America is a once-was Empire that is crumbling before our eyes. Last fall, before the election, I predicted a few things if Donald Trump won; that our agricultural industry and food production will halt, our health care system will collapse, and academia as we know it will no longer exist.  I wrote about the massive layoffs, food shortages, and unemployment rates like the US has yet to see, and the past few days I have fought another wave of grief while I processed the truth of my children’s futures that will no longer be what we had dreamed for them. My husband and I shifted gears to aggressively prepare for the worst while we hope for a miracle. My children will learn more than ever what it is to roll up their sleeves and value labor for survival. Recently, when Trump said that “China needed us more than we needed them”, he was wrong. This error is not only going to take America down, but the entire planet is getting ready to shift from living in a world where the US was once on top, to watching us rebuild from the bottom up. Who will be the most dominant? Well, I have some ideas.

I have watched our boys start a landscaping business and work hard for the past three years. They make double or sometimes triple what their peers make in a day and when they come home they are covered in head to toe with dirt, sometimes soaked from sweat, have gotten stuck in down pours and still push through to get the job done. We have discussed them getting a job at McDonalds, or something in retail, but the wages are so low, they would have to work twice as many hours to make the same money. Yet, despite the money they make, finding extra help for a big landscaping job has been impossible at times. Their peers just aren’t interested in the level of back breaking work it takes to lay gravel, mulch, pull weeds and plant flowers.

This stigma against labor isn’t new and has been a part of American culture since the trans-Atlantic slave trade when White Capitalism began. Slave labor built the wealth of the south creating an empire for White “Gentlemen” and “Southern Belles” to claim as their own. Labor was racially inferior, and it didn’t stop after the Civil War. Jim and Juan Crow laws kept Black and immigrant workers underpaid exploitable roles while White Capitalists rebranded themselves as managers and entrepreneurs. The Industrial revolution relied on child labor, union suppression and immigrant sweatshops to create wealth while White Capitalists claim they were “self-made”.

After the Civil Rights movement, White Capitalists shifted once again, and America needed a new exploitable work force that could remain under the radar. By the end of the 20^th century, America had sent a significant portion of their manufacturing to China while relying on the Latino populations to harvest our food, work in our hospitals and hotels. By the 2000’s, Executives had completely divorced themselves from labor jobs and justified their exploitation by labeling factory work, agriculture, farming and manufacturing jobs as “unskilled labor” while they invested in marketing, branding and finance, producing nothing tangible themselves.

White America has divided its labor by race and class creating a stigma that has helped China become the leader in worldwide manufacturing output. China has created the most efficient manufacturing base, mastering supply chains and infrastructure to dominate production. Simultaneously the US has leveraged White Supremacy and culture wars for a false sense of power believing inflated stocks, branding and hollow luxuries will keep them on top of the world market.

The US hasn’t seen real growth since the mid 20^th century as White Americans fought a race war to keep labor exploitative, targeting marginalized groups to maintain an “unskilled labor” narrative. Ultimately, White Capitalism disdain for labor and obsession with White supremacy has left our country in shambles, and what we had left, farming and agriculture that was a 50%+ immigrant workforce, academia and leading health care innovation, has just had its funding ripped from under it by our current administration, gutting the only remaining pillars of excellence we had on a world platform.

Remember when I predicted that our agriculture will collapse and that we will see college towns crumble? I was hoping I would be wrong, however our farmers have already sounded the alarm stating that the food has been dying on the vine for months with no immigrant work, the cows are not getting milked, and the beef manufacturing plants are empty. The tariffs are raising the cost beyond what small businesses can afford, medical research in colleges have stopped, Canada and China have discontinued farm trading of soy, corn and beef with the US costing our farmers their contracts. Our farm-to-table subsidies will no longer be providing food to our elementary schools, and executive orders and federal cuts are continuing to undermine the only “production” we had left in the US.

So although I can’t predict the measure of significance, I can confidently state that it’s going to get hard, my fellow Americans. If you haven’t already, it’s past time to find your community. Who has what skill amongst the friends you know? Talk to your neighbors and turn your back yards into gardens, trading what you harvest. We will all need to learn the valued skill of labor and redefine America, not as a White supremacist nation built on hollow principles of exploitation, racism and classism, but on our ability to work in unity within our diversity. We have too. Those who do, will be the ones who survive.