 years of war. And that's like some level of trauma that I don't feel like you're as a country

facing, really. Not that we ever superfaced it either. So I think that's what's in common. The causes are very different. But I feel like the human experience can be very much the same. It's a feeling of waking up, feeling like things are wrong, and feeling like they're never going to get better. Like, I never thought the war would end.

Like, I just always thought it would be like that. So I think that feeling is common. And I think what Americans are feeling are honestly, like what the rest of the world has been feeling for a long time. Like, you guys just had like a really good run of luck where, like, you were bombing the hell out of everybody else and just sitting at home watching Netflix. You know, so like welcome to the rest of the world.

Indy really wants us to avoid operating this way, ignoring something that's cracked and breaking, but still kind of working for some of us. What's happening politically in this country and our response to the pandemic are together making him worried that all this bad news is going to make us complacent. A thousand families are grieving tonight.

A thousand more join them every day. The pain doesn't go away. It just becomes a furniture of bones in a thousand thousand homes. But that's exactly how collapse feels. This is how I felt. This is how millions of people have felt, including many immigrants in your midst.

We're trying to tell you, as loud as we can, you can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around. This, I fear, is one of the many things Americans do not understand. You tell yourself American collapse is impossible. Meanwhile, look around.

If this isn't collapse, then the word has no meaning. More in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. The civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009 officially, with militant Tamil groups like the LTTE admitting defeat. An estimated 100,000 civilians and 50,000 fighters died in the conflict. The economic cost of the civil war in this relatively small country is about $200 billion. Indy says that the Sinhal, the military kind of runs things now.

I would say I would call it not peace, but the absence of war. Like, it's stable. And there's no violence. And the state is, like, functional, so people are able to, like, go about their lives. After living through the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War, Indy created a restaurant review app called Yamu. And he later sold it to the country's version of Uber Eats. He was right that his country was eventually a land of opportunity.

He now writes full-time on Medium. And that has given him a chance. to process the impact the Sri Lankan Civil War has had on his own family. My grandparents started the conflict, essentially. My parents, like, really fought it, that generation. My generation experienced the end of it. And it's only, like, my children who grow up, like, without remembering that at all. So you're talking, like, four generations before that sort of trauma can, like, clear a society.

You wrote a follow-up to this piece, and you said in that that you were writing it, for our children, not so much for us, but for our children. Can you say more about that? So when I wrote the first piece, some people wrote to me saying, like, what do we do? Or, like, how do we get out of this? And to be honest, like, it's a crazy question asked me. Like, I don't know. But what I think they may be misunderstood was that, like, if in any way Sri Lankan

collapse is an analogy to an American one, you are just at the beginning of it. Like, I experienced the end of it. So you would be where my parents were when the collapse started. not where I was. I was a baby. And that's kind of hard for some people to understand because they want this to be fixed like next year. Like they want to vote next month

and have it all go away. And I hope it happens that way, but I don't see that happening anywhere else in the world. Indy spent a lot of time thinking about why so many people didn't pick up on the time scale of collapse he was talking about in his piece, which spans generations. Does it have to take generations to fix this?

I think like Americans always feel like there's like some, like maybe it's from the movies or something. You can always like get like a group of teenagers and they learn the lesson of teamwork. Never say that. Goonies never say die. And then they like push one button and then like all the bad guys die.

Like there isn't just like one solution or like one like bomb you can drop on everything that it goes away. So I think it's not like, oh okay, 200,000 people died. What about the economy? Like that's not how like, So how do humans work?

Especially when we want to overcome something like this. Indy would say one way is literally just acknowledging what is happening in real time. For me, the news story that I want to see on the New York Times every day is like America is fucked. They should just publish that. Like there isn't that like realization that, oh, things are bad. People are like, oh, it's getting bad, it's getting bad, it's getting bad. But at what point do you, like, say that, hey, it's bad. Step one, admit that you have a problem.

Step two, might be trying to avoid being completely overwhelmed by what you're seeing to the point that you do nothing and say nothing. Go do stuff. Say stuff. I was always writing about, like, how, hey, this is messed up. And we were always, yeah, we were also always protesting. But in the midst of it all, we also have to take care of ourselves. Indy says that we're dealing with generational trauma and that healing. can happen in small ways.

As a child, I grew up with this, and I don't remember the news. Like, if you're an adult, the news is, like, all-consuming. But as a child, I remember zero about the news. But I do remember, like, what my parents did and, like, what my grandparents did. And, like, those are the examples I, like, tried to carry with me. So I do think, like, it seems, like, minor and it seems pointless. But I think if we're, like, nice to each other and, like, nice to our children and, like, try to, like, speak out when something is bad.

it obviously doesn't stop the bad things from happening immediately because we're so small. But it does, like, children watch a lot of things that you don't realize. And, like, young people see what you do. So even these, like, small, pointless things that you do can, like, make a big difference in the next generation. This is something our history student and Redditor Nick has been thinking about a lot recently. The ongoing debate about whether politics drives larger cultural change or if it's the other way around. This debate is heated, and it's used on all sides to make pretty different arguments. But Nick falls in one particular camp, and he's got two points to make.

One point connects to Indy's notion that we can raise our children to build a better society. Because politics is downwind of culture. Anything that happens in politics is affected and plays in the larger battleground of what is happening in culture at large. And by and large, the values of progressivism are a lot are prevalent among the youth, among Gen Z, which is the most liberal generation in American history, according to some studies. And the culture is changing. And nothing that happens politically will really change that. And the second thing is that, as I said, the age of large state-on-state battles aren't really what's being fought anymore. Instead, what you see happening are fights over political France.

about who has the ability to vote, who doesn't, and what power voting gives people. Nick says that if some form of civil war does happen in the U.S., it won't be a big drawn-out army versus army war. It'll be on a smaller scale and involve access to voting. Quite honestly, big revolutions are bad for business, they're bad for people, they're bad for everyone involved, but what I could see happening is something more like the Irish Troubles or the Italian years of lead where you saw a terrorist action on both sides from left and right. I think that you could see elections, especially becoming flashpoints where violence ramps up

before and after each election as each side tries to seize the power of the presidency and of Congress and are willing to use extra legal means to do this if need be. Doesn't that freak you out? Yes. And to put a personal touch on all of this, my wife is an immigration. from Mexico. So I worry that if tensions get too high, that it will be people who are different, who are minority groups, who will be hit hardest by whatever violence or disaster or change happens because they stick out. This, of course, matches Indy's family story and is experience in Sri Lanka. The further apart different groups were in identity, the more violence ensued. Maybe that's

an obvious statement, that strife comes from a number of stresses that bring differences in identity into sharper relief. And for Indy, a different kind of way of thinking about identity is part of what leads to ending the strife. So I'm singly's, but for me, that's actually like a very small part of my identity. I speak English and then I like, I've lived abroad. And so like my wife is very similar to me in that sense, even though we're a different like racial background. But in terms of like our experiences and how we see the world and so on, we're actually quite similar. Does Indy think? of himself as Sri Lankan, Sri Lankan and American, and Sinhalese, something else?

So, I mean, if you want a personal answer, I'm Buddhist, and I don't believe that I have a self at all. One of the core teachings of the Buddha is no self. Yeah, I think the self is like a tool, and I feel like citizenship are a tool and countries are a tool, and you can use them when they're beneficial, and when they're not beneficial, you need to put them down. For me, I don't think the country you're from should be any more important than like a sports team. But that's how I think about it. I don't really believe that I have a self. And in so much as I do, identifying with a particular country or a particular piece of land,

to me is about as important as a sports team. Maybe it's a good post for the subreddit, future what if. What if we thought about identity differently? Would it help us avoid violence? It would be a pretty big shift. Then again, we're all human, right? we all have the same basic needs. And until we can come together,

which we should be able to do, we'll keep on keeping on. I mean, look, most of human history is like this. Like, we just work around the rubble. Yeah, it's like that everywhere. People keep living. Like, it's not like you still get hungry, like, three times a day, you know? Like, you still fall in love.

Like, you still, like, won't have a drink. Like, people still like clothes. They still like music. Like, that stuff never stops. It's not like you're at war. Or it's not like you're at war. Or it's not like you're in the middle of the collapse yourself. It's like two galaxies colliding.

Like it's mostly empty space. And then there's some like crazy fireworks somewhere, but you're probably just looking at it. The people who are worried that America might be facing another civil war don't really imagine this scenario, where things are bad all around you, but you might not feel the impact of that badness. They imagine something a lot more immediate and visceral and total.

Civil war. But from Indy's perspective, whether it's civil war or collapse or unrest or something else, what matters is that it is already happening and it's happening at different time scales, immediate and long term. And if you can see that, that it's happening now and it's going to take a long time to fix it,

you can start to do something about it. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer, and after finishing this episode, He cleared his mind by watching videos of... Pups on swings. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed,

who thinks browsing the future what-if subreddit is like... Tripping through time. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and he's not shocked about the prospect of another Civil War because... Simpsons did it. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a story tip so we can tell it like we did today,

you can hit us up there. Special thanks, by the way, to Anarchy Squid. My S-C-A persona is Kalinikos-Gavras, a 11th century Byzantine Empire minor borderlord. My co-host and producer is Amory Sebertson. My co-host and senior producer is Ben Brock Johnson. We'll let ourselves out.