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We are in the middle of one of the largest bubbles in history, and it’s getting ready to pop. Maybe. All economic bubbles are irrational, but there’s something different about the AI bubble that may allow it to defy economic reality (temporarily), and it’s not clear how dangerous this will be. What happens if a bubble bursts but then keeps inflating anyway? Presumably nothing good.
Let me set the stage for you here, and please bear in mind I am no Paul Krugman. I’ll do my best to be a huge nerd, though. :)
OK, the tech giants are betting big on AI. This, we all know because they won’t shut the fuck up about it. What you might not be aware of is that they’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, many many hundreds of billions, in a race to develop and deploy artificial intelligence. Whoever wins the race wins…everything. That’s the idea here.
The chart below shows the changes between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2025 in real GDP and some of its components. Investment in information processing equipment — which at this point basically means data centers — accounted for more than half of overall growth, more than consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the economy:
That’s over $80 billion just in Q2 of this year. So far, the tech fucks have dropped $155 billion this year, and they’re INCREASING the amount of money being spent. By 2028, they’ll be blowing well over half a trillion a year on AI.
So all of the money you and I spend on movies and groceries and toys and clothes and books and eating out and and and? All of that money is being dwarfed by the tech fucks on data centers to create their alleged all-powerful AIs.
Even as our spending drops because Trump and his party of imbeciles have killed the strongest economy in half a century, the techbros are ramping up their spending. It’s a mind-boggling amount of money.
And it’s not working.
You may have noticed that Google search today, compared to just three years ago, is trash. It’s about as trustworthy as Donald Trump around a 14-year-old girl and a bottle of Viagra. But, hey, those are just vibes, right? What do we stupid civilians know? AI is obviously a game-changer for Corporate America and they’re making bank on it!
Wall Street's biggest fear was validated by a recent MIT study indicating that 95% of organizations studied get zero return on their AI investment.
Why it matters: Investors have put up with record AI spend from tech companies because they expect record returns, eventually. This study calls those returns into question, which could be an existential risk for a market that's overly tied to the AI narrative.
Driving the news: MIT researchers studied 300 public AI initiatives to try and suss out the "no hype reality" of AI's impact on business, Aditya Challapally, research contributor to project NANDA at MIT, tells Axios.
95% of organizations found zero return despite enterprise investment of $30 billion to $40 billion into GenAI, the study says.
So AI doesn’t work on the user level and…it doesn’t work on the corporate level. That doesn’t seem to be a good reason to set half a trillion dollars on fire per year.
Then there are big picture issues of energy and resources. AI requires massive amounts of electricity to run, and the systems the tech fucks are planning far exceed what the grid can handle. Even as they race to build nuclear power plants to power their bloated data centers, AI will chew up an increasingly larger amount of what IS available, increasing the cost of electricity for everyone else:1
Individuals may end up footing some of the bill for this AI revolution, according to new research published in March. The researchers, from Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative, analyzed agreements between utility companies and tech giants like Meta that govern how much those companies will pay for power in massive new data centers. They found that discounts utility companies give to Big Tech can raise the electricity rates paid by consumers. In some cases, if certain data centers fail to attract the promised AI business or need less power than expected, ratepayers could still be on the hook for subsidizing them. A 2024 report from the Virginia legislature estimated that average residential ratepayers in the state could pay an additional $37.50 every month in data center energy costs.
“The recipe for chocolate pudding is milk and four pounds of mud.”
Oh, and don’t forget the fresh water data centers guzzle. They’re draining it faster than Fox News drains the IQ points of its audience. That’s going to be unsustainable in the long run as fresh water becomes scarcer due to the climate change the tech pricks are making worse.
Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:
Alright, so the tech doesn’t work right, it requires too many resources to be practical, and the return on investment is all but non-existent. Also, it’s possibly the most expensive technology ever developed, and it is almost single-handedly propping up the economy.
This is the definition of a bubble and the press and the market are starting to sour on it:
What happens next? Normally, the bubble pops, the economy crashes and we all get very mad at immigrants. Just kidding. Sort of.2
But these are not normal times.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll probably have some idea that the tech fucks are, quite literally, insane. They believe, REALLY believe, that they will become immortal digital gods and the rest of humanity can fuck off and die as long as they achieve their goal of silicon life eternal.
Émile P. Torres and Kate Willett do a far better job of digging into the religion/cult of Silicon Valley, but for the purposes of this article, it’s important to understand that this religion/cult is very widespread in the tech world and has a very tight grip on a lot of very powerful people.
The key to all of their beliefs is the birth of true AI. It’s literally their messiah. True AI, a program that is truly intelligent, not just programmed to carry out tasks faster than humans, will, the theory goes, be able to create more advanced AI. That more advanced AI will create an even more advanced AI, and so on until we have a super-intelligent AI beyond anything humans can possibly comprehend. This event is called “The Singularity,” and it’s what the techbros are feverishly working towards.
A super-intelligent AI would be able to solve just about any problem, specifically, how to make humans immortal digital gods, blablabla.
Do you see the problem here?
The billionaires who own the companies pouring hundreds of millions into a broken technology do not care about the money they are losing. They don’t care about profits. They don’t care about the economy or the environment or how many people they will harm or kill in the process.
They literally believe they are building God, and when they do, they will be rewarded with eternal life.
So, how does a bubble collapse if the people inflating it won’t allow it to collapse? This is what is freaking me out, and something I have not seen anyone discussing. The people who discuss the cult of Silicon Valley have not been discussing the economic ramifications of their bubble. The people who discuss the bubble do not appear aware of the Silicon Valley cult. I really REALLY need these two circles on the Venn diagram to overlap and figure out what happens next because I feel like the results are going to be catastrophic beyond anything I can imagine.
No bubble can stay inflated forever, and the longer the tech shits keep it going artificially, the worse the crash is going to be when they finally hit the wall of reality. Worse, when they finally run out of other people’s money to spend on their dream of immortality (God forbid they bankrupt themselves!), they’re going to face the awful truth: They will not become immortal digital gods.
What is the one thing we know about rich white men when they don’t get what they want? They lash out and destroy everything around them. So how do you think these entitled, insane, and deeply fascist billionaire assholes are going to respond when they realize that the cold, icy hand of death is going to claim them just like all of the pathetic little “NPCs” they’ve spent their lives sneering at?
Yeah, not well.
I’d rather not wait to find out what the next temper tantrum of the Silicon Valley death cult looks like. The pro-fascist human extinction tantrum we’re living through right now is more than enough, thank you very much.
When we topple the regime, and we will, one of our top priorities has to be kicking down the doors of the doomsday bunkers of all the tech fucks and putting them in prison for the rest of their lives. They need to be kept far away from their money and power, ensuring they can never inflict their diseased worldview on us again.
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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!
The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 66 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.
That’s on top of the Trump regime gutting the very renewables that could have mitigated this strain because climate change is a hoax and windmills make Orange King sad.
I was recently part of an online discussion that asked this question. People were talking about industry, democracy, civil society, world leadership, you name it. But nobody was asking the obvious question: when, in fact, will the sun set on the United States?
Yes, I’m going there.
As we all know, the continental United States has four time zones:
— so when the sun sets in Seattle today, at 7:54 PM, it will be nearly midnight in New York or Miami.
However! There’s much, much more to the US than just the 48 contiguous or “continental” states. Let’s zoom out a little:
You’ll notice there’s a pale green band to the east of the US, covering Canada’s Maritime Provinces and a lot of the Caribbean. This is “Atlantic Time”, and it’s one hour ahead of the US East Coast. And if you enlarge or peer closely, you’ll see that there are two United States possessions — Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands — down in the lower right-hand corner. So that’s a fifth time zone.
Meanwhile, to the /west/ of the continental USA is Alaska. And Alaska is so huge that it covers two time zones. “Mainland” Alaska is an hour behind California and the US West Coast, while the Aleutian Islands are two hours behind.
[Adak National Forest, Aleutian Islands. If you know, you know.]
Most of the state of Hawaii is also in this time zone, which is cleverly named the “Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone”. So when the sun sets in Honolulu at 6:50 PM tonight, it will already be nearly 2 AM in Puerto Rico.
But we’re not done yet. Continuing west, in the central Pacific we find Midway Atoll and, a couple of thousand kilometers to the south, the lovely islands of American Samoa (or AmSam, as the cool kids say). Both are United States possessions — American Samoans are US nationals, thank you very much — and both are an hour behind Hawaii.
And we’re still not quite done. Because far out in the empty wastes of the blue Pacific are Howland Island and Baker Island. Located about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, these small uninhabited islands are US possessions — formally, they’re “United States Minor Outlying Islands”. Baker Island is a US National Wildlife Refuge.
And they’re another hour further west — two hours behind Hawaii.
Wow, nine time zones! Are we done?
Not quite. Because if we now skip over a time zone and jump back /two/ hours, we will find ourselves in the western Pacific — the same time zone as most of Australia and the Russian Far East. And here we will find more American territory: Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI). Despite being way the heck over on the far side of the Pacific, much closer to Shanghai or Manila than to California or even Hawaii, these are all US islands inhabited by US citizens.
So in total, from the Caribbean to the CNMI, the USA stretches across an eye-watering 11 time zones.
The capital and largest island of the CNMI is Saipan. And when the sun sets on Saipan at 7:17 PM tonight, it will be 5:17 AM in the US Virgin Islands. The sun will rise there at 6:04 AM. So — it seems — there will be about 45 minutes of night on America. 11 time zones is a lot, but it’s not quite enough. Maybe the Sun never set on the British Empire, but it does set on the USA, at least sometimes.
(I actually checked to see if adding territorial waters would make a difference. That gives us an extra 12 miles each way. Nope — it only adds another couple of minutes of sunshine. Adding the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone would nearly do it, but that would be, in my opinion, cheating.)
[actual Saipan sunset, yes it really looks like that]
But wait! The United States also extends quite far /north/. Its northernmost point is at Point Barrow, on the northernmost coast of Alaska. Point Barrow is about nine miles / 15 km north of the surprisingly large and busy town of Utqiagvik, which is pronounced like it’s spelled. If you fly into Utqiagvik — you can’t drive there, no road reaches it — it’s easy to get a ride up to Point Barrow, weather permitting.
At over 71 degrees north, Point Barrow is well above the Arctic Circle. This means it is in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Specifically, it means that the Sun stays above the horizon for months at a time, from April through August.
Right now, the Sun is spiraling lower and lower. It’s grazing the horizon for several hours per day. But it hasn’t actually set, not quite yet. It won’t formally, officially go down for a few more days: September 5, 2025.
And so at last we have our answer. When will the sun set on the United States of America?
Trump’s Orwellian Propaganda Is Now In Full Bloom, and It Is Delusional
Donald Trump’s takeover and takedown of rules, law and culture are only widening, furthering deep divisions and putting U.S. intelligence capabilities, democratic principles and independence, the supremacy of law and even elections at risk of irrelevance to his unending demand for power.
For those who have feared autocracy and abuse of power, the era has already arrived. For those who see cruelty in this administration’s actions, and elements of “fascism” that parallel other autocracies and Naziism in the 1930s, Trump is delivering on a near-daily basis now — including public acknowledgement that Americans want a dictator, which he says he isn’t, to lower street crime.
The redistricting madness combined with attacks on voting laws, mail-in ballots, and state conduct of elections is not only supposed to be beyond Trump’s authority but attack the republic itself.
Trump’s attacks on businesses, colleges, museums, the constant need to rewrite history, the widening of immigrant deportations and the presence or promise of military in the streets now being honed to stop civil protest all are setting off screams of dissent.
Even Trump fans are starting to react as they recognize ill effects of policies that are cutting public health care benefits while consumer prices rise, and Trump oversteps protected First Amendment rights, extorts ownership positions in private companies and covers up whatever ill information is being hidden in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
If you were writing to a faraway friend, you would be describing a nation caught in constant tension, of fraught effects and feelings as embers of ethnic hate are enflamed and identity populations are turned against one another. The message: In a time of growing chaos, there is one Dear Leader to heed, and that’s why we should recognize huge Trump portraits being unfurled on the sides of federal buildings and the constant turn to Trump Social posts for daily announcements as signs of growing dictatorship.
Daily Challenges
The daily specifics hardly seem to matter — to Trump and, increasingly to a numbed public. Each bleeds into the next, along with the inevitable court challenges that start strong and get watered down through appeals months later.
Using a public White House meeting with the president of ally South Korea to praise the dictator of North Korea only makes sense in a Trump-ordered world. Declaring flag burning a crime as desecration but putting Trump campaigns on flags would be hypocrisy writ-large outside of this White House.
Of course, Trump crossed the law by firing Lisa Cook from the Fed board; it’s beyond his legal power to do so, even if Trump sees the move as pressuring for lower interest rates. But as with tariffs, immigration orders, federalizing National Guard troops, Trump doesn’t hesitate. Trump simply dares the rest of us to stop him. There are enough justices on the Supreme Court to let him do most whatever he wants in his count.
For sure, putting masked federal agents on the streets of Washington and placing 2,200 armed National Guardsmen and their equipment is a public relations show and not an effective crime stopper. But Trump is telling us what is happening and threatening the licenses or economics of any news organization that says different.
Threats, fear, extortion, pressure are prime tools for Trump. It turns out he needs the world’s most lethal military not because we have actual enemies overseas, but because he wants to aim those weapons at Black mayors and Democratic mayors. In Trump World, optics are everything, and the resulting absurdity of (illegally) renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War makes perfect sense to ensure that his political foes recognize that they are targeted enemies. Unable to win his own Kennedy Center honors for being a reality show figure, he has needed to take over the whole complex and show, pick loyalists as winners, and name himself the host.
Scrambling Aftermath
What we do get from news reports is the sense of scramble among states, agencies, and localities to clean up the aftermath of Trump executive order bombardments that may be based on little relevant information. So we’re smashing FEMA emergency responders and National Weather Service capabilities just as we enter hurricane season in a climate-changing environment. We are canceling wind and solar energy production just as we are hearing of huge gaps coming for electric grids to meet the needs of Artificial Intelligence and Trump’s newly converted love and personal investment in cyber trading. Moving against vaccines as a new Covid outbreak lurks seems nuts.
Trump is so busy telling us about the wars he has settled that he misses the point that almost none of the claimed settlements is working. Worse, he refuses to face down Russia in Europe, or to either force Hamas to release hostages or for the Israeli government to deal with the starvation it is causing in Gaza or the land-grabbing in the West Bank.
Trump may aspire for greatness but only offers solutions that fit on hats. He solves nothing.
Lest the day pass without Trump declarations, he is telling us that slavery is less important and less distressing for our history than our museums tell us, and that it somehow is the job for all Americans to look past job numbers or prices to recognize the bright new day on the horizon.
Trump’s Orwellian propaganda is now in full bloom, and it is delusional.
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Reading the news these last few days feels like being in the depths of a fever. RFK Jr. fires CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate only a month ago, because she refused to go along with his new COVID vaccine policy. She refuses to leave her job, her lawyer telling Kennedy that only the president can fire her, so Trump steps in last night and slams the door on Monarez, a spokesman saying she is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Yes, the capitalized words are in the official statement.
All this after Kennedy moved to limit access to the new COVID vaccine to people over 65 or those who “have other health problems,” according to NPR. Tuesday at Trump’s Praiseworthy cabinet meeting, Kennedy informed his fellow ignoramuses that in September, he will have autism all figured out. This after he announced to the world that the Hepatitis B vaccine should not be given to infants because it is for “prostitutes and promiscuous gay men.”
It’s tempting to say that you can’t make this stuff up, but then, the policies being implemented by Trump’s entire administration fit that description. In fact, it’s impossible to come up with a list of all the outrages perpetrated by this gaggle of criminally negligent incompetents. The New York Times and the Washington Post are regularly criticized for not keeping up with reporting on the damage being done by Trump and his acolytes.
We have entered a time and space separate from the reality of this earth in the here and now. The closest I can come to describing it is having a high fever, when you drift off into a nether world of being neither awake nor hallucinating. It happened to me in the hospital back in January when I came down with a particularly bad case of the flu. It felt like I couldn’t sleep or stay awake. Until the fever broke, I was in a state of abnormal consciousness.
That is where we are right now. Because what is happening to the world we live in should not be allowed to happen, we cannot get an adequate grasp on ourselves or our surroundings. It seems unreal that a maniacal anti-vaxxer and former drug addict who has been accused of “forcibly groping” a family babysitter and has spent the last decade or more papering the planet with lies about vaccines is running the 80,000 employee Department of Health and Human Services. He is a man who felt compelled to issue a written apology to the woman in question – by text message, naturally. Now this abusive monster is making decisions that will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, from infants to the elderly, according to every medical and health policy expert anyone has ever interviewed.
You are not hallucinating. This is really happening. People are coming down with pertussis – whooping cough – 35,000 cases last year, the highest number in decades. There have been 6,600 cases of pertussis so far this year, more than four times the number of cases at the same time last year, according to CNN. Unvaccinated children are dying of this disease – six under the age of one year during 2024 alone. Kennedy has said he wants vaccinations to be “voluntary.” They’re trying that in Louisiana, the governor announcing that the state will no longer “promote vaccines.” Two children have died in Louisiana from pertussis. A hundred and ten came down with the terrible disease in the first three months of this year, almost as many as the number of cases for all of last year.
And pertussis is only one disease easily preventable by vaccination.
You must use numbers to catalog the statistics for pertussis, for measles, for COVID. But numbers are not enough. An infant with whooping cough frequently comes down with pneumonia. The baby’s coughing is so severe, it makes putting them on a ventilator more difficult. “They just never stop coughing,” Dr. John Schieffelin, associate professor of pediatrics at Tulane University told CNN. “They’re just coughing so much, they can’t eat, they can’t drink.”
Try to think of that for a moment. He’s talking about a baby less than a year old, a little thing you could hold with one hand. The baby is coughing and coughing so hard that it can’t breathe. The hospital throws every machine they’ve got at the little baby. Nothing works. The baby’s parents are standing in the hall on the other side of a glass window, watching as the baby’s body stops convulsing and dies.
You look at the perpetually angry face of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You are not hallucinating. He went on Fox News after the firing of the CDC director and the resignations yesterday of four top CDC officials in protest. This is what Kennedy told the salivating hosts of Fox News about the CDC this morning. “The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it. It may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”
According to Kennedy and Donald Trump, it may be that a pill used to treat roundworm in large animals like horses and cows will cure measles and COVID. It may be that changing your diet and eating healthy food and exercising more will cure your infertility, as we learned the Department of Health and Human Services is considering as an alternative to IVF this week. It may be that measles can be cured with cod liver oil and hot compresses on the forehead.
It may be that we are not hallucinating, but what is happening right now in Washington D.C. is causing us to lose our minds. And it may be our minds are not all we will lose.
The patient is running a fever. The patient may live, or the patient may die. We may know “in a matter of two weeks,” as Donald Trump is fond of telling us. Or we may be arrested and spirited off to a cage in a concentration camp somewhere, and no one – not our family, not our friends, not even our lawyer – will know where we are or what is being done to us.
You are not hallucinating. This is real.
I got up the morning and Kenney’s enraged face was in half the stories in my newsfeed. I had to write about this bizarre moment. To support my work trying to keep up with these monstrosities, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
The National Guard ending crime in Washington D.C.: Fox News
I don’t know exactly where it is, but somewhere in the Bible, there has got to be a verse that says, First God created work; then he created make-work. It took exactly two weeks for the 2,200 National Guard soldiers deployed in Washington D.C. to hit the make-work stage. Today, uniformed National Guard soldiers were seen in the touristy areas of the District in orange and yellow safety vests picking up trash. More soldiers were laboring over near the Tidal Basin raking mulch. The Washington Post reported that 200 employees of the Park Service used to do those jobs, but Elon Musk and DOGE came to town and decimated the Park Service, and now there are only 20.
So, with a couple thousand Army guys standing around doing nothing, the White House said, let’s put them to use. Or maybe nobody had to say anything. That’s the way make-work works. Yesterday, at his three and a half hour Praise Our Lord Trump Fest of a cabinet meeting, Trump announced that he had solved the D.C. crime problem. Someone at the White House clearly noticed that there was starting to be some reporting, complete with pictures and video, showing soldiers standing around D.C. street corners and hanging around the Mall doing nothing. A bureaucratic tendency quickly came to life: What you do with vacuums containing nothing is, well, you fill them, and if you can’t come up with anything to fill the vacuums with, then you fill them with nothing, which is the very definition of make-work.
With a guy like Trump, that’s easy. If you’re an ass-kissing underling eager to make the boss happy – in other words, the entirety of the current Executive Branch – you quickly examine the boss’ obsessions, another thing that’s easy to do, since he comes up with a new one about every three minutes, and harps on his older obsessions during the two minutes in between. Our nation’s capital isn’t beautiful enough for him, so he’s been going on about “beautification.” There is trash on the streets and in the parks. Something is wrong with the “traffic medians” – he doesn’t say exactly what the problem is, but trust me, there is an entire floor of the Executive Office building trying to figure it out, so they can do something to fix “the medians” and make him happy.
The way it works in the Army is the way it’s working in Washington D.C. right now. What you do is, you clean and polish everywhere the boss is likely to walk, drive, or observe from a helicopter. Soldiers are dispatched to pick up trash along the road the commander drives to work every day. On Army posts, the “main drag,” as it’s called, from the post gate to the headquarters building, is groomed to within an inch of its life, the same with the roads taken by lesser commanders to their headquarters – grass cut to a measured height of inches, sidewalk edges trimmed, trash picked up, signs straightened so they’re perfectly vertical, fresh paint on every visible surface.
At the commanders’ headquarters, the nit-picking gets real nitty. Names of commander and staff are stenciled on parking spots; rocks chosen for the perfection of their size and roundness are painted white to line the sidewalks.
In Washington D.C. right now, metaphorically the National Guard is painting rocks. Trump’s obsession with traffic medians doubtlessly comes from the infrequent occasions he is stuffed into the back of his bulletproof SUV appropriately called “The Beast” and driven the few blocks necessary to get him to a location such as the Federal Reserve headquarters, to give a recent example. Traffic medians efficiently move the traffic from lane to lane. Trump’s security convoys create lanes and efficiencies of their own, of course, so medians must appear superfluous to him. Or perhaps they are unsightly. Or maybe he saw a Starbucks cup resting against a median curb one time. Who knows.
But he is the Big Boss now, boys, so we’re going to do what the Boss wants. Pick up that Starbucks cup! Groom that mulch! Move that median! It’s in the President’s way!
There is, believe it or not, an upside to Trump’s egotistical claims like his two-week “solving” of the D.C. crime problem. It has to do with his need for approbation and the worship of underlings. The astounding brevity of his attention span plays a major role as well. No problem is so difficult that it can’t be “solved” by Trumpian genius in the blink of an eye, don’t you know.
No matter what he does, Trump moves along to the next thing. Right now, it’s violent crime. Put some armed soldiers on the streets, and it goes away…at least where it’s visible to him, anyway. In Southeast D.C. on the other side of the Anacostia River, where no National Guard soldier has apparently yet set foot, and where actual crimes are an actual problem – well, it’s not on the route taken by “The Beast,” is it? Of course not, so forget it.
It's all a show, and it’s all for ratings. That’s the way Trump lived every day of his life in New York City. He had to be in the tabloid gossip columns in order to breathe. The way he measured “success” when he was on “The Apprentice” was by his ratings. Ratings and polls still rule his day, his week, his month.
He used to pick up the phone and call the desk at “Page Six” in the New York Post and pretend to be a publicist pitching himself as an item for that day. He dined at this restaurant; he was seen with that starlet; he made a deal; he was on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.
Now he picks up the phone and tells Hegseth to put two thousand National Guard soldiers on the street. Then he complains about the Starbucks cup he saw from the backseat of “The Beast” and 500 of those soldiers are carrying black plastic bags and picking up sandwich wrappers and Starbucks cups and soft drink cans.
Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” got it so right: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The only thing missing in that genius lyric is “at Donald Trump’s White House.”
Sometimes things get so disheartening, it seems it will never end. We will make it end. To support my work trying to bring an end to this madness, please consider buying a paid subscription.
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Ogre Note: This is a reprint of an article I wrote for The Banter in 2023 about my autistic son, Jordan. It has been lightly edited and is kind of necessary for the follow-up article I am publishing later this week.
Most parents get to send their kids off to college/trade school/the military/work/etc, when they’re 18 or so. That doesn’t mean their job as parents is done, but it does mean that, if they’ve done it correctly, the bulk of their work is behind them. They can look forward to a well-earned retirement from full-time parenting and the unique stresses involved. They can, hopefully, see their children chart their own path with only the occasional helping hand from the parental units.
When you are the parent of a special needs child, particularly one with significant learning and social disabilities, you don’t get to look forward to the future. You learn to dread it with every fiber of your being.
Jordan is 15. The dread has settled in and grows Every. Fucking. Day.
Who has time for the 5 stages of grief?
I’ve written about this before, but when Jordan was diagnosed with autism, Mrs. Ogre and I skipped the first four stages of grief. Denial? Don’t be ridiculous. Jordan was clearly impacted by something. Anger? Anger at who? For what? We didn’t understand enough about autism to be angry. Bargaining? Neither Mrs. Ogre nor I is religious, so there was no praying to a higher power to make it all not be true. Depression? There was no time for that. The learning curve for autism and the city services involved was steep, and we had work to do.
And work we did. Mrs. Ogre’s skill set came in extremely handy as we had reams of forms and paperwork to go through. While it was all gibberish to me, Mrs. Ogre cut through it like a samurai. My skill set came in handy as we found ourselves essentially abandoned after we told our friends and family about Jordan’s diagnosis. Mrs. Ogre is not good at being alone, and the isolation was taxing. I, on the other hand, can go months without seeing another human besides my immediate family and not blink an eye.
Thus, Mrs. Ogre was perfectly suited to getting Jordan the services he needed, and I was perfectly suited to taking care of a special needs child as a stay-at-home parent with a nonexistent support structure.
That doesn’t mean the grief didn’t catch up to us eventually. Every now and then, Mrs. Ogre would break down crying over the unfairness of it. We would take turns cursing autism. We swore bloody murder if we ever discovered some corporation knew what was causing it and had buried the information the way Big Tobacco had done with cigarettes and cancer.
You’d think that as time went by, it would get easier. You would be wrong. Unlike losing a loved one, the pain doesn’t fade. Every day we see Jordan, and every day is a reminder of what was taken from him, and from us, by autism. He’s 15. Jordan should be on the phone with his friends, playing video games or sports, or asking me for $20 to go get a smoothie with a girl he likes. He doesn’t do any of that and he never will.
When Jordan was maybe 10, it really sunk in that he was never going to be able to take care of himself. I knew it intellectually, but it caught up to me emotionally while I was talking to Lila’s mom, Claudia (Lila being our surrogate daughter and Claudia being our best friend). Claudia, a product of her environment, is emotionally constipated, but she resisted the urge to run away screaming from “feelings.” She managed to stand there as I fell apart and literally let me cry on her shoulder. She must have wanted to die, but I felt better afterwards.
But the dread never went away. It had settled in and continued to grow. I am far from the only parent of a special needs child to experience this unique horror.
The future of Jordan
My wife and I talk about this. A lot. The immediate future is pretty straightforward. Jordan will be in school until he is 21. After that, the city of Arlington will help find him a job that fits his temperament and capabilities. There are numerous adult services here, and Jordan will almost certainly qualify for those.
By this point, we’ll have gone to court to take legal guardianship of him as an adult. That’s a thing you have to do for special needs adults who are incapable of making their own legal and medical decisions. Otherwise, if Jordan were to get sick or be in an accident after the age of 18, we wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
Jordan will also be on Medicaid, we hope. That’s the program that covers special needs adults who cannot take care of themselves. This was not entirely welcome news since Medicaid supersedes Mrs. Ogre’s much better insurance. We were kind of hoping it would be the other way around, but we have to apply for the Medicaid waiver now. It takes years for a waiver to process, and we can’t risk Jordan not having coverage if Mrs. Ogre and I fall down an open manhole.
And then…that will be Jordan’s life for a while. We could look into a group home for adults with special needs but the idea of sending Jordan in his early 20s to live somewhere? Well, that’s not happening. When Jordan is 21, his mother will be 59 and I’ll be 56. When Mrs. Ogre retires at or around 62, Jordan will only be 24. He’ll have long been an adult biologically but mentally? If we’re very lucky, he may be in his mid-teens.
Here’s the thing about Jordan: while his progress has been painfully slow, he is still progressing. He can speak, write, read, and use a computer, all at a stunted level but effectively. And more so than a few years ago. He is starting to ask “Why” questions, something that has been notoriously difficult for him, much like the concept of time used to be. Jordan still can’t tell you how long five minutes is but he knows how many days of school he has left in a week and if you tell him something is happening on a certain day, he understands that now. Progress.
But progress today is not a guarantee of progress tomorrow. Jordan could continue to grow until he’s the functional equivalent of the teenager he currently is as opposed to a very tall 10 or 11-year-old. The one who looks at pictures of women in bathrobes and K-pop idols online because he hasn’t discovered porn yet (and probably won’t any time soon, if ever). Or Jordan could hit a wall and this is who he will be for the rest of his life. What does that look like?
I already know, and it haunts me every minute of every day.
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Once, when I was an assistant manager at the Green Acres Mall Gamestop back in the late 90s, long before we had kids, or even talked about it, I was on break. I had picked up some McDonald’s and had set up to chill in the stockroom to read a book and eat. But first, I went to use the bathroom. When I came back, a middle-aged man was standing there, drinking my soda. I didn’t know who he was and he clearly didn’t belong there. He didn’t look homeless and he wasn’t stealing anything (other than my soda), but something was off about the way he was standing and drinking, so I didn’t immediately start cursing at him at the top of my lungs.
I did say something, however, since A. He didn’t belong in my stockroom and B. He was drinking my soda. He, a man in his 40s or possibly 50s, started to call for his daddy and crying that he had a stomachache. Like most people, I had (at the time), very limited interactions with special needs kids, much less adults. I didn’t really know what to do, but it was obvious (to me at least) I was dealing with a child in an adult body. I tried to calm him down and ask where his daddy was, but that got me exactly nowhere. I backed out of the stockroom and called for Steve, my manager at the time.
Before we got any further, his caretaker found us. The man drinking my soda had slipped away from his group, and they had been frantically searching for him. He was led away and that was that. I always thought about how sad it was to be an adult with the mind of a child, crying out for a parent who was probably no longer there or, at the very least, no longer able to care for them.
This is the future of Jordan. Do you understand now the dread?
When we are in our late 60s, maybe our early 70s, Jordan will barely be in his 30s. We could be sprightly, energetic 70-year-olds, still able to care for Jordan. But we could be dead by then, too. Anastasia will be just barely 30 and almost certainly in no position to care for Jordan at home. She’ll have a career, maybe kids. And while Jordan is relatively low-maintenance, he cannot be left home alone for an extended period of time. He simply does not understand how to remove himself from a dangerous situation, like a fire. Or how to call 911 if he’s injured.
So we have a choice. We can keep Jordan home with us as long as possible and risk a sudden decline in our health (or an accident), making it difficult for us to care for him. Or, we can keep him with us until his late 20s and then find him an assisted living home.
Neither option is appealing in the slightest.
Keeping Jordan with us until we can’t care for him anymore means a sudden and unplanned transition. Jordan wouldn’t understand and we wouldn’t have the time to ease him into it. Would he feel abandoned? I don’t know. It breaks my heart to think about it.
It would also mean Anastasia would have to be involved with little to no preparation. She is aware that she will be Jordan’s guardian and advocate for the rest of his life, long after we’re gone. Anastasia has never complained about this, even when we explained that it means she would always have to live close by to wherever Jordan eventually ends up. That if she were to move to another state, she would have to take Jordan with her, a significant complication. Anastasia loves her brother and is, even at the tender at of 13, determined to do right by him.
That doesn’t mean we want to dump it all in her lap at once. We plan (hope) to ease her into her responsibilities over time. Here’s this bit of paperwork. These are the people you’ll be dealing with. Here’s how the state laws affect his medical care. By the time we reach our sunset years, Anastasia should be taking care of Jordan with us as backup, training wheels if you will.
This option, while the more realistic and less traumatic option, is still soul-crushing. While it’s possible that we will find a place that Jordan loves so much that he wants to live there, it’s far more likely that he will never be truly happy not living at home with mommy and daddy.
It’s true that Jordan is extremely adaptable. He doesn’t have meltdowns, or even get particularly bent out of shape, when there is a major disruption in his life. Every time we’ve moved to a new apartment, he has settled down within days. New school? Within a few weeks. His autism expresses itself in a lot of difficult ways, but inflexibility is not one of them, thank god.
But losing mommy and daddy? That might be a bridge too far. Every time I think about visiting him at his new home, all I can think of is what it will be like when he asks to come home. It’s over a decade in the future, and it’s like a dagger in my soul.
If that was as far as my imagination went, that would be horrible enough. But I can’t stop looking forward 40, 50, 60 years from now. What happens when Jordan inevitably gets sick or injured? He won’t understand what’s happening to him and 40 years from now, even if his mother is still alive (god knows I won’t be), she won’t be capable of helping. The idea of Jordan lying in a hospital room, alone, crying for his mommy who can’t come keeps me up at night.
What will it be like for him when he’s old and his time comes? What if Anastasia is gone? What if she never had children to take up the mantle of caretaker for their uncle? Who will be there for him at the end? Death is terrifying for us all but for someone who can’t process it and is desperate for mommy to come and make it better? The sheer cruelty is enough that I had to stop writing these last three paragraphs multiple times so I could quietly cry and hug my kids.
The guilt parents like me carry is incomprehensible to those outside of our cohort. Normal parents fret about their kids going out into the world and failing to thrive or doing something stupid and hurting themselves. We parents of special needs children/adults feel a daily terror of the future when we are no longer there to protect our children from a world that sees them as a burden. The stories of abuse in the kinds of homes Jordan will have to live in someday are rampant and enough to freeze the blood in your veins and the marrow in your bones.
Anastasia will burn the world to ashes to keep him safe, but she can’t be there 24/7. It’s not possible, which means Jordan will always be at risk because we won’t be there for him. It’s an unending nightmare that runs constantly in the back of my mind, and it’s still over a decade away. Even if we, as a nation, suddenly poured immense resources into caring for our most vulnerable (which we goddamn won’t), that would only alleviate a small fraction of the anxiety.
This is what it means to be a special needs parent. It doesn’t matter how hard we work or what we do. In the end, we won’t be there for Jordan, and nothing can take away the pain of knowing that he won’t understand why. Fuck you, autism.
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