There was a time—not long ago—when Robert Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” were a curious bit of speculative fiction. A warning. A satirical stretch of chaos meant to bridge the rational, grounded past of humanity with its stellar future. You’d flip through the Future History chart and chuckle nervously at the absurdity—sexual anarchy, fractured politics, mass delusions, reality outpaced by spectacle. A cautionary bridge between world wars and lunar colonies.

But now?

Now it feels like we’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up squarely inside his footnotes.

Look around. The United States is tearing itself apart at the seams—not with bombs or bullets (not yet), but with confusion, cruelty, and performative patriotism. Institutions meant to safeguard democracy are being twisted into stage props. Courts that once defended rights now erode them. Media is weaponized, not to inform, but to entertain and inflame. And the people—the damn people—are lost in a fog of grievance and algorithm-fueled hysteria, clawing at each other like rats in a maze that leads nowhere.

That’s what Heinlein foresaw in the Crazy Years. Not a neat dystopia. Not a clean collapse. But a lurching, spiraling descent into incoherence—where nothing makes sense and everyone is screaming for someone to blame.

And here we are.

The "One Big Beautiful Bill"? That’s not legislation. That’s a manifesto. A restructuring of the country not through revolution, but through bureaucracy. Strip healthcare. Slash aid. Dump money into militarized immigration squads and surveillance tech. And then stage the whole thing like a reality show, complete with guest appearances by cable hosts playing war tourist while ICE agents kick down doors.

It’s not governance. It’s theater. It’s Heinlein’s madness dressed in the colors of the flag.

Worse, it's working. The more irrational it gets, the more people double down. That's the core of the Crazy Years: when logic loses to identity, and identity is whatever the loudest demagogue says it is that day.

And just like Heinlein sketched out, we’re watching the unraveling play out in real time. Governors threatened with arrest. Peaceful protests declared “insurrections.” Families detained in basements. Federal troops deployed without consent, sleeping on concrete floors because no one thought to feed them. A nation too powerful to collapse cleanly, too confused to function properly, and too angry to see straight.

And yet, there’s still this part of me—maybe the most stubborn, most science-fictional part—that wants to believe Heinlein got it wrong. That this is a fever dream, not the blueprint. That our “Crazy Years” are just a blip, not a bridge. That sanity can still fight its way back into the room and sit all of us down for a good, long talk.

Because the thing about Heinlein’s timeline is—he believed we’d come through it. Eventually. Bloody, battered, maybe unrecognizable—but not lost. Maybe that’s the real message we’re supposed to hold onto. Not that the Crazy Years are inevitable. But that they’re survivable—if we remember who we were before the fever took hold. Before truth became optional and cruelty became policy.

So here we are. Standing at the edge of his prophecy, trying not to fall in. And if we’re lucky, damn lucky, we’ll build a future where this moment becomes the cautionary tale.

Not the new normal.

Because I don’t know about you—but I’d rather be wrong with hope than right with regret.