The news continues to get worse and worse world-wide. All problems are getting worse, and the planet Earth is rapidly spinning out of control in a downward spiral towards chaos. There are too many people on the planet, and not enough trees. World-wide, almost every country in the world is fundamentally a for-profit corporation, and there is no one, in any position of power, who has any interest in the biological survival of the planet, or Gaia.
The world is evolving much too slowly to accommodate the escalating crises. It is easy enough to look into the future ~ slowly and ponderously, the planet moves closer to the finally inevitable consolidation of authority into a single political entity, whether fairly or wisely constituted, or whether it be yet another gang of thieves exploiting the planet for their personal benefit. But this, along with a single language and a single bank and currency are pre-conditions (necessary but not sufficient) for making any meaningful effort to ameliorate the rapidly escalating world problems.
Some people seem to be surprised that I look to the holders of wealth and power to intervene. But what are the choices? An old-time Revolution from the ground up, on a world-wide scale? Impossible and useless. The problem with just sitting back to wait for the world to evolve at its own pace is that it might easily take another thousand years or more for the people of the planet to reach the point of a single government, and we don’t have that kind of time. All the evidence seems to suggest (daily more resoundingly) that unimaginable changes will have to take place virtually immediately, or life on the planet will spiral down to levels from which it will be impossible to recover. Some people are already using the present tense.
When a train is plunging downhill towards perdition, the train first has to come to a complete stop, and its descending inertia overcome, before the engines can be thrown into reverse for that long uphill climb back up to level ground. An image of Daffy Duck standing in front of the descending train, holding up his hands in a “Stop” command comes to mind (representing current efforts). We have all seen how that cartoon ends!
I can’t believe that no one is even trying to do anything. Is mine the only proposal for a way forward from here? Let’s get it together! We don’t have much time. It may be that the deadline for a radical change of direction on so many fronts was passed about forty years ago (deforestation, ocean necrosis, topsoil erosion, toxic dispersal, etc.) but we have to think positively with determination to make the effort, or die.
So is this the end? Is the destruction of the Host the inevitable consequence of life on earth? Are the obstacles to be overcome just too great for the human race to deal with in time? Sometimes I feel, to match the Daffy Duck image, that I am hollering my messages down into a very deep well. And then there are the images of the band playing on as the Titanic sinks slowly into the sea, or the frogs in the warm water falling asleep as the water slowly heats up to boiling. Dylan sings, “When you gonna wake up, and strengthen the things that remain?”
