A Red Dawn State Of Mind

This is a reference to the real movie Red Dawn - the one with Patrick Swayze, Lea Thompson and Charlie Sheen.

Not the remake.

The movie, from the first scene, creates - for me - an excruciatingly real nightmare life of America rather swiftly disintegrating under the pressure of an invader.

A small coterie of children are really the only vestiges of what had been a full scale life for millions and millions only days before.

The children gradually organize and mount an ongoing insurgency.

But the price is catastrophically high.

And they depend less and less upon what remains of their previous civilization:  once they have consumed the supplies that they managed to hoard as part of their initial escape, they hunt game, make occasional sorties into their previous home town, now occupied by the invader, and get what information and supplies they can gather.

For the purposes of "A Red Dawn State Of Mind" - this post - they, the children, are a metaphor.

They are a perfect metaphor for sheltering in place.

Even down to sheltering in place's underpinning mentality.

I can't get through an hour without feeling the presence of the occupied town and the insurgent children; that is the life I am living: occasional furtive trips to the village supplement tending the home fires and washing my hands.

The very end of the movie is a neutral ending: the invader withdraws, life as it had been never resumes, but a pale facsimile replaces it, and the children - the ones who survived - are lost to history.

The dead all have their names scratched on a rock somewhere in the mountains.

That looks to be a best case scenario for us seven billion and counting.