Yep. Franklin warned us.

People in the Soviet Union lived in state owned housing which meant that nobody got evicted, and you just stayed in your rent free apartment. Public transportation was massive and designed to be maintained with minimal resources, so it kept running, meaning people could still get around. People just kept showing up to work in the former state owned industries because they didn't really know what else to do. There was already a culture of kitchen gardens, barter, and fixing things yourself because consumer goods were always scarce. People were already used to making do and life just kind of went on.

Today, the entire American society is built on a profit driven model where everything is done just-in-time making it incredibly fragile as we saw during the pandemic. The whole housing market is dependent on mortgages, jobs, and property taxes to function. When the paychecks stop and the evictions start there will be a massive flood of homeless refugees from the suburbs, which are completely car-dependent and unsustainable without fuel. American food system is a miracle of logistics that gets lettuce from California to New York in diesel trucks. Once that chain starts to break then the supermarket shelves will be empty in a few days an most Americans don’t even have a clue how to grow a potato.

Then there’s the quality of goods problem to consider. While Soviet consumer products might’ve been crappy and utilitarian in nature, they were built like tanks and designed to be repaired. Many people in eastern Europe still have old Soviet fridges in their apartments. On the other hand, most goods in the US are intentionally designed for planned obsolescence. When the supply chain for new products snaps then people end up with useless and unfixable junk on their hands. And Americans are also in a worse shape physically. So, trying to suddenly live a physically demanding subsistence lifestyle would be very difficult for large swaths of the population.

Finally, there’s the social fabric and atomization of American society. Soviet families were often multi-generational and geographically close which created a natural support network for people. American families are atomized and spread across the country. In a crisis, most people are likely to be stranded among strangers with no incentive to help them. Add to that all the political divisions and things start to look a lot like Yugoslavia before the civil war, it’s a recipe for things getting very ugly fast. While, the Soviet collapse was awful, it happened within a system that was already braced for hardship. The US collapse would be like a comfortable person who has never missed a meal suddenly being thrown into the wilderness with no tools or skills.

Granite? Before this recent upgrade, the basin consisted of bare gray concrete. Prior to the major 2012 reconstruction, the original 1924 pool was built with an asphalt and tile bottom. What granite?

But yes, this is a travesty that is a prime example of "losing themselves".