What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

	Liberator of captives, And defender of the poor, Physician of the sick, And champion of kings, O trophy-bearer, And Great Martyr George, Intercede with Christ our God that Our souls be saved. The Hymn of St. George

“So how’d it go?” I was sitting by my woodstove, checking in on the website, when Todd’s sticky popped up announcing he was back from Chicagoland. It was twenty degrees outside, the first real bite of winter we’d had. It felt great. The squirrels just outside my window were having a blast.

ok I guess

I hadn’t heard much from Todd lately. About a month ago he figured out that what he really needed to do was to talk to his family about the great unraveling. He’s been at it since. He checks in from time to time, reporting on his progress, asking for advice or coaching or information. But, what with the holidays and all, he’s been gone more than not.

It’s been a pretty hard year for Todd. The whole dying thing. And his trials with the chicken. And his journey into awareness of the world situation. It has been, I think, an initiation, in the fullest sense of the word. He’s been undone and rearranged and rebuilt from the inside out. And the hardest part, of course, has been with his family.

Mom was cool and all shes had more time but Spence was a real asshole all weekend and Daria would only joke around and Smithy didn’t even come he said he was sick but I checked and he went to a party with his new girlfriend

“Did you talk to your dad?”

no I tried but he said he was just too sad right now and overwhelmed and afraid and that he needed more time so we made a date to talk again on the ninth after his surgery

“But you’re worried he’ll just blow you off again then, right?”

its ok he needs time Im just worried that there isn’t any

Here’s a program so you’ll know the players. Todd’s mother, Ellen, lives by herself in an apartment in Tacoma, Washington, where she moved a few years ago after splitting up with Todd’s father, Ed, who still lives in Mt. Prospect (north and west of Chicago), in the house Todd grew up in. Todd’s older sister, Daria, and her husband, Spence, live with their two young boys, Sam and Max, in a house just west of Gurnee, a small town north of Chicago, not too far from where Todd was living before he died. Smithy, Todd’s younger brother, is a marketing student at Northwestern University in Evanston.

“So how was Spence an asshole?”

you remember how I gave him Heinbergs new book for Christmas well he had it there by his fireplace and every time he started a fire hed rip out a few pages and crumple them up to start it with he said he tried to read it but it got bullshit all over his hands so he had to stop

“Great guy, that Spence. So did he even watch the DVD I sent?”

we put it on the first night but he fell asleep almost immediately that was after he called you-

Todd stopped.

“Called me what, Todd?”

you dont need to know

“Oh c’mon. I can take it.”

he called you a whining puffed up eco-goebbels I was confused at first because I thought he meant gerbils

I laughed. That’ll have to go on my next business card: Tim Bennett – Eco-Gerbil.

I saw your dvd in the trash the next morning

I sighed. One of those big, long, dramatic sighs meant to communicate to the people around you just how tired you are of the whole damn thing. Todd was the only one around me at the time. And he was just as tired as I was, I think. But it’s hard to sigh on a sticky, so I was sighing for the both of us. It felt good.

It’s been a tough year for Todd’s family, too. First, Todd choked to death on a pizza roll. (The coroner ruled it “death by imperfect mastication”.) Then, a few months later, he shows up in his mother’s cell phone. Imagine getting a text message from your dead son. Especially when you didn’t know your phone could even do text messages. Over the course of a few months, during which he was also helping me get the DVD finished and designed and mastered, and during which he was accompanying Sally and me on tour, Todd managed to convince his mother that she had not, in fact, gone “crazy with grief” and that he was still “& kicking”, if not actually alive. She pinned an iPod Shuffle to her sweater and they began to take long walks together, Todd hanging out in the wires and talking to her via the ear buds. It was the first time they’d talked at length in years.

Once convinced of his reality, Todd’s mother, with Todd’s guidance, embarked on her own journey through the planetary predicament. And she’s proven to be a quick study. She gave notice at her busy-work day job just before Christmas and she leaves for a month-long permaculture intensive in a few days.

The rest of the family has been more… challenging. Not only has their dead brother, son, cousin, or nephew proved to be not quite dead, but he’s no longer who they knew him to be, and he’s talking about the imminent collapse of the global industrial system. Todd’s Dad, now alone and in poor health, has had a great deal of trouble in accepting Todd’s death and return, and no facility at all for grokking such concepts as peak oil or overshoot. By Todd’s report, he’s convinced that it can’t all come crashing down for the simple reason that he doesn’t want it to.

Todd’s big sis, Daria, nods her head and agrees with everything that Todd tells her, but then turns her attention right back to the new 6,000 square foot starter castle she’s hoping they’ll build, her ongoing quest to collect every last Precious Moments figurine ever made, and her grand scheme to get both of her boys into Yale. Spence, who at one point was fairly close to Todd, thinks that Todd, in dying and then returning, has gone “totally nuts”. In his own poetic words, Todd (like Spence, once a regular Rush Limbaugh listener) “has gone overnight from dittohead to shittohead.” Younger brother Smithy seems to regard Todd as little more than a particularly clever piece of software that somehow got installed on his laptop. He dismisses every attempt on Todd’s part to talk about the world situation with a standard issue “No shit, dude. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“So it went about like Christmas went, eh?”

yeah dude except for at Christmas they actually turned the tv off for a while this time it was on nonstop and we saw the new year in with Dick Clark which is pretty funny when you think about it because they watch Dick Clark every year at new years so the last thing it is is new

“The whole ‘asking questions’ thing didn’t work?” Todd, inspired by our conversation called “I Don’t Know”, had decided that it wouldn’t work in his family to show up as some sort of expert, so he’d resolved to show up as curious and inquisitive, intending to draw his family in the direction he wanted them to go, Socrates-style.

they just cant do it dude they dont have the information they dont have the background so they cant put things together I would ask questions and Spence would just argue and Daria would crack a joke and Mom just sat there glaring cuz Spence kept teasing her saying she was as whacked as me and calling her queen of the tree huggers and stupid shit like that

I sighed again. Most days these days it takes more than one.

got any advice

I laughed. In the realm of “talking to your family” I am as far from expert as one can get. “You could try making a documentary,” I replied.

very funny no really you got any advice

I thought about it for a bit, then typed my response. Todd has perfected the ability to put his voice through speakers. He can even do a passable video representation in a QuickTime window. If he gets any better he could have a second career as the world’s first self-animated actor in CG movies. But we met in the written word, and there’s something about that that still feels best.

“I don’t know, Todd. I’ve been feeling that same urgency. The economic news, especially, and even from the mainstream, is way more frightening than usual these past few months. Frightening as in “I’m not ready!” Look at the housing bubble, the sub-prime shitstorm, the price of oil, the climate meltdown, the geopolitical stage play… the whole game is rigged to implode. Could happen any day, it feels like. A whole lotta shakin’ comin’ up. A bunch of people are going to lose their stored life energy when markets crash and banks close and fascists come out of the closet. Bye-bye equity. Bye-bye inheritances. Bye-bye mortgaged home. Bye-bye any chance you may have had to move to where you need to be and prepare in whatever way you can.”

and of course it all has to happen and its like the best thing for the planet its exactly what the rest of the animals and plants and fungi and stuff need if theyre going to have a chance and if were going to have a chance at avoiding extinction right

“Listen to yourself, Todd. Can you imagine even thinking that a year ago, let alone saying it?

I remember thinking you were totally batshit when I first met you

“So that’s our challenge. It’s like some vengeful sorcerer put a curse on us: whenever we open our mouths, the words come out garbled and no one can understand them. I spent hours and hours over the holidays trying to distill the information I have, and my best wisdom about it all, into some sort of “New Year’s letter” to send out to my family. By the end of it I had fifteen pages of text. And I knew that I could not send them.”

why not

I stopped for a moment to think. A face popped into my mind, and a sad pain spilled into my gut.

“Uncle George,” I replied.

whos uncle George

“He was my mom’s brother… a big, blustery guy that was often around when I was a kid. He was loud and brash and full of unsolicited opinions and know-it-all advice. And as he got older, he spoke more and more openly about what he saw happening in the world. He talked of the rich elite conspiracies and their plans for controlling the world, and how we needed to arm ourselves against them. He saw some good portion of what I now see.”

sounds like a smart guy

“By the end of his life, he’d become a family joke. Hardly anybody could stand him. He’d show up and talk for a while and then, after he left, we’d all make jokes at his expense. I made jokes too, Todd. Eventually he just went away. He saw the dragon. He wanted to fight it somehow. But he couldn’t get us to even look at it with him. He got mad and he went away. And then he died.”

and of course now he just looks like he was ahead of the curve

“Yeah. And I seem to have jumped straight off the curve and onto the next one over.” I stopped for a moment to watch the squirrels. There was something about them playing on the feeder that just hit me and my eyes welled up. “I’m just so very sad, Todd. I mean… I know this system has to come to an end, but it’s going to be so hard on us. We who have remained most insulated from its effects. So hard. And for most people, so out of the blue. Like we’re those squirrels on the feeder, unaware of the storm that’s about to hit.”

“There’s something about family… something about blood… something about tribe. Even with my growing sense of kinship with the life of the planet, the old ties still hold tight. I don’t want my people to suffer more than is necessary. I want to help. I want to hold them and guide them and comfort them as the dragon swoops in. I want them to protect themselves, to secure their homes and land and money as best they can. Some of them live in the Southeast, a place that looks ripe for a major meltdown. I want them to really look at whether they should be here.”

but you dont know how to make that happen any better than I do

“Yeah, well, we’re in good company there, aren’t we, dude? ‘A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house’ and all that. What I know is that I am not willing to struggle as my Uncle George did. That doesn’t work. And it dishonors us all, I think.”

“What I can do is show up in my own life and speak my truth and trust that people will do with it what they can and must. As hard as it is, I have to know and trust that my people, my family, even and especially my own children, are sparks-in-meat-bags just like I am, walking their own paths here in the gravity well, following their own meanings and purposes. I cannot assume that I know what they should know, what they should do, how they should make their way through the unraveling. I made a documentary. I told my truth. That is enough. I’ll still pass along what information I can as things shift and crumble, but my family will have to come to the world situation in their own way, in their own time, or they will not. And they may not. There may not be time.”

“My people may be hit very hard. There may be losses too great to tally. And we may be split asunder. There will be grief and pain enough to fill the universe, I think. It is one of our deepest responsibilities, we who walk the Earth at this time: to feel that grief and pain, and to let it change us, so that we do not go this way again. And that may mean that I lose my people.”

Todd posted a jpeg of the Milky Way: thats a lot of pain dude

“Maybe the Hopi Elder was right: ‘There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate.’ Maybe what I’m going to have to do, Todd, is just jump into the river and celebrate with whomever I find there, rather than who I think should be there.

Im thinking about my mom right now were just getting to know each other shes pretty cool shes really smart and shes really funny the thought that we might get torn apart in the river it really hurts

“Yeah, it does. And so we will need to find ways to face this together, hand-in-hand, in safe circles and hallowed ways. As the Hopi Elder said, “All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.” Feeling this grief and pain is our sacred work. That’s my sense of it. And I will do it as best I can. I think that’s why I’m here. Part of it, at least. But man, it’s hard. I can use all the help I can get.”

maybe your uncle George is listening right now

That stopped me. I closed my eyes. I have little idea how the whole “ancestors” thing works, really. I was raised a scientist. But that’s the nature of these times; that we must step beyond who we’ve been, and into something new.

And so I shall ask, because it is not who I have ever been. Uncle George? If you’re out there. Or anyone else who might be listening, and who is serving the greatest good. Help me. Help our family. Help my children. Help my friends and fellows and all my relations. Help the people around the planet who are suffering under this system. Help the Earth and all of her creatures. I’m doing what I can, to the best of my abilities. But I could really use some help.

me too

Enough for now. There’s a dragon out there that needs… something…

***

Tim Bennett is a writer, filmmaker and dragon-slayer currently searching eBay for a new sword in the Southeast US. You can read his blog and maybe get in touch with him - or maybe not - at his website www.whatawaytogomovie.com.

***

Want to connect and converse with others who are looking squarely at the present predicament? Check out the new What a Way to Go: Network online forum at www.whatawaytogonetwork.org. Independently operated and moderated by volunteers, this forum is a space for you to find others in your geographical area, share psychological and spiritual practices that have been helpful in coming to grips with the content of WAWTG, post helpful and practical information, or wrestle through questions that are in your heart and mind about the times in which we live. Check it out. We’ll look for you there.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Tim's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.