La fin du monde

"I get world sick every time I take a stand"

I've been called a doom-and-gloomer, chicken little, a conspiracy theorist, and a radical anarcho-leftist, none of which I would describe as accurate. I feel I have mostly held myself to stringent standards of empirical evidence to back my wild claims, whether those be historical, political, scientific or mathematical. Yet I feel my thoughts, no matter how thoroughly researched, methodically calculated, factually based, are just "mental masturbation". They fall on deaf ears. No one cares that thousands of species are dying, that the weather is becoming irregular and unstable, that the economy is going to fail soon, or that we have run out of oil. No one cares that this lifestyle will collapse. My views, no matter how true or false, are essentially empty rhetoric. I am having an argument with myself. I guess that makes me crazy.

But insanity can only be a good thing in a culture that is so intentionally masochistic, so sick and unhealthy - in every possible sense. Is it me that is crazy or us? At the riverside I was struck by the thought "why do we live like this?" upon seeing the jetsam and flotsam of cellophane rubbish caressing the shore. From landfills to macro-farms how we feed/clothe/bathe ourselves is sick. Our food is derived from genetically modified corn of no nutritional value, made from fertilizers derived from a now almost defunct resource that our entire infrastructure is based off of. In Time magazine yesterday I read 1/3 of America's children are obese or overweight. Diabetes has changed from early adult onset to - childhood onset. We poison our bodies and kill the time away by living sedentary lifestyles that poison our minds with the emptiness of television and videogames. Our entire culture is fashioned along an infinite growth paradigm that became extrapolated from manifest destiny. We expanded to the coasts until there was nothing left to conquer, then we expanded our military might even further to complete hegemony over the world (made possible with our ever expansive economic model), but then we turned the dagger on ourselves and we started believing the lie. We shit where we ate. We bought the dangerous and hazardous products we were supposed to sell to other people. And now we are complacent cattle - docile, fat and unmoving - barely lowing in the field. Masticating on whatever product we are designed to consume. There are entire journalists that only cover news on the latest apple product. We are so enamored with ourselves that we never thought "why"? I often ask people that very question "why"? Why is what we do okay? Why is genocide okay when we do it? Why are human rights violations okay when we commit them? Why is economic enslavement of the third world okay for our products? Why us?

There never is an answer. I'm just talking to myself again. We share an understood collective ideal that "because we can" is enough justification for our horribly depraved way of life. We don't vocalize that though (well, most of us don't). When people search for an answer its usually based in the thought that our political ideology is what is best for the world. Our corrupt, inept, fiscally and morally bankrupt government is what other countries and peoples need. So we shove it down their throats until they are too dead and broken to resist. I don't subscribe to these blind notions "just because" and that makes me crazy - simply because I refuse to tow the party line. But if I told you civilization as you know it will collapse within the next decade (a generous estimate), or the next 5 years you'd call me a lunatic. But why? I have data, and everyone I've talked to either reverts to a blind belief in the self perpetuation of a status quo that is unsustainable, or they'll just laugh at me because its "too big to fail". And its easy to marginalize a view that is so shocking, but that doesn't remove it's veracity. The truth is, its too big not to fail, and if you think I'm wrong look at a graph mapping the human population on the earth for the last millennium.

But now as I sit by my window in the benign heat of a lazy July afternoon I see the sidewalks and the mowed lawns and the old women with their silly hats and froofy dogs selectively bred to be useless and it is so easy for me to think "how could this ever end"? But then the creeping malaise sets in and I remember that none of this is real, that this is a grand illusion of ignorance and arrogance. I look in my driveway. First sign that (our) civilization is going to end: the disparity in the size of my recycling bins to my trash can. My recycling containers (collectively) are about a fourth the size of my gargantuan trash can. My gargantuan trash can that is filled with non-biodegradable trash. Even if all the plastics I used were recyclable, which they aren't:

"Plastic recycling rates lag far behind those of other items, such as newspaper (about 80%) and corrugated fiberboard (about 70%).^[26] All plastic bottles were recycled at a rate of 24% in 2005"[wiki].

And that doesn't include all the little ubiquitous items that we throw away everyday that are made of plastic; whether its the cellophane covering your pack of cigarettes or the applicator for your tampon, or the trash bag itself - those items sit in a landfill forever until they are broken down into smaller polymer chains by sunlight and erosion. We have these items in our society like plastic and Styrofoam that because of their ease and convenience as packaging materials and now they have disseminated into all of our products. Unfortunately we tend to dispose of these items improperly when we are done with them, not realizing that they will never leave. In our "out of sight out of mind" culture we fail to comprehend where things come from and where they go. Plastics come from oil. They don't go anywhere, the polymer chains release other chemicals like bisphenol A and phthalates, which then enter the water supply. They little pieces are then consumed by us and other animals where the plastics act like estradiol causing sterility and hermaphroditic offspring. So I guess if they do go somewhere they go back in us. In the pacific ocean there is a flotilla of plastic refuse the size of Texas. Yet our consumption habits for this material are increasing and our pitiful recycling rates make this beyond unsustainable. Its all the same sickness sprouted from this ever expansionary infinite growth paradigm. Consumption without consequence, a culture of the disposable.

This mindset was the byproduct of the hubris following the victory of WWII and technological innovation. Oil was such a readily available commodity we based all our industries off of it, the auto industry and the ever present car made suburbs spring up, suburbs that lacked the resources of a real community because Americans could always commute to real urban centers to fulfill their needs. We built great highways instead of trains, we built inefficient bulky hulks of vehicles because we could, all built with plastics from oil and powered by gasoline from oil. Now we face the grimmest future as our entire infrastructure is predicated upon this commodity which is running out. Collapse is inevitable only because we are the ostrich, our head buried in the sand.

The sad thing is, the really sick thing is, we could change, we could save the future, if enough of us gave a damn. But we are the cattle, culled with apathy and nihilism, ripe for slaughter. But I'm talking to myself again aren't I? Just taking a piss in the wind, crazy as a loon. I'm crazy for not throwing the empty bag of corn chips loaded with trans fat out the window of my SUV onto the side of the highway. Just remember that as this untenable system crashes and burns around you, while the last pundits tell you that "no one could have ever seen this coming", as chaos and fear invade your consciousness, some once told you the writing was on the wall, you just refused to read it. But no one's listening, I'm just talking to myself.

No one will even remember that I told you so

- DJV