Think for Yourself?

Doing a meditation today. I was looking that “things” in general. I have been feeling a bit down for a while. I even felt a bit odd after seeing Tomorrowland the other night. I liked the film. It wasn’t a great film, but I liked it anyway. There was a certain amount of nostalgia about the future of the 50’s and 60’s. There was so much optimism about science and technology! They hadn’t yet quite awoken to the cultural and environmental train wreck coming their way. Leaded gas and Silent Spring were just beginning to make their marks and the limitations of their laughingly primitive technology were not so obvious yet. Of course, there are plenty of people today that still think we can willy-nilly mess with climate, geology and politics without major consequences, but most of us finally seem to get the idea that everything is connected and it really is a Rob Peter to Pay Paul, world.

Build a dam and it changes an ecosystem, and the lives of all the people that depend on it. Improve your fishing practices and fewer fish are left for someone else, and new species move in to fill the niche the fish you took once occupied, endangering somebody else’s harvest. Improve the “efficiency” of your pig farm and the run-off pollutes the local watershed, destroying the fishing, filling the waterways with fast-growing algae and invasive plants, and making the water unfit to drink. Strike gold and the run-off from your mine fills the local waterways with heavy metals for generations. Nothing comes for free. As big as the world is, we can’t pollute anywhere without effecting someone on the other side of the planet. We now pollute on such a massive scale that it’s no longer possible to destroy and move on, there’s no longer any place to move on to.

Europe’s known that for a long time. They ran out of untouched resources centuries ago and have needed to “manage” to survive. Many have taken major steps to becoming sustainable. Some have taken to outsourcing their destruction. Japan, for example, has protected it’s forests and beautiful landscapes by shipping it’s clear cutting operations to other countries who are willing to permanently cut their old growth forests for a little short-term gain. And China’s massive “growth at all costs” policy is not only an environmental disaster now, but will be so much worse when the inevitable crash comes. They are raping their entire country and it’s people for a narrow definition of “prosperity” that cannot be sustained. They’ll be lucky if they get another ten years, twenty on the outside, before the whole system implodes. The really bad news is that it looks like they are considering the time-tested method of staving off economic collapse: Start a war. Russia’s clearly thinking along the same lines to solve it’s economic problems.

We’re really not much better, constantly jumping into wars across the globe to protect some “interest.” The whole middle east mess is pretty much our fault. Not Bush’s fault, our fault. We were all too busy looking for someone to blame, and get revenge on, to worry about whether we were actually attacking the right people. Of course, we’ve been messing with the people in the middle east for generations. Heck, we’ve destroyed whole governments. 9/11 is child’s play compared to what we’ve done to them in the name of protecting our “economic interests.” What goes around, comes around. Piss in your neighbor’s pool and don’t be surprised if he throws rocks through your windows.

The real point here is the incredible arrogance and hubris that these people have to think that they can foresee and control the results of messing with thinks on such a large scale. History is full of examples of people who engineered their own demise through greed. When I say history, I mean everything from ancient Egypt to last year. And I do mean greed, because everything always comes back to greed. Every political and economic disaster can be linked back to someone wanting more. More power, more land, more money, and they were willing to take any risk to get it. It’s a historic truism that any economic/political system, left to it’s on devices, free of outside limitations, will destroy itself in a relatively few generations through exploitation-to-exhaustion of the very resources it needs to survive.

You’d think that people would be smarter than that, but, it only takes two generations, at most, for a sense of entitlement to set in that won’t allow the people in charge to understand that their situation is unsustainable.

Think you’re too smart to fall for that? Wake up buddy, look around you: Every news report talks about job growth, economic growth and earnings growth as though it’s the only thing keeping us afloat. So, now tell me: How can anything grow forever? And if it can’t, how does this system of our survive? Face it, our system is no better than any of the others throughout the world and throughout the world. We have always depended on expendable resources to fuel our prosperity, but now, every time we try and grab more we find that we’re stepping on someone else’s toes. And they don’t like it.

So here we are. We can continue down this path until environmental destruction and economic collapse forces us to stop, or we can make the hard choices to turn our system around. Choices that business don’t want to make because it will cut into profits, and shareholders don’t like that. That politicians don’t want to make, because they are paid by the companies, and that voters don’t want to make because they either shareholders and/or are scared by those very same companies. The thing is, can you think for yourself? Can you take the time to read the evidence, all the evidence, not just the well-funded ads, and make up your own mind? Things around the world are getting pretty tense, and they’re not going to get any better if we keep on doing what we’ve always done, because, duh, that’s how we got here!

And, finally, can you stop giving all your power to someone else? Can you consider the idea that being elected doesn’t make you an expert in politics, foreign policy, economics, labor relations, or the environment? Sure, he may be a really nice guy and agrees with you on everything, but does that mean he knows enough engineering to prevent the levies from breaking and flooding your house the next big storm? Does he know enough about bookkeeping to really know that the budget he’s voting for is based on more than feel-good wishful thinking? We have a tendency to vote for people who tell us what we want to hear. Call me crazy, but I would rather hear the truth, even if I don’t like it, than be disappointed, yet again, by a sugar-coated, it’s-all-their-fault, lie.