Question Progress

Complexity hides chicanery.  

There are times as I wander around in this civilization where I feel like a townie at a carnival shell game.   Just another mark to be suckered out of his dollar, which of course,  is what I am.  The few commercial human interactions I engage in are between myself and some poor clerk making minimum wage, slaving for some corporation that has appropriated the skill based economies of previous eras.  

"We work hard, so you don't have to".  This on a can of cleaner, this, the epitaph of our age.   In the name of "progress" we have surrendered the idea of work and skill as quality traits, for the idea of convenience and leisure.  What we did not realize is that with that, we also surrendered our freedom and self respect.  Our progress, as we can see now from the failing institutions around us, those institutions that assured us they could provide that wonderful life (failing to mention that they needed to destroy the planet in the process) is enslavement wrapped in the complexity of corporate legalese and government complicity.  

This isn't working.  I look around at the freeways, the high rises, the power lines, the carbon spewing vehicles, the tainted food, the collapsing economies,  the destruction of ecosystems required, absolutely required to maintain a material economy, the economic oppression of billions of people and I think ... "we couldn't have meant this, we could not have meant it to be like this."  Probably not, but someone did, and still does.  

This civilization is not working. 

The struggle for me, the fight for freedom, is not finding them and overthrowing them, or making them wear silly hats and signs and marching them through the streets.   The real struggle is in unplugging as an individual.   It is a struggle to re-discover the common skills that households contained just a short time ago, before we all lost our balls and became slaves to corporate convenience.

It's flashing in bright neon now:  This civilization can not sustain.   The oil that fuels it will dry up very soon, the climate is already seeking balance from our emmissions and waste, and our economies based on plunder are falling apart as I write this.   

Sure, sure it's a pipe dream, a fantasy, but it's time to shut off the machines.  Time to turn them off, melt them for new materials, and put everyone to work at a much slower pace.  Retrain for a slower, less energetic world, where my commercial interaction will be between the artisan, or a small shop keeper who knows the artisan, and my purchase of a fine tool, or a finely woven shirt.  One or two degress of separation between maker and user, rather than this tangled web of credit card purchased, ocean borne, sweat shop produced fabric that serves to only enrich a few hands, but equally serves to impoverish us all.    

This rant was prompted by this wonderful list of Victorian skills found here.  I would imagine that all of those brokers (borkers?) : P  might start here for finding a new skill that enriches us all. 

http://transitionculture.org/2009/01/22/the-200-artisan-skills-required-to-make-a-victorian-town-functional/  

Peace and bone carving, yeah.  

Limits

Some interesting articles on Limits :)  

Chris Clugston on America's Predicament

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46892

...and reality always eventually gets recognized.  

Dr. Dennis Meadows, lead scientist and co-author of The Limits to Growth (1972) and its subsequent updates, is the winner of this year’s Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan for “Transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.”

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47800

Tone up, Turn soil, Drop out. 

A Genocide in Progress

While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

In my random musings, I have thought that what we are about here, in 2009, with our Globalized Industrial economy, is a Genocide against the national and ethnical groups of humans who will be living in 2150.  Our weapons of choice will be climate change and the greed that now consumes ALL of the possible fossil fuel on the planet, leaving them nothing, basically bringing about physical destruction in whole or in part  of the poor people born towards the end of this century.  

And we go about it with zeal!  Our biggest concern is how to "save"  our economy, how to achieve "growth"  in this already rapacious commercial  orgy we are all trapped in.   If I look at the market, look at the economic news, I see a world population suffering the greed of the elites, and worried about what this means for their job, their few pieces of copper shyte that gets taxed away from them anyway.   

When I tilt my head a bit,  and look at what all this economic activity means to the natural foundations of this planet, what it bodes for the very near future and the upcoming generations, I see a genocide in progress.  I imagine how they will despise us, curse us, for our blindness and selfishness.   I imagine memorials erected in the Northern reaches, to all those who failed to escape the drought ridden hot zones of the planet, victims of the Boomers right to an American Way of Life  that is, and never was, a sustainable enterprise.  I imagine the sadness they will feel of watching a planet in ruin, a climate system run amock, an environment of violent changes that their own flesh and blood created just for them.  

I think about how 250 years ago, some clever people tried to create a new country,  after executing another genocide on the native population, and how that history of America does not seem so distant.  The ideas are still approachable, I can visit the homes of some of these people, see the Liberty Bell, walk the streets where the Declaration was signed, all of it still there in Philadelphia.  

 The results of the future genocide are much closer in time, a mere 90 years away.  Now, instead of good Germans, we are good Americans, I suppose.   Either way,  genocide is genocide, and we are commiting that NOW against the next generation of humans on this planet.  The sickness and evil of National Socialism inflicted a genocide of millions on the European population.   The sickness and evil of Capitalism will make that look like a minor turf war, as we inflict a genocide of billions on the next generation.  

End the Genocide!!  

I live the future by reducing, reusing, and backing away from the great commercial machines of genocide. I try to keep my meager pay, and learn to make what I need, grow what I need,  and discover my local place.  It is a struggle of change, as I am a sheep, lulled into thinking that the commercial markets provide all, that the corporations own all, and that government has my best interests at heart.  No surprise at that, as commerce spends billions just to create that message for me.     

I wake up and crawl towards the exit of this commercial insanity.  Come on, lets find some squirrels.