Lousy forest management. Pitiless climate change. Increasing urban congestion. Savage droughts, intense storms and relentless overdevelopment, more and more people (like this very columnist) hoping/wishing to escape the madding crowds and build a gentle oasis out in the woods, a place where the dog can run free and the kid can play with the chickens and everyone can roam around without fear of stepping on a heroin needle or nervously checking the car every morning for a smashed window or a $250 parking ticket.

This much we know: A large part of what fueled the ferocious wine country fires, the deadliest and most destructive in state history? The factors that made them so supremely dangerous and unstoppable? A modern, rather unprecedented combination of the ingredients above, and even a few more.

Which is to say: Not only are we little prepared for what’s happening to the planet, for how she is fast devolving, overheating, freezing, burning, flooding and flicking us away like well-meaning, but severely ignorant, irritants, we are making it all much worse.

The tragedy of the wine country fires begets a strange mix of claims, blames and shames: The underfunded U.S. Forest Service doesn’t manage woodlands well. There are far too few controlled burns, minimal clearing of dead tinder, erratic logging practices, the active disallowing of Mother Nature to burn and clear as she, quite naturally, is wont to do.

And with climate change, wildfire season has become longer, and more destructive, than ever. From Seattle to Oregon, Los Angeles to SF, Denver to Boise to more than a million charred acres in Montana, the wildfires are incessant and many U.S. cities are increasingly choked in toxic smoke. It’s so bad, and so frequent, a new  new term hath been born to demarcate the regions most regularly affected: behold, the ” Smoke Belt”.

This combines with increasing millions of Americans choosing to live near dry, densely wooded areas – a dangerous trend fueled by reckless developers and wayward suburban planning and, yes, the housing crisis, it all points to one dire outcome: more potential destruction, greater loss of life and livelihood, increased tragedy of our own indelible creation. As the New Republic points out:

The U.S. Forest Service expects population growth in wildfire-prone areas to continue. It estimates that there are approximately 45 million homes in the so-called “Wildland-Urban Interface”—the technical term for those in particularly vulnerable areas—and that the number will rise another 40 percent by 2030.

But of course, it’s not just California, or even the west. It’s happening all over the world. As of this writing, 40 people have died in savage wildfires currently ravaging Spain and Portugal, the flames fanned by Hurricane Ophelia and made far worse by extremely dry summer conditions wrought, in large part, of climate change. Meanwhile, more than 1,200 people died and 41 million were displacedby the worst flooding in years in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, the annual monsoons far more deadly than in times past. And you thought Houston was horrifying.

The question gets louder by the season: How are we to adjust to what, by all accounts, appears to be a convulsed, fast-dying world? And can we possibly do it quickly enough?

More specifically, should millions of people really be building houses in wildfire-prone areas? On the flood-prone coasts? In feral hurricane zones? If not there, where should we build? Cities are crammed and traffic is a bitch and once the Yellowstone Supervolcano Earthquake Swarm really kicks into gear, it’s all moot anyway.

Where to find respite, calm, a slice of peace amidst the human firestorm? Did you know 10 of California’s worst wildfires have all occurred in the last 30 years? Did you know the worst, as they say, is yet to come? Personally, I’ve been aching for a slice of land up in the Napa/Healdsburg region, upon which to build a little modern getaway cabin, for what feels like years, saving and searching, planning and devising (I’m not, as they say, swimming in tech bro money). The wine country fires throw the dream right back at me, tragedy-tinged and deeply wary. Are you sure?

But it’s not really a question of money – at least, not for most of those affected. Of course the wine country will rebuild. The majority of those who lost homes and businesses in the Napa area, particularly the wealthier wine companies, have robust insurance policies and plenty of cash to fall back on (not true, of course, of the countless immigrant laborers and hospitality workers of the area – their fate, like most lower-income labor anywhere in the world, is far more uncertain).

The region will resurge, the trees will sprout anew, the tourists will come back and the cycle will, barring massive change to climate policy, start all over again. But should it? How smart is it to build a home on the side of an active volcano? How surprised should you be when it gets eaten by lava? Or is that “just life” these days? Is imminent, hreatbreaking catastrophe just the new normal?

It all begets the larger, and perhaps more distressing, question: Is there anywhere you can really go to be safe from mother nature’s backlash, from the hell we have wreaked upon her? Is there any such thing as a “perfect” haven anymore? The coasts, science tells us, will soon be at least partially underwater, the devastating droughts of world are already getting far more frequent, the rains more engulfing, the hurricanes, tornadoes and superstorms more destructive. Climate change is upon us, and lo, it cares about your well-being as much as Trump cares about #metoo.

To be sure, no place in the world is entirely safe from potential calamity. Human existence is, by definition, crammed with risk, be you hit by a bus on the city sidewalk, eaten alive by flesh-eating bacteria or tossed like confetti by a tornado. We’re all going down, eventually. Life, for the everyday fatalist, is just a matter of (quiet, desperate) mitigation. But really, who wants to live like that?

The outpouring is, as always, sort of astonishing.

Even as nearly two dozen brutal, wind-whipped fires ravage NorCal’s stunning Wine Country, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of acres burned, unimaginable loss and indescribable devastation — all told, the most destructive inferno of its kind in California history — amidst it all, something sort of magical is occurring.

People rally. People offer support. By which I mean, armies of people, massive outpourings of support and kindness and help of every shape imaginable; communities, individuals, local governments, the National Guard, online fundraising campaigns supporting suddenly out-of-work laborers, hotel staffs, needful families; local charities, urban businesses, endless donations of food and clothing, money and refuge, love and support both big and small, personal and financial, emotional and psychological and everything in between, from places you expect, but many you don’t.

The Sonoma County Fairgrounds, an enormous swath of land that’s become a small, functioning city/evacuation center unto itself, is the site of a rather staggering scene, comprising medical care, meal areas to serve hundreds, huge tents full of well-kept cots, a rest area for exhausted firefighters, play areas for children, for nursing mothers, the elderly, support for farm animals both large and small, you name it.

Can you guess the mood? Not bleak and miserable. Not fatalistic and isolated, not fearful and dejected.

It’s positive. Helpful. Kind. Endlessly kind and generous, even with displaced families crammed together in cots, even with all the commiseration and sadness, even with so many thousands having no idea if their homes still stand or where they might go next. There is laughter, there is sharing, there is the unending flow of gratitude to be alive and safe, connected, even now and perhaps more than ever, to the community.

It’s sort of astonishing, but also completely normal. Which is to say, this is always the universal truth: As tragedy escalates, empathy only increases. We are, by default, a generous and hopeful species, and when devastation strikes, our shared humanity only becomes more palpable; sympathy and compassion shine through the toxic smoke like beacons.

This is extremely important to note right now, simply because it’s become all too easy, in the bleak age of Trump, to believe that the default state of the modern human animal is actually one of suspicion, of violence and corruption, shameless sexism and racism and outright detestation for all you hold dear.

It’s worth remembering that, for eight solid years, acts of compassion and overt kindness of the type we’re seeing right now in NorCal were hallmarks of the Obama era. No one ever doubted the federal government would be there to help, or that the president would offer genuinely heartfelt words of support in times of need, and follow through immediately.

These traits have, of course, all but completely vanished from the GOP-led federal government, replaced by nothing but callousness and cruelty, dumb tweets and snarling rhetoric.

This is, after all, a president who threatens to withdraw all aid from Puerto Rico, simply because they’re too poor and have lousy infrastructure and therefore don’t, in his shriveled mind, deserve the help after a devastating hurricane left millions without clean water, electricity, food.

This is an administration that gleefully destroys health care for millions, guts women’s rights, wipes away health care for children, rolls back Obama-era air quality protections regarding coal pollutants — protections that, by every estimate, saves thousands of lives, prevents asthma, protects children.

This is a Republican-led government that, in the face of the most savage gun massacre at the hand of a white American male terrorist, does … well, absolutely nothing at all.

We are not them. Trump is not us. And, perhaps most importantly, the humanity we share cannot, no matter how hard they try, ever be corrupted.

Make no mistake. This is not to say there is nothing to worry about regarding NorCal’s devastating fires. This is not to say “it’s all good” or that we in the Bay Area should be “looking on the bright side” or “see it as a blessing.” This is nonsense. Of course most of what has been lost can, eventually, be rebuilt. Of course the land will recover and regrow. This is not the point.

Let’s be clear: This is a terrible, catastrophic event, more than 30 people dead so far, entire communities destroyed and entire towns under threat, the near-complete annihilation of some of the most gorgeous landscape in the country. The heartbreak is immeasurable.

It’s a region noted not just for stunning vineyards, but countless historic sites and multi-generational family homesteads, gentle retreat centers and childhood campgrounds, historical taverns and deep-woods cabins, hundreds of family-run businesses, enormous redwoods and world-famous natural hot springs, high-end resorts and funky backwoods inns, hostels, national parks, antiques dealers and artists, hot-air balloon rides and antique airplanes, stunning homes, world-famous architecture to make you swoon. On and on.

Translation: This is no typical region, no typical wildfire, no typical loss of near-empty forestland and a handful of remote buildings. This is more than 3,500 structures lost (so far). This is toxic air quality worse than Beijing. This is entire neighborhoods, street after street and block after block, burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a lone chimney and the blackened steel carcass of a car.

This is simply to say, the devastation might be staggering and the loss heartbreaking, but the outpouring of love and community support — occurring, as it is, smack in the face of every nasty Trump tweet, every hateful GOP agenda item, every bit of racist Breitbart propaganda, et al — is unutterably marvelous and radiantly humane. And for this, we can only bow in gratitude.

He wasn’t, apparently, a sociopath. He did not, to anyone who knew him, show any signs of mental illness, was not a fringe radical or a “nutjob.”

All initial indications are that Stephen Paddock, who just massacred as many as 59 people and seriously injured hundreds more, had no record of mental health problems, nothing to cause him to come unhinged or to “snap.” He apparently wasn’t attacking a particular group, or race, or religion. According to his brother, he had no major affiliations at all, be they political, religious or otherwise.

The story might change and there are many unanswered questions, but right now it appears Paddock was just an older, retired, seemingly normal white guy who lived a quiet life in Nevada, playing slots, watching concerts, “hanging out.” He had no criminal record.

In other words, he was yet another “average” white American male who had easy access to all the powerful guns he wanted, pre-planning a massive stash of military-grade death machines found in his Mandalay Bay hotel room, all easily obtained by just about anyone who wants them, with minimal background checks and increasingly lax, idiotic ownership laws (and Nevada has some of the most lax in the nation) – including ownership by the mentally ill, because the NRA is a morbid cult of terrified white males, and Trump is anything if not obeisant to his hateful base.

You disagree? You think only a true sociopath could do something like this? That Paddock must have been crazy, mentally unstable, a nut, regardless of any medical diagnosis? You think no “normal” person could ever do something like this?

You are wrong. The mental illness argument is convenient lie, a myth foisted by the NRA and beloved by hardcore gun nuts everywhere.

Fact is, “normal” people commit vicious atrocities every single day, to the tune of tens of thousands of gun attacks in America every year: murders, suicides, spousal killing, mass shootings, revenge attacks, dead wives and girlfriend and children, church-goers and UPS workers and nightclub patrons. There has been, on average, a mass shooting nearly every day in America since the Sandy Hook massacre in December of 2012, totaling nearly 1,400, and counting. And the vast majority of such shootings are at the hand of – you guessed it – white American males. We must repeat it every single time: No other industrialized nation has this problem, and surely they have as many “sociopaths,” per capita, as America.

Put another way: Even if it turns out Paddock suffered from depression or some strain of mental illness, mass shootings and gun violence in America are not, by and large, mental health issues.

Translation: It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the NRA and their vicious hate campaigns, their lies about “protecting your family” and “shooting for fun” and “if only more people had guns this would never happen,” which is not only exactly the inverse of true, it’s one of the most sinister, devastating lies ever forced down the throat of a nation. It’s their nasty appeal to white males, training them to fear, well, everything and anything: the government, blacks, terrorists, women, Obama, liberals, free speech, human rights.

Here’s the obvious, albeit tragic prediction: Nothing will change. Also, this will happen again. Officially, the Vegas massacre is now the worst of its kind in recent American history, the most horrific mass shooting since, well, the last one, gun violence ever remaining the ugliest and most shameful aspect of American life. And the gun lobby, to put it bluntly, could not be happier.

Despite it all, despite all the calls for new gun control laws and the wails of the mourning families, nothing will change. Not because it can’t, not because guns are too entrenched (they’re not; nothing is), but because no one on Congress has the nerve, or the moral compass, to make real change happen. As famously tweeted once before, the gun control debate in America ended after Sandy Hook. Once Americans deemed it OK to massacre children, it was over.

This is doubly true today, under the violence-loving Trump regime and a GOP that takes in millions of dollars in donations/handouts from the NRA ($32 million in campaign donations to Trump/Pence in 2016 alone – a record – along with nearly another million spread among dozens of GOP congressmen). We also have a thuggish ogre of a president, one who stops just short of endorsing outright violence against those who oppose, or even just disagree, with him – women, blacks, immigrants, the poor, smart people, liberals, scientists, journalists, humanity itself.

Shall we pause for a moment to imagine if Paddock had been black, or Latino, or Muslim? The racist screams from the Right? How Trump would be calling for everyone to buy even more guns, ban all immigrants forever, give police more power and less oversight, allow open carry in kindergarten?  The fact Paddock was an average white male – very much the typical profile for a shooter in America, by the way – points to the darker, ongoing truth, one that speaks to white privilege, the lie of the “lone wolf” shooter, and the easy scapegoat of calling such acts “evil,” when brutal shootings are, in fact, everyday occurrences in America.

Let us be as clear as possible: Guns and gun culture remain the most shameful, destructive aspects of America, and the NRA is America’s truest terrorist organization, akin to a death cult, one fueled by – and openly promoting – only the most fearful aspects of the human psyche. It’s a calculated message, it’s intentional, and it’s destroying us from within.

In other words: There is no light here. There is no hope, love, kindness or inclusiveness anywhere in the rabid push for more guns in America. Guns offer nothing of true value or moral good to a society. They bring only pain and rage. They bring only death.

Guns have, after all, but a single destiny. They are designed, manufactured and sold for one perfectly bleak, ruinous purpose: the annihilation of life.

As I wrote in a previous, post mass-shooting column:

Guns are unparalleled, really; they are small masterpieces of precision engineering, one of humanity’s most deliberate, perfectly designed tools. There is simply no denying a gun’s intention, no possible misunderstanding of its reason for existing.

Unlike cars, knives, drugs, alcohol or any other freely available, potentially deadly items which can (and do) kill lots of people, guns are the only commercially available instrument in the world that we designed specifically for the purpose of the eradication of life. A gun’s nature is, as they say in the tech world, baked in to the hardware. It understands nothing else.

Which is to say: Guns are death made physical, palpable in the hand. They are our basest, least sacred energies – hate, fear, paranoia – compressed into metal and explosives. No one holds or fires a gun without some fundamental understanding of this fact – that he could, if he so desired, kill anything he wanted, right now, in an instant – and that’s essentially all you’re supposed do with it.

The equation, then, is simple enough: the more guns we numbly pump into the culture – more than 300 million, at latest estimate, far more than any other developed nation on Earth, by many orders of magnitude – the more that grim destiny will continue to be fulfilled.

Lindsay Graham (R-SC), one of the few in Congress who seemed to exhibit occasional moments of grown-up lucidity and common sense WRT pushing back, ever so slightly, on Trump’s more appalling revulsions, just went on Breitbart Radio, part of the white nationalist fake news site run by Steve Bannon, to urge its army of racists to “melt down” the phones lines of their state reps in order to help him pass the Graham-Cassidy bill, AKA what might be the nastiest, most hurtful, hail-Mary version of Trumpcare yet, because the GOP hates you.

Is there another explanation? As to why Republicans like Graham keep trying, over and over and in openly pitiless ways, to shiv the American experiment, gut the environment, reject the poor, hate on women, shoot down minorities and hurt as many humans as possible as quickly as possible, morality and compassion be damned?

Graham-Cassidy, rest assured, is one of the most frightening versions of Trumpcare yet. It would again strip basic health care from millions, erase all protections for pre-existing conditions, halt all Medicare expansion, give enormous power back to insurance industry and, in so doing, very much let thousands die and Trump’s base high-five each other in their lonely little basements. So again, why else but hate would Graham implore a bunch of white supremacists to help him destroy the smart black guy’s legacy? What is the true goal here?

Will it matter? It might not matter. Even if this awful bill fails, Trump is doing everything in his nefarious power to choke off funding for Obamacare, eliminate signups and destabilize the insurance markets. Obamacare is far too successful, popular and helpful to millions to fall on its own. They’ll kill it – and you (or your sick child, your cancer-stricken friend, your ailing mother) – one way or another.

What about EPA chief Scott Pruitt, “reviewing” the Obama-era rules limiting poisonous coal ash, the various residues left over after burning? “A toxic mix of mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other heavy metals, coal ash can pollute waterways, poison wildlife and cause respiratory illness among those living near the massive storage pits plant operators use to contain it,” says WaPo.  Yeah, let’s keep more of that stuff around. What’s more heart disease, emphysema and lung cancer when already-collapsing coal profits are at stake?

And don’t forget the savage work of billionaire Education Secretary and noted despiser of public education Betsy DeVos, working not merely to screw over millions of grads suffering from crushing college loan debt, but also working diligently to roll back still more Obama-era rules designed to safeguard women from sexual assault and rape on college campuses, and instead re-empower the accused (AKA college boys)? As everyone knows, entitled college bros are just terribly disempowered when it comes to assaulting and raping women these days.

Know this now: Thanks to DeVos, if you have a college-aged daughter, her risk factors for abuse, rape, sexual assault and general loss of dignity are about to leap by a factor of Trump. This on top of the recent survey from the American Association of Universities, revealing that more than one in fourwomen said they had been sexually assaulted by force or when they were incapacitated while in college

Meanwhile, the president just re-tweeted a fake meme from a neo-Nazi site showing him smashing Hillary Clinton in the head with a golf ball. So funny, that casual sexist assault. Got a good laugh from the inbred base, to be sure. I mean, to hell with women and their dumb complaints and their Planned Parenthood, right? What are they gonna do, hold a march?

There is, we are consistently reassured, no low too low for the Trump administration to plunge, no insult to human life and common decency too grossly derogatory. Anything you think they’d couldn’t, wouldn’t possibly do, they will absolutely do. And do again.

And why not? Why should they care about repercussions? Behold Sean Spicer, milquetoast accomplice to – and foul purveyor of – some of the most intentionally deceptive, hurtful lies in recent White House spokesperson history. Spicer was just hired by Harvard, and enjoyed a cute little cameo on the Emmy Awards, “making fun of himself,” AKA his “hair-tossing by Jimmy Fallon” moment, because violent misrepresentation of facts and policy is so adorable! And lo, Spicer’s gutterball reputation has been resurrected by the machinations of pop culture. Is there no shame? There is no shame.

Curious thing. During a night when women and minorities dominated the Emmy’s, when it was made potently, wonderfully evident that American culture and its social fabric are indeed far more diverse, colorful and (erratically, but powerfully) evolving than the Trump-mauled headlines let on, it’s almost as though Spicer rolled onstage as a cruel reminder of who, right now anyway, still holds the real power, and what flavor of gloating death his clan of supremacist-supporting, immigrant-hating, women-bashing Republicans wish upon everyone attending.

Don’t get too pleased with yourself, educated, progressive, multicultural America. The old racist reality TV game show host and his vile clown car still have their finger on the button. And lo, they wish you ill.

Here is what you most definitely do not do, if you’re storing somewhere around 700 pounds of hallucinogenic mushrooms in the living room of your Berkeley house, stacked like manna in large plastic tubs, just waiting to make life better for countless thousands of hippies and hipsters, enlightened seekers and people who like to commune with trees.

You do not start screaming. You do not start yelling at your husband/wife/business partner, right there in your home/mushroom production facility, arguing so loudly that it alarms the neighbors, and they call the police and the police arrive and bang on the door and you finally have to let them in and, whoops, there’s $1 million worth of trippy goodness, sitting right there on the floor, because you really need a garage.

Another lesson? If you are a dealer in large quantities of home-grown magic fungus, do not skip the couple’s counseling. I mean, obviously.

And thus did the Berkeley cops seize all 700 pounds of happy fungus and arrest our bickering young couple, thus yanking a sizable portion of product off the Bay Area hallucinogen market and jacking up the price for, oh, about an hour, given how even that much psilocybin is but a sliver of what Berkeley likely produces every week, and if you could peel back the roof and peer through the walls of every home in the East Bay you will possibly find that magic mushrooms are more populous than smoothies and Birkenstocks and Subarus, combined, because Berkeley.

It’s all sort of sad, isn’t it? And numbly ironic? It very much is.

For one thing, it dovetails – albeit a bit tragically – with the recent news that California might indeed decriminalize psilocybin as soon as next year, assuming the ballot measure Kevin Saunders, a mayoral candidate in Monterey County, submitted to the state, earns enough signatures.

After all, psilocybin’s medicinal qualities are becoming increasingly well documented (not to mention the centuries of evidence from shamans and healers), helpful in treating everything from PTSD to cancer-related death anxiety, various neurological and emotional disorders and which, along with MDMA, gives users in controlled environments a truly precious, life-affirming reconnection to something quite sacred indeed (Self, God, Goddess, soul, the divine, love – call it what you want but don’t call it hippie nonsense because then you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about, and should probably take some mushrooms for yourself).

Saunders himself claims that psilocybin helped him kick heroin over a decade ago. And, let us be reminded, it’s fentanyl-laced heroin that’s killing tens of thousands of Americans right now, the ones who’ve been blocked from getting their doctor-overprescribed opioids. See how that works?

There is indeed irony afoot, and it’s vicious. The opioid crisis, the one spurred by shameless pharma companies shoving hundreds of millions of pricey painkillers down the throats of millions of unsuspecting Americans (and now developing countries) and thus co-creating, along with inept, overprescribing doctors, the worst epidemic in our nation’s history, one which is currently killing more Americans every year than the Vietnam war, and rising fast, this crisis could be well helped by the very thing we still dumbly fear and continue to outlaw.

Is it not curious? And ridiculous? And brutally tragic? How we condemn and destroy the natural spiritual enhancer/potential cure, and reward, to the tune of billions of dollars to Big Pharma, the obvious poison?

Happy thoughts first: Donald Trump will, almost surely, be long dead, or long imprisoned, and long shamed into historical oblivion. The GOP as we know it today – thick with corruption, scabbed over with abject cruelty, full of open revulsion for most things you hold dear – will have disintegrated into bitter pile of ash.

Everyone will be driving a Tesla Model Z with electromagnetic wheels and a 70” video screen where the windshield used to be. The iPhone 14 will be renamed the iPhone Retina and it will be injected directly into your eyeballs at the Apple Store for two grand, and you will blink twice to order pizza.

What else? Can you in any way imagine the year 2028, AKA the year Los Angeles will, once again, host the Summer Olympics, California surges past 40 million residents and the world lurches past eight billion, and everyone will complain about the lousy WiFi due to the solar storms and the boiling oceans and the Rapture?

Will there even be a Los Angeles? A functional California? Of course there will. But will we have enough water? How will everyone get around? Will next-gen Olympic athletes be constructed solely of steroidal opioids and 3D-printed bones and lasers for eyes? Why not?

Here’s the thing: We seem, as a nation and a world population, to be at a crossroads of imagination, stuck in a surreal Gordian knot of moral and environmental unpredictability, unprecedented in the modern era.

We have little idea what’s going to happen. It is no longer remotely possible to comfortably predict what lies ahead, or to imagine the tech, the politics, the intense environmental conditions, the essential issues that will shape our future, even just one short decade away. Not anymore.

The natural order has thrown up its hands in despair. Predictive scientific models are proving far too conservative. All previously understood trends have largely derailed, patterns shattered, charts remade, maps of the world melted and erased. And not, in most cases, for the better.

As America whipsawed from one of the finest presidents in our history to one of the dumbest and most loathsome, our fundamental understanding of the natural evolution of sociopolitical life and has been hurled off track, to a point where suddenly everything dire appears to be accelerating (water shortages, deadly weather, infrastructure collapse, lethal conservative bigotry and dangerous ignorance), and everything progressive and hopeful has been punched in the throat (health care, climate science, improved race relations, respectful cultural intelligence), largely at the hands of snarling gaggle of viciously amoral, conservative white males.

Which brings us, naturally, to the 2028 LA Olympics. What can we imagine? The climate, we can certainly guess, will be all flavors of extreme and impossible to forecast, much less contain. Rising ocean levels could begin to drown Venice and Malibu. Summer heatwaves could melt LA pavement, blow out the electricity grid and annihilate 10,000 downtown ice cream shops and hipster microbreweries. And of course, odds are ever-increasing that the Big One will remodel the state like a slab of Jell-O bounding on the devil’s trampoline.

And what of the rest of us, watching the Olympics via immersive 3D goggles or custom eyeball TV implants, cheering the impossible athletes from the handful of nations that still put up with us? What of America overall? Will we be but a smoking husk, a trembling, maimed soldier still bleeding from multiple wounds, struggling to recover from the most destructive, racist, incompetent political era we’ve ever known?

Some say it will take at least a decade to recover from the deep structural damage Trump is inflicting, every day. Some say far longer. Some say never.

Or, maybe not. Maybe we’ll surprise ourselves, and heal our country from the Trump era like expunging a barbed tapeworm, to reveal more resilience and ingenuity, tenacity and humane unity than anyone could have predicted.

It’s nice to imagine, no? That we could somehow slingshot from this brutal, seemingly inexorable moment in history toward something altogether healthy and revolutionary, cheering all kinds of ridiculously beautiful Olympic athletes from all over the world as they race around a gleamingly intact, thriving Los Angeles, as President Kamala applauds from the stands?

This much we can be sure of: Right now, somewhere in America, a bright, stupendously lithe 12-year-old is running circles around her teammates on her junior-high track field, and she will perhaps lead the 2028 U.S. Track and Field team to a gold medal in the 400-meter relay.

Somewhere a scrawny, water-obsessed kid is swimming laps in his school pool so fast it will make Michael Phelps jealous. Somewhere a child is practicing her cannonballs, which will become a perfect pike, which will become a reverse somersault triple spin with a ridiculous degree of difficulty from the 10m high dive. What will their Olympics experience be like? Their world?

As for me, I’ll soon be welcoming a brand new daughter into the world, just a few months from now, which means she’ll be hitting double digits right around the time LA is preparing to light the Olympic torch, and prove to the world that we have, in fact, survived that long. Probably.

My daughter will not have a dire SnapChat problem. She will not know anything about getting gas for the car. She will not be staring at a pile of random emojis, trying to decipher if her friends like her or not. Verily, as tech evolves and communication tools mutate an warp, her set of issues and challenges will be entirely different, less dangerous and also much more, but somehow exactly the same. Poor kid.

But one thing’s for sure, as we slather up the SPF 1000 and watch the Olympic divers and the pole vaulters and the archers with the lasers for eyes: we will both be so very glad, so beaming with joy, that Trump is long gone and his poisonous era is blessedly over, and yet the torch, somehow, still burns.

OK, for real though. Get outside. Get outside and go interact with one another. In the woods. By the ocean. In a pool, a feral garden, a misty mountaintop overlooking a shimmering lake abutting a flower-laden field dusted with clouds as fine as god’s own coffee breath.

Try it naked. Try it naked with your teen friends and some really cheap beer and if you can’t get to the woods, then by all means learn to drive and go slouch around in scruffy city doorways, hang out in parking lots, smoke behind the dumpster at the Chik-Fil-A, hide from the cops and discover your personality and the mysteries of your body and of this brutal/glorious world, and then laugh like your life depended on it – because, apparently, it totally does.

Of course I exaggerate. No underage teen should try anything so flagrantly illegal. But they most definitely should, in all ways possible, put down the phone and go experience the world as richly and deeply as possible, as generations of flagrantly adult-defying youth have done before them.

You see, post-Millennials, there is real danger afoot, if you don’t get out and taste the world, each other, yourself, in a real and tangible, dirt-under-your-toenails way. There is depression, isolation and misery and the cause, apparently, is right there in your hand.

It’s all about your smart phone – or rather, the social media apps for which smart phones, for teens anyway, function more like a syringe. Steve Jobs’ genius device is apparently inducing psycho-emotional distress among young teens at rates never before recorded in modern history; this new, iPhone-drunk generation is more depressed, lonely, socially inept, lost like a rowboat emoji in a sea of pitiless pixels than any group previous. And it’s getting worse.

The numbers bear it out. According to psychologist Jean Twenge’s latest (instantly viral) long-read from the Atlantic, the iGen, as she deems them, while physically safer and, you know, less pregnant than previous generations (because they don’t go out much), are also on the verge of major mental breakdown; millions of teens isolated behind millions of tiny screens, trapped in invisible cages called SnapChat and Instagram and Facebook.

(Note: Twenge, back in 2012, also popularized the idea that Millennials might be one of the most narcissistic generations, ever. She wrote a book on it. And on iGen, too. Girl knows a good viral meme topic when she sees one).

Nevertheless, her stats are alarming indeed. P2P social interaction among teens has plummeted. Far fewer teens go out on actual dates. Far fewer care about learning to drive (i.e.; long for escape and adventure), preferring to stay in their rooms, ignore their families and SnapChat with friends until their eyeballs bleed.

They’re taking longer and longer to “grow up” and take personal responsibility for, well, anything at all. They don’t really know how to listen to one another, engage, make eye contact, pay attention without endless iPhone distraction.

Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

Sexual activity (and teen pregnancy) have, of course, plummeted, because they don’t go out and don’t know how to socialize. (Is that a good thing? Not if you value healthy adult relationships, physical pleasure and positive body awareness. Few things more toxic to social/marital health than sexual illiteracy and ignorance of true intimacy).

They don’t care to drive, they suffer more sleep deprivation, they don’t care (or need) to get summer jobs or learn the value of money, as more Boomer parents just let them live at home, for free, until they maybe, finally, slouch off to college. Huge portions of their personal time is spent alone, behind a very small screen, typing frantically, desperate for a “like” or a validation.

Meanwhile, rates of teen depression have skyrocketed. Ditto the suicide rate, which has increased particularly quickly among girls, who are more susceptible to the specific, nasty kind of emotional berating, social FOMO and image shaming social media seems to specialize in (though the rate for boys overall is still higher).

On it goes, stat after finding after revelation; the psycho-emotional damage currently suffered by the smartphone generation quickly becomes undeniable, and rather terrifying, and much of the damage carries over into adulthood.

Now, maybe you’re tempted, as I’ve often argued in the past, to suggest it’s all just another case of nervous generational paranoia; that is, every generation sees those coming up behind it as under mysterious, terrible duress, largely because adults don’t understand the technologies and the lingo of, you know, “kids these days.” Radio, TV, email, the Internet – each had its panicked fear-mongers, those older types who believed the next generation would never make it to 30. Just ask your grandparents.

But this, as they say, is different. The stats are more alarming and far more dire – and, more significantly, they coincide pretty much exactly with the invention of the iPhone – or, more specifically, the social media apps that iPhones deliver to teens like a virus.

What can be done? Twenge doesn’t offer may suggestions beyond the obvious: moderation. Vigilance. Better parenting. Less habitually tossing your screaming kid an iPhone or iPad to quiet them down, more throwing them out into the woods and let them run around naked and drunk on sunshine and screaming at birds (exaggeration, again, mine). After all:

All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.

Hey, it worked for the last 10,000 years. And it sure beats SnapChatting your way to oblivion.

1) Prosaic

Let’s start obvious. Buy some cheap eclipse glasses at Safeway and go outside and, at around 9 a.m., look sunward, and don’t look down for two full hours. Complain later about the crick in your neck and how slow and boring it all was and what’s the big deal, even though it was moving at 1,700 miles per hour and hasn’t happened like this in 100 years and we are in desperate need of awe and wonder in our Trump-poisoned world.

Log in to Facebook and tell everyone how you thought the nation’s most intense alignment phenomenon in your entire lifetime “sorta sucked, I mean who cares it was so stupid I can’t believe I paid $5.99 for these glasses.” Wonder why you have no friends.

2) Ancient WTF

A circle of cairns in Loughcrew, Ireland makes up an ancient, eclipse-predicting monument, built around 3340 BC. We have no idea how they knew how to build it so precisely. Ancient Chinese astronomers carved eclipses into “oracle bones.” Ancient Mesopotamians believed a solar eclipse signified the death of a king. Greeks foresaw certain doom.

The ancient Chinese claimed a heavenly dragon consumed the sun and had to be scared away by banging pots and pans. The Vietnamese blamed a giant frog, while Norse cultures said hungry wolves ate the sun.

Every culture, every religion, every era and epoch, from pagan to modern, saw eclipses as omens of intense change, upheaval, warfare and peace, the gods throwing down some serious cosmic/karmic wisdom. Who are you to ignore it?

3) Mystical

Workshops. Webinars. Global meditations. Chants, prayers, spells, drums, Wiccan fires, rituals of a thousand flavors both public and personal, a moment (2.5 minutes, at peak eclipse, to be exact) to go deep, to hold center, to let yourself dissolve into the OMGWTF of it all, sans dogma or the whining of politicians or celebrities or organized religion.

Truth is, any form of planetary eclipse offers a potent moment to reflect, to go inward, to flip your expectations as your entire frame of reality collapses. But a total solar eclipse, spanning a single country? Unreal. What was light is now dark, and what was dark is now blasted by light, everything you thought you knew is slapped asunder, as the gods laugh and flick your consciousness like a tiny paper football through the devil’s fingertip goalposts.

4) Quasi-mystical

Festivals. Megaparties. Psychedelics and fractals and raving ‘til dawn. Gathering in enormous tribes of awesome, partially attuned, like-minded pseudo-hippies in enormous fields under the hot summer sun, waiting for the moon to do its thing as you try to sync the eclipse’s peak with the moment the MDMA and the acid and the ketamine and the warm beer all kick in at once.

Stagger back to the main stage to have your remaining synapses pulverized by godawful dubstep for nine solid hours at a festival that cost $15 million to produce and is 100 percent a capitalist, for-profit venture, but which you think is, like, the way people should really live, open and celebratory and loving and tripping and annoying and weird. Which it totally is. Sort of.

5) Vedic

AKA the other astrology. Priests of this ancient Indian cosmic system say this eclipse is actually not at all a fine a time to trek to the mountaintop to stare straight at the sun, yelping with delight as you Instagram every planetary phase.

Oh my goodness, no. Best to go inside, draw the blinds, run a warm bath, don’t eat anything for the day, wear only light-colored clothing and meditate as deeply and calmly as possible. In fact, Vedic astrologers suggest you hunker down, mystic pilgrim, and perform as many introspective, grounding practices as you can, because this particular eclipse is actually a fierce, intense shadow demon (in Magha, the Leo-esque house that rules warfare, traditions, authoritarian power, government, general agitation), and he will wreak all kinds of disillusion and egoic melodrama as he passes over, the likes of which your meager soul cannot possibly process, and the effects of which will linger for months, and even years, to come.

See, to the Vedic priests (and many other traditions), eclipses were powerful omens indeed, and not necessarily positive ones. Get your ghee ready.

6) Entitled/Exceptional

As pointed out by FiveThirtyEight, Earth gets the best eclipses of any planet in the galaxy, due to our perfectly sized, ideally positioned little moon, a phenomenon which will only be the case for another, oh, 600 million years or so, until tidal forces hurl our little Chandra to a new dance floor.

However, given how humankind has only been around in any relatable form for about 10 million years, it’s safe to assume we will be but a speck of a footnote in the annals of the goddess’ grand notebook by then. Also, before you think only America is all special (given how someone had the gall to deem this event the Great American Eclipse), another one is coming as soon as 2024, spanning Mexico to Maine. Put another way: We ain’t all that special. And we never were. Still pretty cool, though.

7) Geek Out

NASA goes for the gold. Live streaming. SnapChat. Q&A’s and FAQs, myth-busting and multiple video feeds from around the country and the galaxy. Online forums. Experiments. A satellite to swirl around the sun and measure stuff. Everybody wave at the moon!

NASA, in short, is all in for GAE 2017. After all, as mentioned above, this particular shadow demon is in Magha, AKA Leo, AKA Trump’s rising sign. And he’s as dumbly, viciously anti-science as they come. Maybe NASA sees this event as their chance to measure the scale of his terrible, corruptive capacity, so as to figure out a cosmic way to hurl him into the volcano once and for all? Let us pray.

8) Idiot rebuff

As Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out, it’s odd how no one is in denial of the total solar eclipse – an event which, exactly like climate change, vaccinations, evolution, et al, uses scientific methods, tools, evidence and advanced college degrees to predict, prove and analyze it. Where’s the bloviated congressional Republican or blank-eyed Fox News pundit standing up and pointing to his face and saying “See? I got a sunburn yesterday so clearly here’s no eclipse”? Why aren’t they decrying science this time?

9) Capitalist shmuck

NBC News and Fortune magazine were kind enough to tweet out the useless guesstimate that the eclipse will “cost” U.S. businesses about $700 million in lost productivity, because, as the Lipstick Socialist so perfectly tweeted in response, “God f—king forbid anyone look around and notice the natural world when they’re supposed to be making the boss richer.”

10) Capitalist Shmuck II

You can, if you’re so ridiculously entitled/inclined, plop down 10 grand for a private jet that will whisk you to a perfect lawn chair somewhere in Oregon to witness this planetary event, with a picnic basket and some Dom Perignon, as brought to you by … well, who really cares.

Million Air is whisking customers to remote airports where the moon will totally block the sun’s rays for a time on Aug. 21. Passengers will watch from lawn chairs near the wings of the plane while an astronomer offers expert commentary and views of solar flares through a telescope.

Ah, such a proud, advanced species we are. No wonder the gods adore us so.

Every holiday is a manufactured holiday. Christmas to Valentine’s, Easter to Hanukkah, Mother’s Day to the 4th of July – no matter the supposed legitimacy of a given celebration’s origins, capitalism has seen to it that every one on the American calendar has been gutted, repackaged and turned it into a massive marketing gimmick, wrapped in a retailer’s wet dream, tied to a 50% off clearance sale.

Commercialism has swallowed tradition and spit back mountains of plastic landfill. There is no holiday without shopping. There is no celebration without mega-sales and screaming ad banners, horrible songs and endless marketing gimmicks urging you to buy more stuff as quickly as possible, lest the GDP drop and the American dream suffer and die.

No one understands this hellish matrix better than the beast than Jeff Bezos birthed. It should come as no surprise that Amazon, AKA Earth’s Biggest Everything So Shut Up Already, would dispense entirely with the hollow pretense of, say, overweight, red-robed saints and egg-laying rabbits, gluttonous turkey dinners and ten million toxic roses, and just make up its own holiday, no silly “tradition” required.

Behold, Amazon Prime Day, the newest and, let’s be honest, most all-American holiday ever invented by ruthless marketers and/or numb politicians, and that includes Columbus Day and President’s Day and Flag Day and, well, pretty much all the rest.

Amazon Prime Day is America incarnate. It is capitalism unleashed, frighteningly well armed and live-blogged in real time, unafraid to decimate your truest values and your maxed-out credit limit. Prime Day is where Black Friday meets the opioid epidemic in a giant blow-up kiddie pool, and then stabs you in the spine with a Bluetooth-enabled LED talking “smart” meat thermometer/garage door opener, for dogs.

It’s all here: Ridiculous overconsumption, BS pricing tricks, idiotic appliances you will never use, fake “reviews,” nefarious tracking/predictive shopping algorithms recording your every twitch and click, all coupled to simply staggering fuel consumption/air pollution/packaging waste via all the factories and planes and trucks that manufacture and deliver your crap to your door within 48 hours and which will, in turn, soon result in mountains of landfill because, as mentioned, you’re not a real American unless you can’t close your garage without knocking over three ruptured trampolines and seven WiFi-enabled Sno-Cone Waffle Makers you bought for 24% off but that never actually worked and now live in your nightmares.

Amazon Prime Day is also, let’s just admit, a perfect scam. As expert product-review site The Wirecutter discovered, only a small fraction of Amazon’s “exciting” offers were worth the bandwidth they wasted impaling your anima. Last year, the site scanned nearly 8,000 deals and found a mere 64 – that’s less than 1% – to be any good whatsoever.

Will this year be any better? Maybe two percent? Who cares?

For Amazon, Prime Day isn’t really about selling more stuff, anyway. It’s just a way to lure new members into signing up for an annual Prime account, which will ensnare millions in Amazon’s ever-expanding metaverse of goods and services and, in turn, enable still more Americans to buy even more stuff they do not actually need, at prices that aren’t really all that great anyway.

After all, Prime members spend anywhere from two to four times as much on the site as non-Prime members, upwards of $2,500 a year. So, you know, sucker on, America.

Too cynical? Not really. Amazon’s miracle of convenience and speed is only matched by its staggering waste and increasingly terrifying scale. Amazon already handles a huge portion of the world’s Internet commerce in its services division. It spent $11 billion on shipping alone, just last year. Its powers are garguantuan, its reach staggering, its aims shamelessly monopolistic.

Bezos could soon be the world’s first trillionaire. “I have the best job in the world because I get to work in the future,” he told Fast Company. Please note that “the future” he’s talking about has everything to do with massive, never-ending, relentless, hyper-convenient consumption and, well, not much else. Maybe he really is the new Jesus.

Should you care? Depends on what you do, well, tonight. For 30 hours starting at 9PM Eastern on July 10, a large portion of America will be caught in a newfound summertime shopping frenzy matched only by its rabid ignorance of the damage wrought, both karmic and environmental. Hide the children, get your credit card ready and never mind that deep shudder in the bones of the fragile planet: the new American holiday is here. Rejoice!

 

Mark Morford has been providing hyper-literate, award-winning commentary and cultural criticism to the San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate since 1998, which probably astounds him more than it does you. He’s also one of the Bay Area’s premier yoga instructors, leading classes, workshops and retreats in SF and around the world since 2001. Read his latest stories, follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or just visit markmorford.com for the whole of it. Email him here.

Cocaine. Cocaine and pixie dust. And maybe some snuff you found in a strange, cool-looking tin in your dad’s dresser drawer from the ‘80s that smells like gasoline and charcoal briquettes and makes your nose burn, eyes water and throat clench up in panic – so you know it must be good.

But that’s it. That’s all you should ever really be snorting, and I’m not even sure about the cocaine anymore because I tried a whole big bunch of it myself, back when, and it never seemed to make me exceedingly rich or get me hardcore partying with hot porn stars and Slash and a pre-sober Russell Brand, as promised on the label. Oh, well.

But not chocolate. You should definitely probably not be snorting powdered chocolate, from a little tin, in a nightclub, especially a tin with the name “Coco Loko” on it, which is actually a product you can buy, right now, legally, on Amazon, because this is America and capitalism laughs at your meager concerns about “life” and “health” and “lung capacity.”

But if you really need a doctor to tell you that it’s a bad idea to snort “infused” coco powder full of unregulated ingredients, perhaps you actually should snort some, because you are apparently not very bright and probably aren’t reading this anyway, so, you know, never mind I guess.

Do you actually care what Coco Loko is? You do not. Not really. Come on.

Then again, I totally understand the universally desperate need for any sort of distraction from the Trumpocalypse, so here you go: Coco Loko is a flavored, “infused” snuff made with cocoa powder and a bunch of other stuff, and it’s sold in a little tin for about 25 bucks and it was “invented” by a pseudo-clever millennial kid from Florida, who actually didn’t invent it at all and just swiped the idea from some YouTube clips he saw of not very bright club kids in Europe snorting something similar.

Did you get that? Because nothing says “quality health product” like Eurotrash club kids, Florida, and millennial.

Is Coco Loko a big deal? It’s not a big deal. Is it “a thing?” It’s not really a thing. It’s just a modern iteration of snuff, the classic tobacco product that’s been around since the 17th century (if not far earlier, in tribal cultures), just another dumb head-shop product that only caught the attention of the Interweb and a handful of MSM outlets due to the inclusion of everyone’s favorite dietary supplement, chocolate.

Clever! But not really. And certainly no worse for you than those giant tubs of terrifying health powders and bizarro, heart-stopping supplements you can buy at your local GNC. Or from Pfizer.

But this is why “What to know about snortable chocolate” is actually a headline you can read in 2017, on places like Rolling Stone and CNN and Time magazine and, well, right here, because we do not have enough nightmare hell to endure right now. “OMG who will think of the children?!” And so on.

To make matters worse (though to make sales much better), a grumpy politician quickly jumped into the fray, and it was, sadly, none other than the Dems’ own “Grandpa” Chuck Schumer, who took a break from flinging not-nearly-angry-enough anti-Trump tweets to actually call on the FDA to investigate Coco Loko, even though the stuff is perfectly legal and the FDA has no authority to regulate such products – and Schumer, like all politicians trying to speak authoritatively about drugs and youth culture, just sounds like a clueless old fool.

“I can’t think of a single parent who thinks it is a good idea for their children to be snorting over-the-counter stimulants up their noses,” Schumer actually said, apparently not realizing that’s not a question anyone was asking.

“This product is like cocaine on training wheels,” he added – which, of course, if you’re a Florida party kid who can’t afford coke, sounds totally awesome and makes the product more cool, not less. After all, nothing like some old guy in a suit who wears half-reading glasses 24/7 scolding kids and telling them not to do something, to make them want it even more. Couldn’t ask for better publicity, really.

Wait, maybe grandpa Chuck is getting kickbacks from Loko? Is there conspiracy afoot? I smell collusion! Or rather, I snort it! I hear that’s the cool thing to do.

 

Mark Morford has been providing hyper-literate, award-winning commentary and cultural criticism to the San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate since 1998, which probably astounds him more than it does you. He’s also one of the Bay Area’s premier yoga instructors, leading classes, workshops and retreats in SF and around the world since 2001. Read his latest stories, follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or just visit markmorford.com for the whole of it. Email him here.