I don't anyone is saying the petrodollar is going to collapse overnight but it's the start of a trend, one that will completely fuck the US economy if it keeps going.
I think America's biggest problem is it has no social capital left, the majority of people are completely self-interested and don't care about each other, there's no community in most of the country and outside of upscale wealthy neighborhoods, there's a lot of visible decay, things just aren't taken care of here. It doesn't seem like a huge deal now but in the future when real crises happen, ones which require a country to come and work together to survive, it's really hard to see America uniting and overcoming something like it did in the Great Depression.
I'm glad you mentioned this, because it's extremely frustrating trying to explain to Americans who haven't traveled extensively abroad that the U.S. is actually quite backward in many ways on-the-ground. It's understandable
why the U.S. tends not to view itself this way - after all, it's insulated by two oceans and two enormous countries to the north and south with somewhat comparable living standards (I'm including Mexico because there are areas that have been developing quite well in recent years, like Monterey - it's a wonderful city).
Most major American cities are an embarrassment. Their cores are falling apart, they're so spread out (note - I'm not in favor of stuffing people into hyper dense cities, many American cities just happen to be on the other extreme of the spectrum) and atomized (the pods just go horizontal instead of vertical in this case) that most newer suburbs feel like the sanitized, paranoid setting of the Stepford Wives. Neighbors are rarely talked to. Children won't go outside because where are they going to go? There aren't any nearby parks (instead it's just half-empty surface lots) and even then you don't want to risk them getting kidnapped by some freak or stepping on used needles left behind by some homeless drug addict. Societal trust is in the gutter and it has less to do with racial demographics and everything to do with the rotting, atomized,
hyper-individualist 'fuck you got mine' corpse of American culture as a whole. These issues also exist in American communities that are 85-90%+ white.
You're either sitting at home, sitting in a car, sitting at the office, or sitting in a restaurant eating hyper-processed brain-pickling food and playing vidya or consuming some other product. You don't walk to the local neighborhood market where small business owners and small landholdings sell their goods, you drive (because outside of a few isolated locations, there's no other reasonable means of travel even for daily chores) to the corporate big-box store or the rotting strip mall. Even the old shopping malls - more consume product - formerly the mid-late 20th century's replacement for the neighborhood park or newly-corporatized urban core, are either closed or falling apart. People are moving into overpriced gated communities which breeds paranoia even towards people who live in the same development, and the masses of people moving out of the shitty cities 'for a little country atmosphere' results in the 'countryside' becoming the new suburbia, and the cycle repeats itself as the Great American Landscape is devoured by
more sprawling McMansions, highways, parking lots, corporate big box stores and gas stations. If you point this out, people will either a) accuse you of trying to take away their 'freedom' (to consoom, suck corporate cock and be hyper-dependent on a single overpriced mode of transportation), b) accuse you of being an urban bugman because they think anything not resembling the modern, garish caricature of the post WWII 'American dream' marketing scheme means you're a pod-loving, private-ownership hating collectivist or c) distracting them from consuming product, getting fat, and piling on the credit card debt. Can't help but feel like 9/11 really did ruin everything. There were signs we were already headed in a problematic direction, but damn it feels like we went into overdrive after that shitty day in September.
There are homeless people
everywhere. This is a combination of the closure of the asylums preventing people from getting the mental health assistance they so desperately need, the opioid epidemic (partly caused by the fucking depressing state of modern American culture/life), housing prices spiraling out of control (thank you, Black Rock), a near total lack an industrial base (because most of the factories are now in China), and illegal immigration driving down wages. Inner-city neighborhoods are in a state of collapse or are literally more dangerous than third-world shitholes. All races in America are suffering, from heroin-addicted whites in the rust belt to gang-riddled ghettoes in Detroit, or destitute Hispanic
colonias in Texas which are no better than South African townships.
Also fuck the
actual Progressive bugmen. Even if I live in a flat/apartment (which isn't a pod, by the way -
this horrid thing is) I want to OWN IT. I love meat. I will not eat bugs. Progressives/WEF/bugmen don't get to own the concept of a good town or city. You can have good, more dense cities while maintaining private property rights and rejecting everything the demonic Great Reset stands for.
This isn't the case for all Americans but fuck if it isn't depressingly common. I love the United States. I love Texas. I love my homeland, but dammit it's completely falling the fuck apart and that is heartbreaking. As much as I wish we could do more to fix it, turn it around and drag it kicking and screaming into reality, it just feels like that opportunity has passed. I'm glad I left but it was an extremely painful decision. Solzhenitsyn was right. Mankind has forgotten God and it's led to disaster.