Plague Journal, If We Cannot…
The 20th century
was a century of
the straight line,
of yang rationality, of
modernism and abstraction,
The 21st century will be the century
of the curve, of yin,
of harmony and
building with Nature.
…if we cannot recover
our innate empathy, find balance, and
come up with a new tone, a new mood,
a new aesthetic to live by,
then it will be a century of hubris,
brutality, and mayhem
on a scale the world has
never seen before.
— excerpt Adbusters Magazine Jan./Feb. 2021 issue
4 thoughts on “Plague Journal, If We Cannot…”
Brief and to the point, without commentary (kind of odd but in keeping with the brevity of the season). So mankind has a choice, eh? At least according to Adbusters. Our species has had many choices since the dawn of conscious thought and most of the time, we have picked the wrong road. Regardless, we have miraculously survived to this point despite our self-destructive nature. But I agree that it’s time to come to terms with the grim reaper and either choose the correct path this time around or embrace the consequences of myopic stupidity. As a staunch skeptic, bordering on cynicism, I would not bet on our species being able to distinguish between the two choices, not when we still immerse ourselves in the belief that some magical deity will somehow swoop down from on high and make everything better. Our one and only chance is to take responsibility for our past actions and become proactive about solving the problems we ourselves have created.
Yet as I write down this response, the current administration of these United States is attempting to rush through leases for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where the greedy bastards of capitalism wait to harvest billions of gallons of oil to spew into our rapidly depleting atmosphere. All for the enrichment of the few, bringing forth the spoilage of our one and only home. As noted in your image above, the crucifixion of all of mankind at the hand of the capitalistic monarchy.
So, my cynical answer still stands: we cannot possibly survive the catastrophic musings of a group of animals bent on self-destruction. I often ask myself if I’m one of the lucky ones, an eye witness to the last hurrah of a creature whose creativity has allowed us to peer into the vast reaches of the universe, create the beauty of extraordinary music and art, philosophize about our place in this world, write monumental scripts telling the story of our struggles, set up a semi-functional civilization, and see into the infinitesimally small reaches of subatomic particles, all unlocking the secrets of nature. While also being alive for the final curtain, the stage where we take a last bow to our phantom creator while giving credence to the end of a Looney Tune animation where Porky Pig says, “That’s All Folks!”
…” belief that some magical deity will somehow swoop down..”
I understand that you are not referring to the current pantheon of demigods, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla etc. Many of our contemporaries conversant in digital literacy have “faith” that these global corporations will come up with the tools by which we will save ourselves. We don’t seem to notice these organizations excel at piling up capital. That is what they care most about.
James Bridle in his book, New Dark Age, agrees with you. He says that real change can only be effected by a great mass of individuals. And that, is an impossibility, given that the technologies atomize rather than fuse our social formations.
Those who run the tech corps give lip service to being of a different, more caring and concerned breed, but for the most part they are, as you note, as complicit in the destruction of our environment and of our culture as the scurrilous members of Halliburton’s board, or Exxon Mobile’s or Raytheon’s or any number of the thousands of other soulless corporations bent only on profit margins. How do a couple of old guys playing verbal badminton on a little known blog site have any impact on this deadly game of monetary oneupmanship? [rhetorical question!]
As I often do, I will leave you with a few verses embodied in an old poem:
The Geezer
Into muting winds
his guttural voice hurls
epithets of a rose-colored
childhood, that did not,
could not exist.
Naïve simplicity exposed,
his wasted hull tilts downward,
as pious certainties lie discarded
at the edge of a world that does
not care to know his pain.
Exhausted by invisibility,
he pulls Ex Caliber from his thoughts,
and in dimming light
throws the relic onto fractured dreams
too real to claim as his own.
At last self-pity trumps dignity.
“Do not leave me behind,” he sobs
“I want to be the change,
to place my mark upon this world
before it and I are gone.”
No one even shrugs.
Opportunities gone.
Dice no longer roll,
and redemption just a word
too long forgotten.
Seventy years of self-delusion
now hang limp at his side.
Gazing at the evening sky
he finally understands;
at least the stars have not forsaken him.
I like the poem. Sounds as if a personal confession that many of us could subscribe to. There’s not time enough left for another roll of the dice. There is only so much time allotted for the living. Even to the stars.
I continue to read and write to the blog as I have the satisfaction of slowly developing the vocabulary and understanding requisite for describing our predicament. Certainly some alive when it was clear that Rome was falling felt the same way. The difference for us is that the dissolution involves the entire planet, Nature itself is adverse to our consume & discard way of life. Time is felt as collapsing, and we are nearly out, running on empty. I’d like to think that communities of our species will survive somewhere, somehow.