Inflection Points

Reflection on inflection points occurring across seven decades is telling. Having just entered the workforce during the Vietnam War as a teenager working part time, inflection points of that conflict and surrounding economics had little impact on me overall, aside from expectations that I would soon die in a foreign jungle taking fire at point on pointless patrol.

Then I began working for a living just as a clueless, inept peanut farmer with delusions of being a great leader managed to get elected into the highest office of the land. Surviving that period of dismality while working fulltime and attending college just over a decade, I entered the professional workforce shortly after Black Monday struck markets. Surviving that stretch of economic crisis, my career rocked along well until the Dot Com Bubble Burst which cost me a recently hard-won location change moving further westward. Fortunately I had just purchased a homestead property inbedded in remote wilderness and had begun improving that raw land for purposes of surviving whatever the U.S. government brought down on me next. That plan worked out extremely well, providing essential and ideal isolation from negative effects of The Great Recession and SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic. But then the USFS arsonists came along playing with fire when they barely had sense enough to wipe their own asses and destroyed twenty-two years of an excellent off-grid wilderness existence.

None of these pivots have been mere trigger events. All have been moments when steady accumulation of cultural, economic, or technological shifts reached critical mass, fundamentally changing the trajectory of our society here in the USA. Still more will happen.

As yet another pointless, endless war ramps up (no, it will not end today as the convicted felon in the White House claims it will) while consumer debt edges up to $20 trillion and national debt edges up to $40 trillion (over $31 trillion of which is held by the public), prospects for another harmful inflection point in life are high. Still recovering from the negative effects of multiple USFS acts of arson, I sense dreadful stormclouds growing ahead.