Little by little our eyes are being opened....but it is so slow and painful
We are about to see the end point of the Democratic Party scam that they called a "Primary". The Republicans are doing their version and the theater just gets more and more sickening.
Stealing the First Lady's speech has caused another wave of reaction to the well established disregard for truth or ethics that should be expected by now.
Also the energy spent arguing about whether or not Trump is worse than Clinton. It is so funny. Trying to establish some meaningless small difference between very large numbers.
As the sheep bleat we see more and more people, especially young people, who see the thing more clearly. It is so slow and painful, but it is happening.
History is of little use for most people or they would know that we have been through all this before many times over a very long span of time.
At 80 sometimes my patience wears thin. Having been in this since I was at the University of Chicago when Bernie was there in the early sixties I get weary trying to get people to see what was so clear back then. It seems that the human species is highly overrated for intelligence. We have mastered a mechanistic approach to nature that we think is "science" and usually fail to see it as an appendage to the greed driven economic system that dominates us. Unfortunately this will come crashing down on us sooner than the "scientists" were able to fathom.
We have filled our environment with many poisons, fouled the water, ruined the soil and yet we blindly go on thinking something will save us.
At a time when we need the most radical departures from a system that is a form of mass suicide we look for band aids. We play political theater rather than plan for survival.
More people are seeing it. Too little to late? Probably. But we can only keep trying for the sake of those who follow us into this mess we have made.
Comments
Two things I would like to
Two things I would like to add:
People in Latin America have understood the dystopian USA for centuries.
I am a "scientist" (a botanist/archaeologist) and you really do have to differentiate scientists whose goals are to create "things" to make a profit from technology, and those who study nature for the pure joy of it. Yesterday, for example, I spent twenty minutes watching the "Dance of the Midges" in the sunlight, waded around in a waterfall pool to see how small water skaters were distributed, and observed (with a binocular stereomicroscope) tiny green liverworts, algas and mosses on stones near the waterfall. I also managed to get nearly to the base of the massive sea cliffs to see the office building size boulders close up which have fallen into the sea from the cliffs. I am 70 years old and not nearly as nimble as I was, and a bit fearful of slippery rocks on the river below the falls... but observation of nature, a science, is still infinitely amazing.
From the Light House.
I love science
From biology to planet formation. As a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, the kids just now born may never get the chance to have a dream.
FDR 9-23-33, "If we cannot do this one way, we will do it another way. But do it we will.
Yep.
I'm the same age as you and agree that it is probably too little, too late. I have apologized to my children. You and I both tried in our different ways to make a difference, but there weren't enough of us and we could not agree on enough. The only hope I have is that this awareness is worldwide now and maybe the corporate masters will not be able to kill enough of us before we finish them. Pretty slim hope. I agree that all we can do is keep trying. William Faulkner said that what we do best is endure.
-Greed is not a virtue.
-Socialism: the radical idea of sharing.
-Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, In a speech at the White House, 1962
Even if all of us who tried to save the world agreed,
it would not have been enough. I started preaching about climate change 25 years ago but very few have wanted to listen. I have decided that you can't tell people things that they aren't ready to hear. Still, you have to try.
Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.
I have always made that distinction
The problem is that too few do or even understand the difference....Have you seen this? Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World
An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.
It's all a big put on
to make people feel helpless.
Getting through to people who swear up and down that things are just fine and that we can ONLY vote R and D, is the hardest part of this battle, but even that is starting to make headway.
Of course, you have to be a right royal, mouthy, strident pain in the ass to get their attention initially, but that has its downside, too (and I'll just go ahead and say it so you don't have to...."I oughta know from pains in the asses, being one myself...") But I have had some limited success in my pain-in-the-ass-ness, so there's that.
What we have to do is not give up, no matter how discouraging it gets. Thanks for this post...it really is happening, albeit at a snail's pace...
A dear friend
and former VA psychiatrist educated and trained at Vanderbilt University said it best for me. He'd gone to practically every Vanderbilt football and basketball home game since he'd graduated medical school. Vandy at one time had very competitive teams. Later in his long life they were hard to watch much less attend regularly. Yet he always did. A couple of years before his death the subject of that week's Vandy football game disaster came up with one friend remarking that there was always next year. My friend quietly remarked, "At 83 years old wait until next year loses most of it's appeal." Yet he still went to those games despite failing eyesight from late onset diabetes. The lesson for me is: endure, keep going, and as long as you are still alive all things are possible.
Thanks for the essay.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
keeping on going on - when pain is too much - I listen to this
guy and then I get some sleep and I know when I wake up that ... people are not falling for shit, they don't talk about it, but they get it, young, elderly, poor and the ones, who are stuck in dependency. It might be slow and might be painful, but people go on and get it.
[video:https://youtu.be/NX3KOaJvly4]
[video:https://youtu.be/nd8i4j6zQSw]
[video:https://youtu.be/_d1SpEfRBr0?list=RDnd8i4j6zQSw]
Listen, guys, life can be and is a bitch.
But in death there is no homemade ice cream.
We gotta work with what we have.
Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.
It's a little different this time
because humanity is at the end of its rope. There's nothing left to hold onto.
Back in 1979 when Pres. Carter installed thirty-two 100 lb. solar panels on the White House roof, just soon after as it was used for cooking, washing and other normal operations in the residence, I think we had a glimmer of hope. But our true fate was left to Raygun who, after exchanging the hostages for TOW missiles, but before the covert cocaine shipments for contra arms in Central America, before all those disgusting inhumane things, he first immediately removed all the perfectly functional solar hardware because of his obsession with placating fossil fuel corporations. After which his hatred of Mother Earth was never so apparent in his infamously absurd statement, “Trees pollute”.
“History repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.” Karl Marx
Whether our new sworn enemy of Mother Earth this time, will it be Pres. Hillary or Pres. Trump, it largely is irrelevant as we watch the polar ice caps melt, the CO2 reaching the levels of Cretaceous, the rerun now won't be the last gasp of the dinosaurs but pretty much everything hominid and below, with the exception of thermophylic bacteria which will also go away once all the oceans evaporate as so much steam and disappear into the atmosphere as did the ancient seas escape from on a once wet-planet Venus a few billion years ago. Before Earth was hardly even getting started with its life.
If there is ever to be any final epithet for Mother Earth, I would think it would be: "Capitalism delivered the death blow."
You make some good points, but
much of what you're saying is hyperbole. Earth will NOT be like venus. Not possible, not going to happen; an entirely different trajectory. Everything hominid and "below" would eliminate all the bacteria as well, btw.
The first thing to go will be our social structures and as the ability to burn fossil fuels in mass quantities is no longer possible, things will gradually begin to improve; granted, they will get far worse before they get better. Human populations will likely not go extinct, but will become much smaller in number, more tribal in nature, and involve lots of hunting and gathering again. If this happens there will be no second iron age or bronze age, because none of those materials can be easily mined at the surface anymore and all that might be accessible will be rusting away in the destroyed structures.
Anyway, I could go on and on about this, but I've got to get the final grades in for my environmental science students; procrastination king here.
A bit silly to argue whether or not it will be like Venus
That is just another example of how we waste time and energy in politics rather than getting the job done
An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.
I look at the
way people can get under stress, collapse of civilization while the climate unravels to the point that it is possible that we may see an extinction event. add wars for the goodies that are left over, diseases, lack of doctors, social disarray allowing for things that go against civilized behavior.
So while some may gather together and wall off their communities, those communities are likely subject to siege by the warrior bands that will form, but likely, most will see that worse case scenarios, Humanity will be gone along with several other species, but Humans say "It would be the end of the world" Incorrect.
It would be the end of Humanity and its' civilization, the planet has seen five extinctions, bounced back and started over again with some species coming out and evolving. Will Humans be part of the survivors? who knows? Humanity has apparently according to certain myths weathered several "bottlenecks" and look at us now, 7+billion, and allowing ourselves to be ruled over by just a few ultra-greedy nutters.
If Mother Earth decides to shed us off as we do a cold, so be it, it's not like we are doing any truly great things with the rapacious consumerist market culture the corporates have fostered here, maybe land squids could do better once they evolve? hard to say.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
We are a definite large scale threat to the ecosystem. We need
to go. And we will.
An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.