Ever watch Hoarders?

In each episode, they introduce someone who's been living in filth so long they don't notice it. They don't notice the smell, they don't notice how they have to navigate through the clutter, they don't notice how bad their home has gotten.

They've been doing it for years, decades. The clutter and rot is perfectly normal, it doesn't register.

Their loved ones express horror at how dangerous it is, how literally all of it is not, despite protestations, useful.

In each episode, they bring along a psychiatrist and a team of disposal guys to basically reform the hoarding behaviour.

The psychiatrist teaches them coping behaviours for anxiety. The organizers teach them to triage belongings, how to store things properly, etc

The original series got cancelled after it was found to be completely useless. The 7 day intervention did absolutely nothing, for the vast majority of people.

Those coping mechanisms fail, the organization fails, the old normal has been around too long to be erased in a week.

It didn't help the people. It *did* make good dramatic tv.

Viewers thrilled as an old woman clutched a shit-coated broken toy and justified keeping it because she has plans to use it in an art project.

Viewers enjoyed watching the grizzled dad have a nervous breakdown over someone throwing out his rusted heaps of unidentifiable appliance parts.

Viewers got a thrill out of seeing a woman deny the abundantly obvious fact that her entire fridge was full of rotting food. Telling people who were close to vomiting that she was planning on using that rotten food for a nice meal.

The show didn't help the people. It did titillate viewers though.

People watched in anticipation of seeing just how in denial the shown hoarders would be. Just how bad a situation could they stand in and proclaim, angrily, "this is fine!"

The draw of the show was watching the hoarders justify and explain every last bit of seemingly homogenous trash.

They'd spot from across the room a tiny trinket, and explain when they got it, where, what they were planning on doing with it, and why it was so important.

They would tearfully break down, describing the death of a loved one.

Then angrily explode "it's like losing him again!" When asked to throw out a maggot-riddled pumpkin.

They would profess love and concern for their children, or their marriage, which are in jeopardy

And, asked to choose between them and a 10 year old expired can of beans, break down in tears as they choose the bloated botulism can.

Hoarders wasn't at all therapeutic for the people on it. It served no actual medical use.

But it did provide a good analogy for how Americans hoard and accumulate dangerous racist and misogynist institutions, institutions that objectively lower their standard of living,

And how very attached they are to each tiny aspect of those dangerous institutions. Denying there's a problem, denying it's interfering with their lives, denying the pile of mummified bodies, justifying each piece of long-expired food, rationalizing junk as one day useful.

Hoarders, if it wanted to actually be therapeutic instead of entertainment, would have had to embark on years of therapy for each person, in a managed living space, to reverse the decades of learning what is normal.

Nothing less than complete upheaval of normal, removing the ability to even begin accumulating, and slow and arduous therapy, would work.

America is a hoarder's house. An American explaining literally any part of it, horrifies and disgusts others.

Americans don't notice the stench of rot and the sudden smells of burning flesh that permeate their home.

They've lived in it for 400 years, and accumulated so much dangerous and useless crap that they don't even notice how hard it is to move about or find space to do anything.

After 400 years, no short crash course in coping mechanisms is going to help. No frantic period of reorganization will help.

Only a prolonged, painful and arduous process that's probably achieved by setting the house on fire and moving them into an assisted living home.

For it to be effective, and not simply entertainment, it has to be more than tossing out some of the more dangerous stuff and telling Americans how to breathe more deeply.

However, in any event, things will have to be thrown out and set on fire. Whole rooms full of things.

Abolishing the police is the first, most basic step toward making that home habitable again.

It's the easiest thing to throw out, the easiest to develop coping mechanisms to replace the perceived need for it.

It's the first bag of rotting food tossed out.

Every other step after that: developing robust coping mechanisms, making the place safe for habitation, making it easier to move around and do things, all are harder to do.

Abolishing the police *is* the part that can be done quickly.

If America can't do that, can't bring itself to toss out the most obviously harmful and useless mound of trash, and not replace it as soon as possible with an identical mound of trash, it can't do *anything* else necessary.

Abolishing the police is the litmus test of whether America can actually *start* the long and painful process of discovering how badly miscalibrated its idea of normal was.

If America can't abolish the police, it can never account for, and set on fire, its metric tonnes of white supremacy. It can't do *anything* toward living in a safe and clean home.

Abolishing the police is the first, most obvious, most basic step toward not inevitably dying underneath a mountain of trash after slipping.