Empathy is key here. It’s the foundation. The scenario you described, apart from the trees—we actually do have those where I live—is pretty much my daily walk. I live near train tracks where unhoused people move their camps up and down the line as the police come in, sweep their belongings, and force them to relocate. I’ve interacted with those folks. I try to give what I can, when I can.

We have mutual aid networks in the city that do their best—working both independently and with local government to get people into transitional housing. Those projects have limited success, but some success. And I’ll take that. Getting someone indoors, even temporarily, is meaningful. It matters.

At the same time, I walk down streets the city claims are “repaired,” and my car is bouncing around like I’m off-roading. That’s flabbergasting to me. I remember growing up with roads that were actually cared for. Now? Not so much. It’s that slow-boil effect—the frog in the pot. Things fall apart so gradually that we stop noticing. Until one day, we wake up and realize: there are tents outside my house. I can’t drive down the street without jarring my car. That’s when you start to see it.

Empathy, in this context, is really a kind of emotional situational awareness. You’re attuning not just to your surroundings but to the people impacted by those surroundings. That kind of awareness is absolutely teachable. Our brains are constantly interpreting our environments—whether we’re conscious of it or not. The challenge is taking off the blinders and helping others do the same.

And on a broader conceptual level, yes—becoming a "leftist prepper" is also teachable. It’s about developing a particular mindset. You look at a world that’s clearly unraveling, and instead of retreating into self-preservation, you ask: How can I show up for my community? It’s a mindset of collective care in the face of systemic collapse.

Yeah, I think for a long time, I interpreted collapse as the end of the world—almost in an eschatological sense. I went through a religious phase as a teenager, which I eventually moved away from, but during that time I was fascinated by those end-times narratives.

As I got older, I wrote Above All Men when I was about 24 or 25. It took a few years to get published, but that was also around the time when the signs of climate change were becoming much more obvious. People were making predictions that now, in hindsight, seem mild—because everything is unraveling faster than most of us imagined. The pace is exponential.

At the time, fiction was the way I knew how to engage with the world. I don’t know if it was about processing what was happening, exactly, but it was definitely about finding a way to talk to people about these issues—climate, collapse, what it all means—in a form I could manage: by telling a story.

So, the next step after personal preparedness is, to an extent, what comes after prepping: it's about building relationships with your community and engaging them on these issues. It’s about coming together and saying, “Look at the way things are—we have the resources to do something about it. The government isn’t acting, even when we ask them to. So what can we do?”

And most often—unless you live in a very small or extremely disconnected community—you’ll find that people have already had this idea. For example, when I drive past the most recent encampment of houseless folks in my area, I didn’t invent the idea of gathering a fund to get them supplies or support for temporary housing. All I had to do was Google “area homeless mutual aid”—and there it was. People are already doing the work.

So, more often than not, your next step is entering your community ready and willing to join the work that’s already underway. And if there isn’t something yet, then you start it—and you’ll likely find others who want to help.

Eventually, the step beyond that is dual power. You build mutual aid networks strong enough that they begin to replace the conventional systems meant to address those issues. You provide resources for unhoused people, for example, so they no longer have to engage with state systems that are often coercive, manipulative, and even dangerous.

And when that happens, the power the state holds in that area begins to erode. Sure, the money we pay in taxes won’t come back—it’ll probably just go to policing—but we will have supported people in need. We’ll have established ourselves as a force capable of doing what most people assume only the state can do.

That’s a powerful idea: a community that can take care of itself doesn’t need cops on its streets.

I did want to come back to the idea of dual power, because there are real limits to what you can do without being stopped—or even arrested.

Take roads, for example. If I went out with a bucket of pitch to fill a pothole here and there, maybe I’d get away with it. But if I tried to address the issue systemically—say, shut down Third Avenue for two weeks to actually fix the thing—the state would immediately push back: “Where’s your license? What are your qualifications?” You hit a wall.

So the next step, I think, is this: even if we can’t address every issue ourselves or within our immediate communities, we engage deeply enough that our collective actions start to shake the bars—start to rattle the cages of those in power.

And to bring it back to the idea of utopia—it is a utopian idea. That, even amidst systemic failure, collapse, war, genocide, and all the crises we don’t even have time to get into, we can still build something from the ruins. That’s not necessarily where I draw “hope,” but it is where I get the energy to keep going.

To bring it into the present: when I look at the LA uprisings against ICE, I don’t just see state violence. I see people standing up. I see them learning how to stand up and how to do it better.

So yes, the issues we’re facing are massive. The state is doing immense harm. But there’s also progress—people pushing forward, even when it feels like we’re on the back foot. And the fact that a relatively small group of Angelenos figured out how to resist, how to disrupt, how to fight back—that’s deeply encouraging.

So yeah, I see the systems failing. I see the boot coming down. But I also see, in the cracks it leaves, the places where new things can grow.

I'll answer that question by starting with a definition of anarchy—which is so often misunderstood. Anarchy is not chaos. It's the absence of hierarchy. That doesn’t mean there’s no leadership, no guidance, or no safety nets. It simply means there is no one above me—no one with power over me. And that, I think, is the critical point.

So when I talk about toppling the state, I'm not imagining a world where everyone does whatever they want, whenever they want. I’m not saying there are no longer any rules for civil society. What I am saying is that I no longer have to fear the state taking something from me—whether it’s my money, my life, or my freedom. And I don’t want anyone to have to live in that kind of fear.

Obviously, I’m extremely privileged. I can move through the world almost anywhere without much fear. That’s not true for so many others. So the world I hope for isn’t just one without the state—it’s one without the systems that uphold it. That includes white supremacy and other hierarchical worldviews that determine how we see and treat others.

So no, it’s not just about everyone being left to their own devices—although I understand why some people frame it that way. Because what I also believe is that we can inject better ways of organizing ourselves, of being in community.

For example, I think about my relatively rural hometown. If you take away the cops—who mostly just harass people for having their high beams on in the middle of the night—you’re not saying, “Let’s let people speed through town.” You’re saying, “Let’s give people the freedom to organize safety and care in their own way.”

And it’s also about removing that capitalist, extractive mindset that distorts how we see each other. It’s about learning to look at the people around you and just see… people. It’s realizing you don’t have to see the world through a white supremacist lens anymore—because it’s no longer being reinforced from the top.