April Fuels
“It’s like there’s this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds upon the essence of the spirit, feeds upon the essence of the human being, the spirit. This predator energy can take fossil fuel and other resources out of the Earth, turn it into fuel, to run a machine system. But in order for there to be a need for that system, and in order for that system to work, they have to mine our minds to get at the essence of our spirit. In the same way the external mining takes place, it pollutes — we see now, people understand how it poisons the environment, the water, the air pollution — the mining of the essence, the mining of the spirit, mining our minds … the pollution from that is all the neurotic, distorted, insecure behavior patterns that we develop. That’s the pollution. Because in order for this predatory system, this disease, to work, we must not be able to use our minds in a clear coherent manner. Because if we use our minds in a clear coherent manner, we will not accept the unacceptable.”
~John Trudell
THIS JUST IN! Everyone save for a few stragglers like Bill Gates, Kanye and Flo from Progressive Insurance has agreed to call it quits on this crappy sh!t kicker of a civilization. Even Elon is in! So starting tomorrow, the economy will be shut down. All work for money will cease. 90% of existing jobs will instantly be erased forever. No more stock portfolios or credit scores. No daylight savings time or alarm clocks. You will no longer need a job to survive, which will help us move into the reality that what we really needed all along was just the Earth and each other. Everyone (who wasn’t already doing so) will start training to become “essential workers” so we can all do our fair share in the labor required to keep us alive and well which means everyone who is physically and mentally capable will become a farmer/cook and or a doctor and or a therapist/healer and or be put on clean up crew. The birdsong will comeback. The insects will recover. Water will start to run clear again. The smog will lift. We will start to learn how to live as real human Earthlings once again, as the bulk of our ancestors did. Our lives will finally begin. It will not be easy but it will be real and for the first time we really will be all in this together.
APRIL FOOLS!
Ha ha, I was just joshin’ back there when I was talking about the dawn of a new and sane era. Everything is still the worst, and this racist, sexist, unethical, unjust, toxic, gross, ecocidal, mad, maniacal for-profit death machine we are trapped in will keep chugging right along until it no longer can, either because the ecological crisis overcomes it or the masses finally rise up and overthrow these stupid as fucking hell insane systems built on exploitation, colonialism, extraction, inequality, white supremacy, human supremacy, and a complete disregard for the one planet we know to harbor something as rare and precious as complex Life.
Just like with the pandemic, the war in Ukraine is yet another grotesquely squandered opportunity to actually take a collective moment, or several thousand moments, to really have a rock hard honest look at the brutal global man made systems we live by and ask what should be a very obvious and simply question:
Do we really want to continue on with this utter insanity or what?
I would venture a guess that the bulk of humanity, who is under some form of oppression and suffering caused by these insane systems, would say NOPE….but they feel as though they have no choice or say in the matter. But many of us still have a hell of a lot more say than all the other countless helpless non human lifeforms that also live here, remember them????
Apart from sharing an article like this one on social media, or this one, or this one, you have no real say in how Biden handles the Ukraine situation. You cannot stop him from using the crisis in Ukraine — a situation that the U.S. and NATO had a hand in creating— as license to “ramp up” oil production during a critical ecologically sensitive time that calls for epic and swift rationing and powering down and degrowth and a radical re-organization of EVERY-FUCKING-THING.
But I don’t think it’s denial exactly that’s at play here. It’s grief. Denial is one of the stages of grief for sure. But so is bargaining. And there is a lot of it out there right now….Just the ridiculous and dangerous idea that a “transition to green energy” is going to solve much of anything. The IPCC report from last summer said that global emissions must PEAK by 2025…..in order to have a FIFTY FIFTY chance of staving off 1.5 degrees of warming (this is considered to be the temperature we must stay under to avoid widespread catastrophic runaway global heating).
That is not going to happen.
You know it won’t.
There are ZERO signs of slowing down energy production, manufacturing, consumption, travel, factory farming, fast fashion, WAR, award shows, etc.
The fossil fuels just required in the setting up of these promised centralized “renewable” energy systems — all the new mineral mining and construction needed for such a colossal endeavor — would put us way off track of ever EVER reaching that goal of peaking by 2025.
Well, not according to this ONE scientific paper [READ HERE] which estimates that the infrastructure needed to “transition” to a renewable energy grid would “require less than a year’s worth of CO2 emissions”. But to laser focus only on emissions isn’t helping us grasp the whole scope of the problem, like not even close. By doing so it creates a painfully myopic view of what is actually going down. We have compartmentalized ourselves into a box here, a sterile box that we’ve been led to believe exists outside of the Earth’s life support systems, outside of reality. Forget “transitioning” off fossil fuels and onto renewables. We are failing to bring up the REAL transition that needs to happen…….We need to transition the fuck off of this ENTIRE mother fucking crum bum way of life! No amount of green energy will accomplish this goal. It’s called “green” energy because it’s going to make a shit ton of greenbacks for basically the same fucking group of low life asshole people (*cough*white men) who made a fortune off fossil fuel extraction. And they’re only called “renewables” because they renew our faith that this shady corporate hack of a crazy chemicalized civilization is cool & normal and can just go on in perpetuity without consequence just as long as we fuel the destruction in a different way that’s actually the same way but allows unearned guilt absolution. So the only thing truly “sustainable” about green energy is that it sustains the illusion that industrialized humanity can carry on operating completely out of sync with the Natural world, and without any meaningful healthy respectful interdependent relationships with Nature and with others, and with a near total discounting of all the oppressed slaves required to do the nitty gritty physical work involved to maintain this industrial nightmare. Sure, once this fantastical new green energy system is in place it will put off less emissions than it’s fossil fueled predecessor….but the road to get to this new system (no pun intended because many more actual roads will be needed) will be paved with unimaginable destruction, death, pollution, exploitation, slavery, neocolonialism, theft, inequality, and further uglification of the beauty that still remains.
The more one wakes up from this fever dream and the more sane you become….the more crazy you feel……..
If we are serious about actually healing and preserving the Earth’s biosphere (Ugh, what a terribly technical and unpoetic word for this freakin’ miracle!), and not just for humans (or for certain humans, wink wink) but for ALL LIFE then this civilization must stop, like grind to a halt. Green energy will not stop much. It won’t stop the Amazon from being burned down to create grazing space for cows, it won’t stop car culture and all the road building/maintenance involved, it won’t stop animals from being hit on those roads, it won’t the stop data centers required to keep the internet going (if these centers were a country they would be the 5th most energy intensive in the world!!!!! Ha ha, imagine if the internet was a real country. Its main exports would be funny cat videos and make up tutorials and its National Anthem would be the TED Talk intro music and its president would be a Bernie Sanders Mitten Meme), it won’t stop plastic pollution, it won’t stop sweatshops, it won’t stop lawns, or light pollution, or soil erosion, or food waste, or overfishing, or homelessness, or the churning out of the endless parade of electronics constantly in “need” of “upgrading”, it won’t stop police shootings or mass incarceration, or millionaires or billionaires, or spousal abuse, or sex trafficking, or cancer, or junkmail, or the unnatural inefficiency and isolation of the nuclear family, it won’t stop species extinction, or deforestation, or landfills, or endocrine disrupting chemicals, or wet markets, or biolabs, or pandemics, or testing on animals, or the fact that in 2020 a boundary was crossed where man made things now outweigh the Earth’s living things (biomass). And it definitely won’t stop the military industrial complex.
That paper concludes that “Our calculation shows that about 25 GtCO2 will be emitted to build a 100% RE system. Currently, the world emits 40 Gt CO2 annually.” But it’s important to remember that one of the biggest emitters on the planet is the U.S. Military, but their emissions are not factored into global emission numbers, as if they don’t count. Here is some interpretative dance to help you better understand…..
A very serious problem with all these scientific papers and studies is that they are highly specialized and fail miserably at any kind of of systems thinking, at seeing the big picture. That renewable energy paper makes no mention of all the sacrifice zones that would be required to mine the bonkers amount of materials needed for this new infrastructure. No mention of all the habitat that would be destroyed. All the pollution that would result. All the water required. All the traditional and Indigenous and impoverished peoples that would be royally fucked over in some way, just adding more trauma to the most traumatized among us. In a schizophrenic 2020 article in ‘Nature’ entitled ‘Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity’ they say that switching to green energy is necessary to avert the worst of climate change but also say
Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.
Of all the millions of animal species on Gawd’s Green Earth, only ONE is under the impression that it needs to produce energy outside of what they can make with their own bodies and with just leaves n’ shit. Beavers do damn rivers like us but not in a way that kills the life in the river but actually adds to it. We are so entrenched, so invested, so addicted, so ensnared by these industrialized systems we live by that require massive inputs and enslavement. If we pull the plug on these artificial life support systems, many of us will die. But if we don’t then we will also die. But this is NOT a “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” situation, don’t let the human supremacy you’ve been steeped in fool you. Because if we stay plugged in, not only will we die but countless other lifeforms — and even entire ecosystems — will die too. Pulling the plug may kill some of us humans, especially those most dependent on these artificial systems keeping many of us alive, but at least other species will have a chance.
I think it’s safe to say that very few of us understand the enormous and destructive and exploitative undertaking of trying to replace fossil fuels with so called green energy just so everything can remain “NORMAL”. Just have a look at ONE component of such an endeavor: Cobalt [TAKE A LOOK AT THIS SHIT].
The backwards thinking that more destruction of the Earth is needed before we can stop destroying the Earth is the very definition of psychosis. One rooted in the bargaining stage of grief. One rooted in a fear of change. One rooted in a strong dependency on centralized authoritarian systems to provide what we need rather than a reliance on one another and a direct reliance on Nature. We have been trained not to trust one another, so it’s understandable that we want things to stay the same because alternative systems would mean actually helping and trusting one another again. So instead we fully believe that things can remain the same but somehow be magically powered by fairy dust.
And to even hint at the mere suggestion of actually using less energy, using less of ANYTHING, so that the Earth has a chance to start healing or to stave off mass extinction, well this is blasphemy in the eyes of the religion of capitalism.
Jimmy Carter barely broached the subject of resource conservation by asking folks to turn down their thermostats and put on a sweater. For even attempting to bring it up he was practically tarred and feathered (which is actually a half way decent way to keep yourself warm)….
….when only a couple generations before that, the public was more than willing to do their part to conserve and ration — granted it was to help win a war that was sold to the American people under the guise of “fighting fascism” but really at the core of the war was a move to establish a new world order that would make it even easier for the rich to amass wealth and territory and turn us into the mindless obedient consumers and workforce needed to run this new world. Whoopsie. But the campaign to get people to conserve during WW2 was very effective.
They convinced the public that by not buying things they don’t need and rationing what they do have then it will help win the war. But I fear the same tactics that worked during WW2 will no longer work on us now, and we’re not even really talking about a war, we’re talking about rationing to save the mother living planet!…Not saving a country or a group of people or “democracy” but the actual Earth. But we are far too hyper-individualized now to come together and sacrifice for the greater good. So the idea of rationing and conservation is just not anywhere to be found in the mainstream consciousness (and if it is, it’s masked in very tame non triggering words like “degrowth” because no one is allowed to just come out and say we need to stop using like 75%, 80% of all that is being consumed if there is to be even a slight chance at stopping the Earth’s life support systems from shutting down). In fact, since WW2, the the opposite has been pushed. George W. told us to shop to beat terrorism and Biden along with Fossil Fuel giants are foaming at the mouth to increase all oil and gas production and usage by any means necessary.
This one time, Barack “Paris Climate Accord” Obama even bragged about how U.S. gas production went up under his reign [WATCH HERE].
But it’s not just fossil fuels that Joe wants to ramp up, it’s all of the above. Anything to keep this shit show on the road. So that means anything goes when it comes to mining the materials needed for “green energy”. So time to pull out all the stops and enact the Defense Production Act, which lets corporations bypass many legal obstacles or use unethical outdated mining laws to get at the raw materials needed for electric cars and solar panels and wind turbines.
According to the White House fact sheet:
The president will issue a directive, authorizing the use of the Defense Production Act to secure American production of critical materials to bolster our clean energy economy by reducing our reliance on China and other countries for the minerals and materials that will power our clean energy future. Specifically, the DPA will be authorized to support the production and processing of minerals and materials used for large capacity batteries — such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese — and the Department of Defense will implement this authority using strong environmental, labor, community, and tribal consultation standards.
Day Hinkey, a Paiute and Shoshone tribal member who opposes the gargantuan Lithium Mine slated to go in at Thacker Pass, NV says “We deeply oppose President Biden’s executive order for the Defense Production Act for precious minerals, I believe this is gonna be the second coming of environmental destruction.”
Lauren Pagel of the environmental organization ‘Earthworks’ says “Expanding mining without addressing the shortcomings of our archaic mining laws would be disastrous. More than a century of reckless mining has poisoned the air, water, and land of too many communities.”
Mining of ANY kind pollutes, big time. And mining lithium and other minerals and metals needed for batteries and other renewable infrastructure is no different. Mining destroys habitats. The Thacker Pass Lithium mine threatens the homes of Sage Grouse (down to only 1% of their historic population numbers) and Golden Eagles. Mining keeps us addicted to lifestyles that require evermore extraction of one form or another leading to evermore destruction. We must learn to scale back. We’ve mined enough. We’ve moved enough shit around (including ourselves).
The fact that as I type this there are more coffee cups being manufactured in some factory somewhere when there are already enough coffee mugs in existence that every man, woman, child and golden retriever on Earth could have at THE VERY LEAST 5 mugs to their name (and 3 of these mugs would be referencing the banality of Mondays) is quite a sobering obscenity. My parents have so many mugs that when they are all clean they can’t even all fit in the cupboard. We are at #PEAKMUGS, people.
Now just apply this mug rule to all the shit out there. It’s bad. It’s real bad. So VERY much shit has already been produced. Most shit that is made isn’t even in use 6 months later!!!!!! Just last year alone 29 Billion pairs of shoes were made. And there are one billion people who do not even wear shoes (either because they don’t need them or can’t afford them). So before anything new is made, how ‘bout we first use what is already here: share it, take care of it, re-use it, refurbish it, repair it, and recycle it — to give the Earth a break, to give workers a break. It’s time to go full on ‘Maria Von Trapp-Making-Playclothes-out-of-the-Old-Curtains’ mode!
So the good news is that there is already so much fabric out there that we wouldn’t need to grow anymore cotton for a good long time. This would free up so much land so that it could heal. It would free up cotton farmers in India who are forced to use toxic chemicals, it would shut down all garment factories — which is a real shame because I hear they are absolutely delightful places to work. All that currently exists is MORE than enough for all of us to have our basic “stuff” needs met, and then some….
So the behavior of the world’s ruling class feels to me like a kind of doubling down, a high stakes betting on how long they can continue to squeeze excess and wealth out of the Earth using these current systems before it all turns to complete shite and/or the masses finally revolt. But at this point it’s scary to think about what would actually get us to revolt, like how much worse must it get before we say enough. But many of us HAVE said enough…by way of marching, petitioning, voting, protesting, hunger strikes, and a whole hell of a lot of like button pushing. But none of that is going to cut it. Not anymore. We cannot plead with or work the available systems to bring about the massive changes that are required right now. We must take drastic action, and soon. All this talk about reducing CO2 emissions when the top 1% of the world are responsible for as much emissions as the entire bottom half of humanity. So there is one way to cut emissions in half right now….
P.S. If you make $35,000 annually, congrats, you are a part of the top 1% “earners” globally. Yep, that’s all it takes to qualify for that prestigious club.
Listen, the rich and powerful are not in denial, they know full well that shit is going down: ecologically, societally, economically. They are not in denial of this. Their answer to the question Do we want to continue on with this utter insanity? is Yes. But not because they are in denial about what is happening but because they want to continue to make money and they truly believe their money will protect them. And it probably will, up to a point. Especially if the masses let them get away with it. But this means more of the masses must wake up to many things. Like how the military is basically the hired muscle of the rich and is PRIMARILY there to protect the resources that the rich will exploit for profit, NOT to protect you. I saw this first hand at Standing Rock as the National Guard was called in to protect a Fossil Fuel Corporation against a group of rag tag activists and brave Indigenous Water Protectors.
And most of your taxes go to fund this private security company known as the U.S. Military.
It really is that simple. Look at Afghanistan. The U.S. government told us “Listen, we need to go occupy that area to beat the Taliban, we must do it for freedom, for democracy, and for women’s rights. Yeah sure, maybe in the process of ridding the world of the Taliban we’ll have to physically destroy much of the country but don’t worry, we’ll help the Afghan people rebuild.” Welp, fast forward to now and not only is the Taliban back baby but the country is also physically destroyed AND not only did their president flee with $170 million of the people’s money, Biden has frozen $7 billion of the country’s assets, oh and don’t forget about sanctions — the most ineffectual way to make leaders of other countries do what you want because it just ends up hurting the people and not the ruling class — so now Afghanistan is worse off than ever. 13,000 newborn babies have died since January. And if you try now in this geopolitical climate to bring up the war crimes of the U.S. and NATO you are met with neo-McCarthyism……
So many people were saying “The Slap” from the Oscars just helps normalize violence….when hello the entire film industry normalizes violence, the resource intensive lifestyles of the rich & famous in attendance at the Oscars normalizes violence, as did Chris Rock’s bad joke referencing the U.S. military……the most violent force on the planet! EVERYONE in attendance at the Oscars deserves, at the very least, to be slapped. For the sake of the Earth, many superfluous industries need to go bye bye. Why not start with show bizness?….right after one last star studded film is made:
‘Back to the Future, Part IV: Dude, Where’s My Future? Answer: The Rich Ate It, They Got Crumbs All Over Themslves’
You hear that, Adam McKay? (net worth of $60 million. Of course that number is from before he made ‘Don’t Look Up’, one of Netflix’s most watched movies EVER. So he actually made millions more while warning us about climate change using an oversimplified comet-hitting-the-Earth metaphor, when he himself — and the class he belongs to — IS the comet)
But no, instead here comes a shiny brand spankin’ new Top Gun Sequel! And not a second too late! Can’t have the public losing faith in the military right now!
The premise: Tom Cruise’s ‘Maverick” is called back for a special top secret mission, the most dangerous one to date. Hmmmm.
Maybe the war in Ukraine will disrupt Russian pipelines but nothin’ gonna stop the Pentagon-to-Hollywood pipeline from a’ flowin’. David Swanson reports in Counterpunch…..
The “entertainment” content carefully shaped by the “entertainment” offices of the Pentagon and the CIA doesn’t just insidiously prepare people to react differently to news about war and peace in the world. To a huge extent it substitutes a different reality for people who learn very little actual news about the world at all.
Nearly 3,000 films and many thousands of TV episodes have been given the Pentagon treatment, and many others have been handled by the CIA. In many film productions, the military effectively becomes a co-producer with veto power, in exchange for allowing the use of military bases, weapons, experts, and troops. The alternative is the denial of those things.
But the military is not as passive as this might suggest. It actively pitches new story ideas to movie and TV producers. It seeks out new ideas and new collaborators who might bring them to a theater or laptop near you. ‘Act of Valor’ actually began life as a recruitment advertisement.
The Pentagon has also prevented many films from being made that cast the Military or the U.S. in general as the bad guy. Tough luck for you, Yemen, Hollywood will most likely never tell your story.
This oppressor, this machine that has gone mad and run amok, it is berserk. They keep telling us, “progress.” They keep telling us “face reality.” Well, let’s deal with reality. Reality is the Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this Thing to continue when it’s polluting the air, it’s polluting the water, polluting our food. They pollute the air, they pollute the water, they pollute our food, they pollute our minds. ~ John Trudell
There was a gruesome 60 car pileup recently on I-80 in Pennsylvania during a snow squall. In my eyes, this horrific ghastly scene perfectly encapsulates our insane, reckless, violent, full steam ahead civilization and our passive disassociation:
Our society(or sorry excuse for one) is a series of deadly ongoing accidents.
And most of us can’t see where we are going nor what lies ahead.
Visibility is low.
No precautions are being taken, and no one questions whether or not we even have any business doing what we are doing because we simply know no other way other than this non stop fast paced madness.
This culture is on a collision course with LIFE itself.
The impacts are already many……and piling up:
Icecaps are melting faster than they ever have in Earth’s history, more CO2 is in the atmosphere today than since well before humanity existed, 150 species are lost everyday, the jet streams are slowing, the oceans are warming & acidifying, the corals are bleaching, the insects are disappearing, babies have more microplastics in their bodies than adults do, microplastics were recently found for the first time in our blood, Americans are selling their blood at record numbers just to survive, the Amazon rain forest is deliberately being burned down to the point where many parts of it are now a carbon emitter rather than a carbon sink while Amazon.com makes record profits. Half of U.S. waterways are severely polluted…
And less than 10 miles from where I grew up in Ohio, construction is underway for the largest silicon chip factory EVER….in response to the global computer chip “shortage”. And we are too deep into the pileup to realize that dude, that’s not a real shortage, man.
Biden even praised this factory in his SOTU address….
Yet he somehow failed to mention in his speech even ONCE the devastating IPCC report [please watch this] that had just come out (but please do tell me how Biden is the “lesser evil”. Please do tell me how when Trump effed around with North Korea it was psychotic and an existential threat but when Biden effs around with THE BIGGEST nuclear power in the world it’s American exceptionalism).
But it’s OK because as we all know, computer chips are basically made of fairy dust so no foul no harm, right?
From an article in The Guardian entitled ‘The Computer Chip Industry has a Dirty Climate Secret’
The industry presents a paradox. Meeting global climate goals will, in part, rely on semiconductors. They’re integral to electric vehicles, solar arrays and wind turbines. But chip manufacturing also contributes to the climate crisis. It requires huge amounts of energy and water — a chip fabrication plant, or fab, can use millions of gallons of water a day — and creates hazardous waste.
Biden says that the building site for this $20 billion, ONE THOUSAND ACRE chip factory is just “empty” land sitting there waiting to be put to good use. The land is in fact empty because the rich diverse Life (including Indigenous peoples) that once occupied and enriched that land was already displaced long ago by colonial chemical-laden factory-farmed GMO soy & corn monocrops……to feed cows, who should be eating their natural diet of grass and who should also not exist in the populous numbers that they do….just like another species should not exist in the populous numbers that WE do.
It’s all insult to injury at this point. It’s all just piling piles on top of piles.
GET THIS: Of all land mammals on Earth, 96% are now comprised of humans and domesticated animals, namely cows. Only 4% are wild animals now. ONLY FOUR PERCENT. Think about that.
That means all the squirrels and monkeys and deer and raccoons and tigers and mice and zebras and foxes and giraffes and rabbits and polar bears and grizzly bears and black bears and pandas and antelope and groundhogs and prairie dogs and bobcats and rhinos and skunks and baboons and weasels and wolves and elephants and kangaroos and opossums and lions and bighorn sheep and bats and coyotes and orangutans and boars and badgers and any other wild non-marine animal you can think of — these creatures now only represent 4% of ALL the land mammals on this planet. Talk about a pileup. Life on Earth is literally being buried under humans and cattle and all our man made belongings.
And as more of us are thrown from the wreckage of this pileup, we cower in the bushes on the sidelines, gaping stupefied at the big blue Amazon smile plastered on the side of a truck as it crashes and burns in front of us while we are simultaneously hoping aloud that our belongings are ok….LONG before it eventually occurs to us (if it ever even does) to wonder if other “things” BESIDES our charger — like people and animals and plants — are gonna be ok too. And never thinking of trying to WARN those who are coming down the line.
And the mindless disconnection of not being able to put two and two together to see that it’s all these “belongings” — and our forced adherence to systems that put material possessions at the heart of our very existence — that have brought on this calamity.
One person at this chaotic scene can’t even remember what vehicle she was in, for crying out loud.
Can you?
Can you dig back deep into your DNA, into our collective consciousness and remember a time when the vehicle you were riding in was the Earth and we were all participatory passengers together…..not these lonely separate passive spectators we’ve become, waiting to be rescued, waiting for someone else to clean up the mess, waiting without any real reflection or contemplation of what just happened, waiting for the road to hell to be cleared and opened back up again so we can continue on this dead end path of destruction. No need to worry about ever going off the cliff though, we’ll crash and burn way before then.
But there will come a time, sooner than we are allowed to fathom, when there will be no one left to rescue us from the widening emergency. There will be no one left to rescue the rescuers because the emergency will be everywhere all at once, and the artificial safe havens propping up any sense of “normalcy” or stability will no longer be able to be maintained. There will be no kelp forests, no koala bears, no mountain glaciers, no mountain gorillas, no old growth forests, no new growth forests, no reliable seasons, no time for ecosystems to heal from the once-in-a-1000-year droughts & floods that are now happening every few years. There will be no fishermen because there will be no fish. There will be no farmers because there will be no soil. There will be no flowers because there will be no bees or bats or butterflies to pollinate them. There will be no birds because there will be no bugs for them to eat or trees for them to nest in. There will be no trees because we needed space for more roads, more factories, more monocrops.
The ONLY glint of a glimmer of hope lies in the fact that when all this comes to be it will also be next to impossible to keep up the vile absurdities that plague us — -which means there will be no politicians, no money, no debt, no credit scores, no celebrities, no award shows, no “social media”, no extreme human hierarchies, no “under-developed” nations, no billionaires, no bargaining, no denial….but maybe just maybe…acceptance.
But as it fell, we documented it all. We took videos with our phones and shared them with a mile long list of hashtags. We read the latest science reports (even though what we actually read was just brief watered down articles ABOUT the actual scientific reports that no one can read because one would need a trigonometry calculator and physics degree to get thru them), we changed our profile setting to highlight different flags and different causes. We told ourselves that Audre Lorde was wrong when she said “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”….or we post this quote defiantly on instagram, oblivious to the crushing irony that the rich will never be overcome by way of using the for profit platforms they created to make us feel as though we have a “voice”. We forget that despite all our rage we are still just a rat in a cage.
We did EVERYTHING we could think of.
Everything but the ONE thing that EVER had a chance of stopping all this:
Actually stopping.
Just walking away.
Hand in hand.
I want this to be the last thing I ever write on the subject.
I want it to be the last one you ever read.
But it won’t be.
And that is why we will fail. Fail each other. Fail the millions of other species we used to call our kin. Fail the future generations of all creatures.
We comfort ourselves with statements like “The Earth will be fine, the Earth will still be there long after we are gone”.
This is just an excuse to keep trashing the place NOW, and said to absolve our guilt and avoid the immensely complex feelings of deep pain & grave sorrow of taking so so SO many other species down with us. Sure the Earth might “still be here after we are gone” but elephants won’t be, whales won’t be, millions of species that took millions of years to evolve won’t be here anymore….and not because of volcanoes or asteroids, but because ONE species lost it’s way and overran the planet and changed the physical make-up of the atmosphere and the water and the soil to the point of no return. All because we couldn’t help one another get off the road….roads built to be the veins of this psychotic insatiable beast created by a handful of psychotic insatiable men. Men who are seen as important job creators and visionaries and pinnacles of success…..Instead of the callous, out-of-touch orchestrators of mass death that they are.
Harriet Tubman once said she could have freed a thousand more slaves if only they had realized they were slaves.
But today, even when we fully realize we are slaves to systems destroying the planet and each other it seems to make no difference whatsoever. As long as these systems we are forced to (and willingly) live by exist then none of us can truly be free in any real way. But freedom isn’t even what we actually want….it’s what we are TOLD to want, told to value, told to believe we already have when we have nothing of the sort. What we actually want is interdependence, not sovereignty. We want togetherness not autonomy. We want cooperation not the “healthy competition of a free market”. Freedom doesn’t actually exist in nature. Nothing is totally independent from everything else, that’s impossible. And until we realize this nothing will improve (but until these fake unnatural systems built on separation are gone we won’t be able to fully realize this! D’oh!). The only freedom we should speak of is to free ourselves and others of these wretched systems we live by once and for all.
There is no Life on Earth that is safe from the ongoing pileup until these systems are stopped and we start to dig one another out from the rubble and get into the light where we belong (sorry, didn’t mean to slip into an ‘Ace of Base’ lyric there, lol).
When I said earlier that this ecological mess is due to ONE species who lost it’s way and overran the planet, I misspoke. It’s important to remember that there are still some of us out there who have miraculously hung on to their humanity in the midst of such colonial and industrial onslaughts, who can still claim the nomenclature of ‘homo sapien: the wise ape’…..
And even though with Earth’s current ravaged state there are far too many of us to return anytime soon to the kind of nature based lives that these true homo sapiens are living, we can still try to remember what it was like before the fall, before the crash, before the pileup. When being happy was a much easier pursuit, in fact it wasn’t a pursuit at all, it was simply built into the daily rituals ensuring our connection to that which sustains us, and sustains all of creation…
Imagine, instead of being initiated into the ways of capitalism and careerism and consumerism and rugged individualism and patriotism and monotheism and materialism and politics and standard schooling and the Great Savior of Technology, you were initiated into the ways of the forest or a mountain or a river. Just imagine.
Imagine running out of imagine
Mistaking authority for power
Weaving lifes free spirit
Into patterns of control.~John Trudell
Every day upon waking, there is a moment — before the harsh intrusive deranged social conditioning kicks in that makes us just accept this shit show of a manufactured world — where this ancient part of us instinctively wonders:
THIS HAS TO BE SOME KIND OF A JOKE.
THIS CAN’T BE REAL.
THERE HAS TO BE SOME MISTAKE.
We are living the same day over and over.
But it’s not Groundhog Day.
It’s April Fools.
Only the joke is deadly. Only the joke is on everyone and everything, even the jokers. This joke is getting old. It’s not funny anymore. It never was. And to see so many people waste their outrage on something so trivial as Will Smith’s odd immature reaction to a bad joke does not bode well that we will be able to collectively garner the strength to do more than just slap those offending us but STOP systems that are offending ALL LIFE ON EARTH in the worst possible way.
Are you still using up brain power a’wondering whether or not “the slap” was staged? Well, I can tell you with great confidence that it most definitely was…..Merely because in a sense EVERYTHING is staged in this weird-ass fake human zoo we all live in. How can it not be? We have no strong tether to what is real. How many Americans have ever seen a coffee tree or could even identify a picture of one, and yet we drink coffee everyday. Staged. Our entire world is staged. You are surrounded by props that you haven’t the faintest idea of where they came from (other than “the store”). And practically everyone around you is playing a role they were NOT born to play. And the stage directors are no where in sight. Look around, none of this is based in reality. None of this is based in respect to the limits of Nature. And far too many of us, especially the likes of rich celebrities like Will Smith and Chris Rock, live in a complete fantasy world where they are not required to do ANY of the direct physical labor to meet our most basic needs, so that work gets piled up onto the poor, onto the Earth itself. To be this out of touch with capital “L” LIFE makes it impossible also to be in touch with death. A fear of death is natural, but without a culture in place that properly praises LIFE then you will also find no tools to deal with death in a healthy way. It’s why so many of us live in constant fear or constant apathy or constant pleasure seeking. It’s why we cannot seem to move through the grieving stages TOGETHER and arrive at acceptance and then get to damn work at stopping that which is unnecessarily causing so so so much harm, stopping that which doesn’t allow us time to process any of what is happening. You are alive during an extremely rare precarious unprecedented time in not just human history, but ALL of Earth’s history! And here we sit staring at screens, alone, incapable of comprehending any of it. Nor feeling out our place in it. We are a placeless people. Refugees from our own human nature. Refugees from real life, from real death. This sick society has rendered us unable to, as James Baldwin wrote, “earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
“Behind what we think of as the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro: reality- the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
~James Baldwin.
