It’s 2021, and the boys are back in town—the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan boys, that is. Almost twenty years after the American military sent the Taliban’s government went into exile, they’re back in power after America’s (truly weak sauce) withdrawal. You would think that twenty years of occupation would have produced some hurdles for the Taliban to climb, but their regain of what they had lost was sickeningly swift.

It’s the miserable end of a miserable war that has been going on since before I was born, one that, looking at the plain hard facts, ultimately proved useless for the greater good. The money has been spent, the death toll is still staggering, the weapons suppliers are doing exceptionally well, and the innocent people of Afghanistan, humans like you or me, are back to being incessantly victimized by an excruciatingly oppressive and fundamentalist state. Got enough of rose-tinted late 90s-early 2000s nostalgia? Try going back 500 years, when women weren’t permitted autonomous thought and simple forms of recreation were considered a front against the man upstairs. Heaven on earth, truly.

But is that really that different from the country I reside in? You can rejoice in the streets about how a man in a blue tie is in office, but that isn’t stopping the men in red ties, the conservatives, our own Taliban, from trying to exert their own archaic control over the populous. Bills proposing the restriction of voting rights, abortion, and gender expression continue to pop up like kernels of butter-drenched popcorn at the movie theater, granted that movie theater hasn’t closed down because of a local spike in COVID-19 cases.

The COVID problem is also an important matter here, as leagues of religious fundamentalists claim that wearing a mask for the safety of others in the middle of a worldwide pandemic is some ungodly offense. Vaccines, too, are seen as satanic, as they’ll apparently rape your body with either a tracking chip or reptile DNA, depending on which science disbeliever you ask. All this when hospitalization rates of those who abide by these reckless behaviors are spiking from their selfishness. We’re going back once again, back to when leeches and snake oils were used as cure-alls. Mind, these are the same people who also want to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other innocent people in the name of the lord, just like those Taliban boys over there.

And did we all just forget about when the so-called patriots who believe all of this tried to pull their own takeover at the Capitol building last January? I witnessed the attempt at insurrection on live television, and I can remember it like yesterday. Unsatisfied by Biden as the country’s choice of president but fully aware that his election win was genuine, I had innocently turned on the news hoping to simply observe his presidency be validated, because seeing democracy actually happen successfully is pretty satisfying in today’s perpetually corrupt hellworld. I was aware that the moment was one that would be placed in the history books after months of incessant “Stop The Steal” squabble calling for another four years of Trumpolini (like the country hadn’t been decimated enough by the first four). I also expected counterprotests at the scene by those delusional goons indoctrinated into his suicide cult of personality, because you can’t help but do so after four years of fringe conspiracy insanity becoming mainstream political discussion.

What I ended up seeing was a nation’s people mobilized against itself, their brains rotted by lies and conspiracy, exerting violence in the name of tyranny, the decimation of what remnants of democracy we still claim to cling to. The halls of the Capitol became the stomping grounds for a horde of neurotic rednecks, a deranged militia free to roam in defilement of something once considered worthy of protection. All sanity and sense of what should be was forcibly ejected out the window. The patients had taken over the asylum.

It still unsettles me to think about; I never would have expected for the world’s forces of de-evolution, those dangerous delusions, to catalyze such an attack, to go that far off the deep end. People died that day. Many others feared death or worse. It was a nail in a coffin.

But we’re America. We’re united. We believe in freedom—freedom to treat others like dirt because they’re different than you. It could never happen here, could it?