[I wrote this on October 30th but scheduled it for posting the next day. If events catch up with me, that’s why this post is out of date.]
I’m skipping Halloween. I like the holiday in general but I’m taking this year off. I’m in the mood to be a hermit for a while. Unfortunately, I may have to go grocery shopping. This is what I’m writing about.
Both Mrs. Curmudgeon and I limit our exposure to “the news”. We do this for the same reason we don’t smear dogshit on our faces. However, I have a general knowledge of what’s going on. As I type this, it’s day 30 of the “shutdown”. Tomorrow, will presumably be day 31. Then comes November 1st.
It is said that in some states (no idea which ones) SNAP benefits will temporarily cease on November 1st. I have no idea what the details are. Nor do I know the difference between SNAP, EBT, and what was called “food stamps” when I was a kid.
All I know is the free shit army will temporarily have a little less free shit. For some, this may literally be the first time they’ve even considered purchasing their own food with their own money.
None of this is relevant to me. I’ve always paid for my own food. Plus, we’ve usually got stores of food like a medieval castle prepping for siege. It should be no big deal for anyone. Literally nobody in 2025 America is at risk like a homesteader in 1890.
But we know that’s not relevant. Dependency leads to dependency. Folks generations removed from the labor of feeding themselves will never be as based as a homesteader in 1890. They lack the strength to say “the crop failed, that sucks”. They’ll look for a scapegoat. They’ve been trained (literally from birth) to consider their personal situation someone else’s fault. Dependent people don’t think of themselves as dependent, they think of themselves as entitled. What should be gratitude becomes envy; which soon drifts into rage. Lacking basic restraint, mentally unwell masses in the modern era are a playground for evil. The deliberate replacement of self-reliance with extended childhood has created vast vote farms; sown thickly with the seeds of discontent.
Planning ahead, I told Mrs. Curmudgeon it should be no big deal but as I heard the words I said it rattled my bones. I said this:
“There’s a small chance that some food stamps, or whatever they’re called now, will get interrupted on Saturday. I’m sure it’s nothing but you never know if people will get stupid and overreact.“
That last line… it scares me.
I’ve said that before.
In 2020 we bought my little Yamaha TW200 dirt bike. I’ll always remember because it was February 29th… leap year day. We drove from our little piece of nowhere to a big city to get the bike.
I saved a shitload of money by doing that trip but it wasn’t without hassles. After we got the bike and had it strapped down tightly in my truck, we spent the night at a hotel. What a disaster! It was overrun by busloads of spastic partying young “athletes” and their associated “hoes”. Some sort of basketball tournament had just gone down. I get that people like to party but I got no sleep due to the cacophony of rutting wildebeests in all the rooms around us.
The next day, we were groggy and worn out. We were about to drive home when I mentioned something to Mrs. Curmudgeon. “There’s this thing going down in China. I’m sure it’s nothing but people tend to overreact. Maybe we should buy some groceries while we’re in the city.”
I give Mrs. Curmudgeon huge credit for what happened next. She dragged my clueless ass through a massive grocery store buying shit like the zombie apocalypse was upon us.
I thought it was probably overkill. I did not then (and still do not) fear the pathogen. To the best I could communicate I sensed that a lot of people had spent the last 4 years working themselves into a cognitive dissonance shitstorm and they would eventually do something spectacularly stupid. Mrs. Curmudgeon nodded, ignored my theorizing, and stacked pancake flour and canned goods like it was her goal to crush the shopping cart. (The prices were cheaper than our local store anyway.)
It was possible it would all blow over. Ever since Hillary wasn’t coronated, folks had worked themselves into a lather. So far, they’d failed to destroy much more than their own mental state. Even so, something was going to happen sooner or later. A fuse existed. If not a pathogen, then something else. A kitten stuck in a tree? A real estate market crash? Another 9/11 type terrorist attack? Anything might kick things off.
Still thinking people might react with dignity and intelligence, we drove home with a shiny new motorcycle in the truck bed and the cab crammed to the brim with groceries.
By my count, it was 13 days later when all hell broke loose. I remember that too because it was March 13th and I was 500 miles from home. I remember listening to the radio as one thing after another was closed down. I drove home thinking “they cancelled basketball”? I made it home just fine. That big pile of groceries we’d bought a few weeks ago went well with our other ample stores.
Some folks will never see 2020 the way I do. Sadly it feels like reason is insufficient to find us a common ground. I saw it as a flat out panic attack by people who’d been deliberately brought to madness. Some of it was self-inflicted. Some of it was externally sourced. But it sure as hell wasn’t merely a pathogen from China (eventually everyone gave up and admitted it came from Wuhan Institute of Virology but even that simple fact took years to sink in). Was it social media? Was it propaganda? Was it a people who’d never experienced true risk? Was it too much wealth? Too many people with an external locus of control? Just another witch hunt? I’ll never know.
All I really know is it started with me saying “I think it’s nothing but people tend to overreact” and progressed through closed sporting events, closed schools, arrows painted on floors, fiery but mostly peaceful riots, an election of remarkable statistical improbability (Biden got more votes than any other candidate in American history and I repeat that legally required fact every chance I get), political prisoners in America, unvaccinated in concentration camps in Australia, truckers with frozen bank accounts in Canada, lawfare, assassination attempts (some of which succeeded even quite recently)… and that’s just some of the bullshit that went down.
I will always associate “sometimes people overreact” as leading to this…
Whenever I say “I think it’s nothing” it hits me again. These things happened. They happened over what I think of as “not meriting this level of spastic overreaction”. People driven to insanity do insane things and they’re still just as numerous and insane as always.
Do I think a couple day’s interruption of food stamps is that big of a deal? No, it’s pretty damn minor. But it’s not me making the call.
So, our house is crammed with food (as it often is) but I’ll probably spend Halloween afternoon buying a cart full of generic “stuff”. If people lose their goddamn minds and start looting over toilet paper I’ll hunker down and stay away, just like I did last time the world ended.
That’s my theory anyway. YMMV.
A.C.