Someone once said something to me that, in its simplicity, completely rearranged how I understand this country in that devastating way where you just go oh… fuck, because suddenly everything makes sense.
They said:
The United States is not a country.
It’s a business.
And it hit me like a ton of bricks, because once I heard it that way, I couldn’t unhear it. It explained the absence of real solidarity, the constant pressure to be productive, the way human worth gets measured in output and market value, and why almost everything here, from healthcare, to housing, to education, to safety, is treated less like a shared responsibility and more like a transaction.
That framing didn’t feel cynical to me because it felt accurate, and it matched my lived experience of this place in a way nothing else had.
That realization stayed with me because it didn’t just explain the United States, but it elegantly articulated how power actually moves here. It made it impossible to believe that systems change because the argument is good, or because people finally understand the moral stakes, or because truth is spoken clearly enough. What moves things is pressure. Leverage. The point at which maintaining the status quo becomes more costly than changing it.
And once you really understand that, you stop imagining that reality responds to belief or intention alone. You start seeing that it responds to contact, to force, to attention applied at the right point, which is exactly why, when I teach my students about magic, I’m very explicit that there is nothing supernatural about it. Magic isn’t outside the natural world; it’s inseparable from it. It’s about understanding how reality responds, how patterns repeat, how cause and effect actually work, and how synchronicities tend to show up not as metaphors, but as very literal feedback when something is trying to get your attention.
That’s why people talk about asking for signs, and why I always warn them to be careful with that question, because signs are rarely subtle or mysterious. More often than not, you get exactly what you’re being shown, whether you’re ready for it or not.
Which brings me to this moment.
The United States is in late-stage neoliberal empire collapse, and it is not going down quietly. I’m not going to rehash the news, you’ve seen it, and if you’re paying attention, you’ve probably felt it in your body before you could articulate it.
But I want to name something plainly.
They killed Good.
They killed Pretti.
I’m not making that symbolic. I’m not “reading into it.” It’s literally what happened. This system openly destroys what is good and what is beautiful, abuses power in plain sight, and then expects people not to draw conclusions about what kind of system it is.
And once you really understand that this is not a country but a business, something else becomes obvious: this system does not respond to morality. It does not respond to ethics. It does not respond to suffering.
It responds to money.
Which is where I want to clarify something I keep hearing people struggle with, the difference between organizing and activism, and why so much effort ends up feeling scattered or ineffective.
The simplest way I know how to explain it is this: organizing is like marketing, and activism is like sales.
If you were trying to sell something, you wouldn’t start by demanding a purchase from people who don’t know who you are, what you stand for, or why it matters. Marketing is how you find your people, clarify the offer, build trust, and eventually make the ask. Organizing works the same way. It’s how people find each other, develop shared language, understand what they’re part of, and get clear about what’s being asked of them.
Activism is the moment of action: the protest, the walkout, the boycott, the refusal, the point where people actually DO something together. You can’t skip organizing and expect sustained action, and you can’t organize forever without action and expect power to materialize. They need each other, and they have different jobs.
Which is also why, when people start talking seriously about a general strike, my reaction is: FINALLY!
A general strike speaks the only language this system has ever respected. You want its attention? You stop producing. You stop consuming. You stop making it money.
And magic, the way I understand it, requires us to be honest about how power actually works, and then choosing to act at the point where it can’t be ignored anymore.
If things feel more blunt, more brutal, more exposed, less interested in pretending…that’s because they are. Nothing subtle is happening. Nothing needs to be decoded.
What’s in front of us is exactly what it looks like.
These aren’t abstractions. These aren’t metaphors.
These are signs.
And they are very, very clear.
Do with that what you will, and may your descendants be proud of you.