“Hey there James, a little bit of sci-fi apocalyptic speculation for you. Let's pretend that World War 3 has happened and the Baltimore Metropolitan Area is now an irradiated wasteland. How would society rebuild? How do you see humanity climbing itself out of the primordial soup of its chaotic demise? Who would be the haves and who would be the have-nots?

“I'd love to see your response to this as a Harm City piece, and if you feel inspired, by all means steal shamelessly and add it to your rotation of growing fiction ideas.”

“Hope all is well,”

-Adam

Well, Adam, let’s say a dirty bomb nukes D. C. and Baltimore becomes—via association—a wasteland. My first impulse is that the survivors would still have to listen to choppers overhead, with black hawks replacing the police choppers.

First, the a haves will be the most heavily armed and effectively organized aggressors, as they always have been. The have nots will be the law abiding unarmed citizens, whether they disarmed themselves because they were liberals squids, or were disarmed by National Guardsmen travelling in the company of a State Trooper with his gun registration database. The State Police will be charged with overseeing disarmament in The People's Republic of Maryland.

Since you run role playing games [he actually gets paid to do this by some game company], let’s just discuss an apocalypse in general, from an EMP blast, from a meteor strike that kills all of the little Asian kids that make athletic shoes and precipitates a stock market crash, or any 30 day lapse in welfare subsidies to the starving fat people of the American underclass…

The upside is we will not require World War 3 for urban collapse. A flood will do in most places. In Baltimore, a shortage of heroin or a snow storm could trigger it.

For predicting the trajectory of social collapse for fiction projects, and to aid in planning my nonfiction projects in advance, I use the following scale.

1. Stable: The social contract is intact, with the population, even the criminals, recognizing the rule of law and the authority of the police to enforce it. By this standard it is clear that most American cities are not stable urban units, with an intact social contract and that these conditions are usually only present in rural communities.

2. Marginal: Part of the population supports the police, and the other part of the population does not. Understand that policing only works in communities that accept it. Communities that do not accept police authority can only be oppressed, suppressed of impressed through military force, which is why police are looking more like the military every year, because despite the news about falling crime, it is increasing, as is resistance to arrest.

3. Unstable: Part of the population denies police authority and the other part of the population has no faith in the police to act on their behalf. This is Baltimore right now, where a reign of terror is in force, and the criminal underworld holds more actionable authority than the police. Alternating periods of absent police and hyper active police typify the unstable environment. For instance, I only viewed one cop in three days, but have heard the chopper and responding police cruisers on my street every few hours. They are not patrolling but responding, having fallen back to a linebacker defense. You will notice a reduction in vehicle and pedestrian traffic at all hours, but drastically after dark.

4. Failed: A failed community is an unstable one in which the authorities and police are only vested in taking action for their own protection. This was Baltimore in late April during the purge and riots, a hunting ground—even with cops from a dozen other districts and National Guard and military contractors on the ground.

5. Military Intervention: The National Guard or other armed force entering the community to protect the police is an improvement over the failed situation, but is just a speed bump to collapse.

6. Martial Law: In a martial law situation gangs will still loot and murder, but switch to home invasions away from easily protected commercial districts. Ad hoc militia efforts by citizens will be suppressed more easily than the criminal actions. Remember also that community defense militias are more of a threat to the State than are criminal gangs, because they themselves are potential provisional states. If any readers do not understand this last statement, it must be because I am wrong. So, organize your defense brigade and say "cheese" when the drone flies over your roadblock.

7. Crackdown: The law abiding population will be disarmed, particularly if there have been any successful citizen actions against criminal gangs. This will result in increased home invasions, and in transit zones, rampant unarmed mob violence against unarmed civilians.

8. Collapse: The military will confiscate fuel and food for its own use under redistribution pretences. Unpaid and demoralized law enforcement units [City cops are so corrupt it is not even funny.] will form plundering robber gangs. The only real protection will be had through private security employed by the political elite and gangs. Whites and Asians remaining in urban areas will be hunted to extinction, with mass rapes and executions likely. I know, Mother, that this sounds hyperbolic. So try this mental exercise. Watch Black Hawk Down. Now imagine that we load the owners of the Baltimore Ravens, and their clerical staff, and the cheerleaders, on a pink airbus, or even a yellow submarine that floats like a hot air balloon and drop them into Mogadishu. Imagine that.

9. Contagion: The collapse of utilities in urban areas will cause a wave of refugees and invaders from the city to seek refuge in and pillage the suburbs. Intact military and police will dragoon suburbanites into providing food and shelter for the violent urban masses, assisting the urban breakout by disarming suburbanites.

10. Road-kill RFD: Rural police will be likely to continue working with the rural residents and form a united front against the urban invaders that filter out through the suburbs, stopping them. At this point, who the State Police and Guard side with is clutch. Also, there is a possibility that Guard units with personnel drawn from these areas will refuse to side with the government against the rural communities who resist forced immigration of violent felons. This is the only scenario that seems interesting to me as a writer. 2-9 are pretty obvious.

The standoff between the state and federal desire to resettle urbanites in rural communities at the point of a gun, and the rural residents and law enforcement not having it, is where I would choose to write this story. The actual urban outbreak is just going to consist of blacks and Latinos slaughtering the whites and Asians who fail to flee, before, or while, turning on one another. In any case, where blacks do not possess a clear 3-1 advantage over the Latinos, I see the Latinos wiping them out.

I am not predicting urban collapse unless there is a precipitating disaster, as I find the American human to be thoroughly and despicably domesticated, and expect our evil and corrupt government to hold onto power with a ferocity not imagined by most prepers.

The biggest question in my mind is does the real military come home and sort this out? In a total collapse I could see a scenario where the federal government brings combat units into the Homeland [You know, they call it that now.] to force rural police, armed citizens and even defecting National Guard to cooperate with the resettlement initiatives that surely exist on paper, and which I lack the information to speculate on and therefore will not write such a story as it is above my pay grade.

Overall, in case of a total, violent, urban collapse scenario, I see a better world emerging from social collapse than what has welled up out of the toxic sewer of the collective Baby Boomer mind.