Societal decline is now obvious to (almost) everyone. Even the most Kool-Aid soaked, hive mind dwelling, moonbat sees it. Inmates at college campuses are starting to realize even they are within the event horizon of their own foolishness. The rest of us are like “no shit Sherlock”.
We saw it coming. We knew years and years ago. Long ago, I took drastic measures. I didn’t wait around while the tadpoles caught up with their own failures. I vamoosed. If stupid shit is both obvious and destructive, why stay around to get the biggest dose? I chose to avoid bullshit every single day.
I had to! Bullshit grates on us all, but some have more tolerance than others. It really gets to me. I’m allergic to stupid. Every time a woke fuck opens zer’s mouth and demonstrates how little they know of the real world, I feel degraded. Hearing supposed examples of homo sapiens rejecting their God given intellect is profoundly unpleasant.
As an adult, I can’t live in a made up world. I gave up a lot of wealth and convenience to secure a personal place of peace. It’s not without drawbacks. I slop the hogs every night at sunset. Pigs are a pain in the ass. It’s not without rewards. Right after sunset I see brilliant stars in an unpolluted sky.
Pigshit and glittering skies. It’s a package deal.
One protection against bullshit is distance. Distance keeps most of the crap at bay. The worst shit happens when idiots cluster together to fuck up en masse. So don’t be near them. If there’s a place where shit invariably builds high, I’m somewhere else. Shit generally belongs to “that place”… the land of dipshits… “over there”… where “you can’t expect anything better”… “because they’re fuckin’ idiots”. The rest of us, through exposure to reality and tradition, stay rooted.
Unaccomplished nobodies protesting the world that feeds them? Far away. A dozen assholes lever their ass off the couch just enough to shoot each other on an “average” weekend? Far away. Homeless derelicts building tent cities? Far away. Cities are far away; not just in miles but in spirit. They devolve into holding pens for domestic cattle. Vote farms creating their own problems.
Thus, I’m aware of but usually not in direct contact with the endless litany of social decline. However…
Yesterday I was in a hardware store; picking out some metal for a future welding project.
Wandering around the store was a woketard. It’s easy to identify such cretins. Look for someone who should be an adult, acting like a not-adult. This guy wasn’t sporting purple hair, six pounds of piercings, or a face tattoo… but he was definitely too stupid and pointless to be in a hardware store. He was expensively dressed like a bum and lugging around a skateboard.
If you’re old enough to buy beer and still consider a skateboard legitimate transport… you’re a loser.
He appeared the limp soyboy sort of half-criminal that vote farms have been breeding in box lots as the rule of law fades. He wasn’t the hardened violent sort of criminal that’s actually motivated and purposeful. He was a generic shoplifting wanker and not an Al Capone bad ass. I hefted the 3′ rod of steel I was carrying. If I was wrong and he was a genuine thug, he’d be laid out cold before you can say “Curmudgeon don’t play that game”.
I don’t know if he deliberately avoided me or did so by chance but our paths never crossed. He wandered about a bit and then walked out the door. This set off the shoplifting detectors, which seemed almost superfluous given the skulking twit’s obvious behavior.
“Sir! Sir! Please come back through he detectors, something must be wrong.” The cashier scampered over and tried to get him to come back inside.
He shuffled about back and forth just past the detector. Mouthing some words about “I paid for the candy”. (Apparently he’d bought a pack of Twizzlers.)
He was unwilling to come back through the detector. He wasn’t willing to get on the skateboard and flee. He seemed confused. Maybe he was high.
I weighed my options. I would really enjoy shoving a skateboard up a thief’s ass… but why? It’s society that allowed this cretin to exist. A few decades ago it would be different. Me or some dude like me would pin captain skateboard’s goatee to the pavement until the cops came. No more. Police no longer enforce laws. They don’t appreciate those who do. Laws may exist for me, but they no longer exist for losers like skateboard shoplifter guy. He knows this. I do too.
The clerk tried a bit more to get him to come back through detectors (I’m not sure what that would’ve accomplished). The guy finally connected a few synapses and realized he was outside. He shrugged, gave an uneven grin, and walked away.
Walked! FUCK! There was a time when committing a crime meant you ran.
The clerk was pissed. “They tell me not to chase ’em so I don’t.”
That’s part of it. The hardware store simply cannot afford the liability of maintaining civilization. They’ll keep factoring the cost of theft into the consumer price until something changes. Presumably, at some point, my steel will be shipped via internet orders. It will depart secure facilities, be shipped in a secure environment, and cost twice as much. Stores will be rare, poorly stocked, and resemble fortresses. Picture a Seven-Eleven in Detroit.
Nobody bothered calling the cops. Nobody even suggested it. We all know they wouldn’t show up. If they showed up they wouldn’t do anything. Oh sure, if I’d tackled a dude half my age and held him down, they’d have showed up… and arrested me. Cops defend thieves against citizens. It wasn’t always this way but it is now.
“I was only hired 5 days ago and there’s been one of them every shift so far.” The clerk muttered.
“Damn! Every day?” I wasn’t that cynical. I had no idea it was so widespread.
“Every day.” She sighed.
“I just paid $17 for a hunk of metal when I could have just walked out the door? Show’s what kind of dipshit I am!” I joked.
Then I paused. I’d hit to close to home. People like me obey laws. Every little crack in society makes us feel like chumps. Skateboard guy had just stolen shit. I was paying. Why? At some point it’s not clear that the one paying is the smart one. The day law abiding citizens stop paying is the day it all burns down. Break out the fiddle Nero, it’s time to watch the lights go out.
I was already walking out the door, having paid in full.
Who knows if there’s a day when nobody pays for the stuff at that particular hardware store. I know there are neighborhoods like that. Not coincidentally, those neighborhoods don’t have hardware stores (at least of the sort I’m used to).
I wasn’t aware California’s “small theft isn’t theft” logic had landed on the shores of my world. It has. Now I know.