Two Heathers
(Or: A Gen-X Field Guide to Collapse)
I read two Heathers every morning. Both are documenting the same collapse. Neither is pulling punches. And if you’re Gen-X, you already know what it means to be a Heather.
Heather Cox Richardson is a historian. Professor at Boston College, author of multiple books on American political history, writer of “Letters from an American” - one of the most-read political newsletters in the country. She’s been studying how democracies fail for her entire career. When she writes, you’re getting the long view: this has happened before, here’s the pattern, here’s what the historical record tells us about where this leads. She saw it coming because she’d read this story play out across centuries, in a dozen different nations that all thought it couldn’t happen to them.
Heather Delaney Reese is a witness. For over a decade, she built one of the highest-performing lifestyle blogs in the world - “It’s a Lovely Life” - growing her reach to over a million followers. Family travel. Luxury resorts. Disney vacations. 150 days a year on the road with her kids, documenting the beautiful version of America. Six-to-seven figure income from the tourist brochure life.
And then she couldn’t do it anymore.
“Recently, like so many of you, I hit my limit with the lies, chaos, and cowardice coming out of our government,” she wrote. “I realized I had a choice: stay silent while democracy slips, or use the platform I built to document the truth.”
Now she writes raw, present-tense dispatches from inside the dissonance. From her latest: “I live in San Diego, in what still feels like a bubble of compassion and reason. Most people are kind, accepting, and decent. I don’t see red hats. I don’t see immigration raids on the routes I travel... And then I open my laptop, and it’s like stepping into another country entirely.”
The kindness is real. So is the collapse. Both things are true.
She compared it to Franco’s Spain: “Clean streets, quiet cities, and a death grip on anything that looked like dissent. Tourists came for the architecture. They didn’t see the surveillance or the cells.”
And then she named it: “That’s what this is starting to feel like: a dictatorship with a tourist brochure.”
The Boutique
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024) that I haven’t been able to shake.
The journalists - war photographers who’ve been driving through a fractured, burning America - pull into a quiet little town. They step into a clothing boutique. And the sales girl immediately starts trying to sell Kirsten Dunst a new dress.
The reporters stare at her. What planet have you been living on?
But here’s the thing: the sales girl isn’t evil. She isn’t collaborating with the regime. She’s just... continuing. Maintaining the routine. The boutique is still standing. The dresses are still on the rack. What else is she supposed to do?
Garland understood something essential: the horror isn’t just the violence. It’s the simultaneity. The normal and the nightmare, coexisting in the same country, sometimes on the same street. The war is real. The boutique is also real. And the boutique feels more real if you’re standing inside it.
That’s the camouflage. That’s how it hides. That’s how it spreads.
Heather Delaney Reese was living in the boutique. She was writing about the architecture, documenting the lovely life, showing her million followers where to find the best family resorts. And then she looked up from the dress rack and saw the war zone outside the window.
She walked out. She started writing about what she saw.
Not everyone does.
The Other Heather
If you’re Gen-X, you remember Heathers (1988).
Winona Ryder, when she was the priestess of Goth Cool, before she was the Mom on Stranger Things. Christian Slater channeling Jack Nicholson. A dark comedy about high school sociopaths that taught us the popular kids were running a protection racket, the institutions wouldn’t save you, and the best you could hope for was dark humor and survival.
“What’s your damage, Heather?”
That movie was our training. Gen-X didn’t get “we can change the world” (Boomers) or “you’re special and can do anything” (Millennials). We got the Cold War’s tail end, nuclear drills, latchkey afternoons, and the distinct understanding that the adults were not in control and nobody was coming to rescue us.
So we developed the protective shell. The irony. The gallows humor. The slacker pose that was actually hypervigilance in a cool jacket.
There’s a joke that circulates: “You can call my mom Karen. But if you understand Gen-X at all, you’d know that I’m a Heather.”
We knew the popular kids were dangerous. We knew the system was rigged. We knew the sunny smile was a lie. We’d seen the movie.
What You Need
You need both Heathers.
You need Richardson’s long view - the historian who can tell you that yes, this has happened before, and here’s how it played out, and here’s what the patterns suggest. Context. Perspective. The reminder that we’re not the first generation to face this, and others have survived.
You need Delaney Reese’s raw nerve - the witness who was living the beautiful lie and couldn’t anymore. The present tense. The urgency. The reminder that the collapse isn’t abstract, it’s happening right now, in Arizona and Washington and the waters of the Caribbean, while most of us are still standing in the boutique.
And maybe you need the third Heather too. The dark one. The 1988 model. The one who taught us that sometimes the whole school is complicit, the authorities are useless, and your survival depends on seeing clearly while everyone around you pretends everything is fine. Because wearing the blindfold might just mean smoking that last cigarette.
What’s your damage, America?
We’re about to find out.
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