Kimberly Steele

I grew up in the lap of plenty. I was born in the early 70s in a home for unwed mothers on the north side of Chicago. I was promptly adopted to a wealthy suburb and brought up amongst the daughters and sons of Fermilab and Argonne scientists. Several of my classmates had fathers who ran large home-building companies. Post-graduate degrees were commonplace on the block where I grew up. My parents, in contrast, did not go to college and neither did any of their ancestors.

I have not seen much of the world. I have only left home briefly and I did not go far or stay very long. I may be blinded to certain realities because of my under-traveled status. I have a difficult time picturing a future that doesn’t involve more of the same. I cannot imagine what catastrophic collapse looks like and because I cannot imagine what it looks like, I have no way to prepare.

Our civilization has an apocalypse fetish. I think large masses of people believe in an apocalypse, be it religious, environmental, or zombie in nature, because that gives them a mental failsafe when they get too close with confronting the fact they are not making the change they want to see in the world. We can all sense that there is something terribly wrong with modernity, and there are many who seek to remedy their anxiety over the wrongness with compulsive shopping. Preparedness is the latest in compulsive shopping trends: witness the surging sales of MREs and toilet paper. I am not immune to the squirrely impulse: I have enough beans and rice to last until next July.

Don’t get jealous of me though — I am going to run out of almost everything, starting with cat food, if SHTF and I don’t make enough excess cash after expenses to do a damn thing about it. Maybe it’s that I just cannot believe the current system will come to an end in any meaningful way.

Recently I have been battling my own anger over “the way it is”. This anger is nothing new: I was first aware of it at age ten. When I was 10, a group of idiots in my suburban town decided to build four gigantic malls on a hilly area where kids used to ride their bikes and generally just mess around. The area was in the southernmost corner of the town. There was no point in building the mall as we already had one in a neighboring suburb to the north. During the 80s and 90s, I watched in horror as mall after mall was erected, only to languish in semi or full abandonment. Malls were joined by half empty office parks, car dealerships, gas stations, and housing developments. Like everyone else, I was given the binary choice to beat ‘em (impossible) or join ‘em. I ended up joining them: my commercial space is run out of a strip mall despite passionate efforts to create a work/storefront of the type that is common in Europe and used to be common in small town USA.

I did not join ‘em in another key respect, and that was a dodged bullet. I never took a salary class job and I married a man who got kicked out of the salary class back down into the working class after a brief stint. We haven’t faced vaccine pressures because I own my own business and my husband’s company isn’t the fancy, aspirational type that forces vaccines on its employees.

The salary class has slashed its collective wrists and gone jogging. Blood is strewn across sidewalks and forms sticky pools on the chemically-treated lawn yet the salary class is nowhere near dying as a way of life. A person like me who was only ever in the lowest of low echelons of the salary class cannot understand the wealth of the upper middle class. There are people who have never had to worry about skipping a meal to save money and frankly I’ll never truly get them. They can hemorrhage money and not feel it. That is what is happening now, I think. The upper middle class is being squeezed just as hard as the middle and lower middle class, but they haven’t felt any form of hurt because they still have plenty to put gas in their cars, to pay their inflated utility bills, and to travel to the usual destinations now that they’ve had their double vaccine shot and possible booster. There are still FOR SALE signs on the little patches of cornfield that are all that remains of the previous millennium. Starbucks still has people who wait in line for their overpriced milkshakes. Salary class kids are still going off to university in search of useless degrees so they can become obedient office fauna like their parents before them.

Does it end within my lifetime? Will there ever be a system that does not mercilessly exclude and ritually humiliate those not “lucky” enough to be born in the salary class?

Real estate prices don’t seem to point in a good direction where the average lower middle class plebe is concerned. The main reason that creatives aren’t out there creating their own small businesses is because the cost is far too high to get anything started. It is only through sheer force of will and a disproportionate amount of luck that I am able to keep my own music lesson business running. If I had chosen to have children I would not have time to do what I do. Even now, I fight every month to keep my business open in the face of my state’s freakout about the Nothingburger Flu. Small businesses are impossible to start because the landlords charge too much and the banks wouldn’t have it any other way. The result is 24.5 square feet of retail space for every man, woman, and child. We paved paradise to put up a parking lot, or at least they did and we went along with it.

What does it take to bring the system down? I have said to myself that todays malls are tomorrow’s slums. Sometimes I soothe my mind with the vision of saplings bursting through the former entryway of Whole Foods, with an entire family of deer chilling in what used to be the gluten-free display. I still cannot genuinely picture it happening within my lifetime, and I plan on living 40-50 more years.

I found James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand books amusing in their unreality. At no time was I able to suspend my disbelief in his world of country dances and grumpy men pushing their cars down the street for lack of gas. I know that we are in decline and the heavily industrialized world as I knew it is going away and never coming back. I know that I had better enjoy plantains, pineapple, and avocados while I still can. I know the industrialized world in its current state cannot last and yet the (digitally recorded, quantized, sampled) beat goes on. I'm doing my best to create the analog version.