“somehow avoiding our headlong plunge into global mass extinction”

I sympathize with the impulse to reinvent everything, but reinventing everything is one of the things that we know doesn’t work, but if I understand you right, I think your idea of the way to respond is deeply and frighteningly wrong.

What we need is a soft landing. You don’t get a soft landing by disassembling the airplane in midflight. What we need to do that is different is to find a path to sustainability that is fast enough that we have a chance of saving as much as we can but not so fast as to cause huge disruptions.

Here’s another way to look at it: if the world population crashes abruptly, the damage we will do will be far worse than if it comes down gradually. The way to avoid the mass extinction is to keep things on an even keel and gradually steer the damned thing to a safe harbor.

Deciding things emotionally rather than rationally is likely to crash the damned thing even faster. We have exceeded the long-term carrying capacity. That’s a quantitative problem.

Doing the least damage from there requires rigorous thinking, with numbers, and taking advantage of everything good the system provides us, like movies and the internet. And hydroelectric dams and coal sequestration and maybe even nuclear power.

The culture is confused and self-destructive, but our goal is to make the smallest change that works, because that’s the one that’s most likely to succeed. Call it muddy green and sneer if you want, but the right goal is to avoid the crash altogether, not to hasten it and make it deeper.

So I’m wondering, what does this truck you’re talking about look like? The last line of your letter, “Bring it on” sounds good maybe to a 13 yr old or someone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about. I think we can agree that it has the shape of a juggernaut and that a lot of what we love will be snuffed out. It may take some kind of strange attractor, maybe even a new form of gravity to get people, even our loved ones, to stand in front of an oncoming truck.

In any case, thanks for doing the necessary work of telling people what they don’t want to hear. I can’t help but think of a number of poets, going back at least to Wm Blake, who detected the patterns of the time we’re now in, but could not keep us from jumping on the shit slide.

regards
Norm

That’s what our System of Systems is trying to do: Trying to fly our way out of danger using resources we don’t have. Trying to buy our way out of debt. Trying to spend our way out of bankruptcy.
All these things are undertaken without asking, “What are People For?”
Survival isn’t an answer. Consumerism is simply Blind Faith. To truly Grow Up, we have to Grow Down. Descent is the only viable option. We have to decide who and how far.

All of this is very frightening, but I am a person who has always wanted to know what I am dealing with as far as a dread disease, global warming to the point of mass extinction, and the rest of the dreads.

I have joined a Simplicity Circle, but I also want to join something similar that deals with all the issues that face our world and its rather shaky future. I think this all has to start on the community level if we ever hope to reach the powers that be. The communities have to become the powers that be. That is probably the direcrtion this will have to go because I don’t see any national politcal or government level individuals or agencies or parties who are addressing this. Too scary I suppose to even acknowledge it and have the sound bite play on the six o’clock news. Could be a deal breaker with the voting public next November.

Jim also mentioned post traumatic stress disorder as a wide scale cultural disorder. I think he has a point with that. That could explain a great deal of the behavior we see everyday.

The calculated denial of many people about what is happening is wide spread and is not going to be easy to change. They are comfortable in their denial and their rejection of bad news. We have been manipulated by fear to keep us in this horrible war in Iraq. We have been manipulated by anti-fear to keep us from taking global warming seriously. I for one am getting tired of being manipulated for someone else’s short term gain and greed.

There is a point when we must get over the cognitive dissonance (what we are TOLD is happening verus what we THINK is happening versus what is REALLY happening being all at variance) confront the inevitable overwhelm and get on with it.

I have post traumatic stress disorder, compounded. I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t have it to one degree or another - the Cuban Missile crisis rocked people to their bones as suddenly the reality of nuclear annihilation was addressed to THEM, there in the belly of the beast, America, and it’s been fight or flight ever since - or alternatively, profound dissociation. But it’s time to start getting with a daily program of recovery admittting to yourself you can never fully recover but you can be honest about it and start telling your REAL story to others.

I wrote a series of columns on dealing with PTSD this year. They had a political AND a social context in them and it pissed people off. Not surprising, but not very healthy. Lots of people think that this affliction is for the middle class alone - well, it is not. It affects everyone. Like every other dysfunction it’s no repecter of class, sex, race but again we CAN do something about it but not be being SELF centred; that only makes it worse.

Once people “transition” into REALizing that we really are interdependent, and treats each other as an intrinsic part of LIFE, then maybe we can end the wars, make economic sense .. and it’s really putting one foot in front of the other each and every day that’s going to get one there, with our arms outstretched towards others; not with our hands holding everything in towards our solar plexus. We can SCREAM, shout, do all sorts of normal human behaviour if we but take the time and QUIT taking the friggin meds.

Great essay .. I’m glad someone forwarded it to me, as I could not agree more.

Do drop by my blog and see what I found to do with myself. It’s my attempt to give something back to life and recover myself. It’s like one huge long poster to real psychic health for a person and for the planet. The links should tell you something about what’s on there.

Thanks for letting me spout off.

www.ladybroadoak.blogspot.com

1) Emotions like “fear” and “anger” are useful when we have to fight. I don’t see why anyone would want to suppress such useful things. But to experience “fear” based upon all the media presentations of impending doom is to be totally gullible if not somewhat mental… If you live in fear, it means you worry about everything. It’s hard to live very long if you are truly experiencing fear. Fear is meant to help you make it through scary, short-lived experiences. “Worry” isn’t useful… except to prod one into action. So, I try to _immediately_ convert any worry into actions within my means and to mentally invalidate any worrys outside my means. Worry must be dealt with and discarded, quickly.
2) Believe nothing without evidence. Be prepared to change beliefs when presented with new evidence. 3) Question sources of all evidence. All sources have agendas that skew the data.
4) Realize that all the things that have ever happened on Earth are actually insignificant. We do want “now” to be the best it can be, but don’t ruin your life over it… Make the best of it.

Larry Irwin
lrirwin@alum.wustl.edu

But nothing lasts forever
Time is the destroyer.
The wheel turns again and again
Watch out! It’ll take you through.

But nothing dies forever
Nature is the renewer.
The wheel turns again and again
If you’re ready it’ll take you through.

“I mean, this one scares me to death. You know, Mussolini developed — again, a parliamentary democracy, Italy was, in the teens and into 1920. He developed the Blackshirts, which were these paramilitary thugs that beat up newspaper editors, terrorized the population, and they intimidated people counting the vote in Milan. And then Hitler …developed the Brownshirts, the SA, who intimidated people counting the vote in Austria. …. And you saw this scene of identically dressed Republican staffers in Florida in 2000 intimidating people counting the vote.

…things like that are ….more and more chilling as — I think right now people are kind of ramping up their awareness of these echoes, and what you also see predictably, because the blueprint is predictive, is that the White House is ramping up its implementation of some of the scariest aspects of its crackdown.

…what’s so scary about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and these black sites around the world — apart from the moral issue …it’s our own American souls that are at stake. But just for purely personal reasons, we should be afraid when the state starts to torture people that it sees as at the margins or that citizens see at the margins: brown people on an island in Guantanamo with Muslim names, whatever. That’s what they did in Germany in ’31, ’32: anarchists, communists, Gypsies, Jews, whatever, homosexuals, whatever. You know, people didn’t care, because they were seen as at the margins. People knew about the torture cellars in Germany.

But then, what always happens, always — you can’t name a society in which this doesn’t happen, Amy — is that there’s a blurring of the line. And once the state legalizes torture of people at the margins, inevitably it will begin to direct state abuse at people at the heart of civil society, and it’s always the same cast of characters: journalists, editors, opposition leaders, outspoken clergy and labor leaders. And when that starts to happen, society can close down in a heartbeat, because people start to sensor themselves.

I just want to note about the blurring of the line why we’re in such a moment of danger right now. The President has said that he can say, “Amy Goodman, you’re an enemy combatant. Naomi Wolf, you’re an enemy combatant. … He can take us, and if he says it’s true, that makes it true, because it’s a status offense, and he can put us in a ten-by-twelve-foot cell in a Navy brig in solitary confinement for three years, making it difficult for us to see our families, to contact an attorney, to get charges filed.

They can’t torture us yet, though I was chilled to learn that an adviser to the White House was reported in a British newspaper yesterday as not ruling out waterboarding against US citizens. However, psychologists know that prolonged isolation makes sane people insane. That’s what happened to Jose Padilla. So, you know, when I say everyone’s got their moment at which they start to silence themselves, the day I read in the New York Times that someone I identify with has been named an enemy combatant and is sitting in a Navy brig in isolation, that’s when I’m going to stop talking in a context like this, because that’s when I will become too afraid.

http://www.soulfulliving.com/voluntarysimplicity.htm

http://www.awakeningearth.org/