Has anyone actually been listening? Does anyone have their head up, ears and nose to the wind?
Are words lost in the dull echos of meaningless white noise, so devoured by the frantic static of modernity that even those who are full of sound and fury are drowned out?
Yes, the economy's slipping more. The Senate and the House both agreed to the $850 billion bail-out and it seems right now like that was just throwing good money in after the bad. Strange, how last year-- when the economy was supposedly so robust-- we didn't have $100 billion for healthcare for the nation's poorest children, but suddenly now we have seven times that to spend on Wall Street.
And of course we spend more than that on the military in any given year, especially lately. The figure for the Iraq war is well past 3 trillion.
Palin doesn't believe in global warming, but I do. There's not enough Arctic ice. Polar bears are swimming now; they'll drown soon, and the dark ocean water will keep absorbing more and more solar energy, get warmer, release more methane, melt more. Water has a high specific heat; it may heat up slowly, but it also holds that heat longer.
Another degree Centigrade and we get three times as many Katrinas. How long can the people of New Orleans keep swimming? As long as the polar bears?
In New York, a mentally ill man fell to his death from a fourth-story fire escape after being tasered by the cops; later one of the officers committed suicide. What the hell was the point?
The extinction rate for amphibian species is over 200 times the natural background level. The pollutants of the rivers in southern England are causing fish to gender-switch. Scientists map the ocean floor with sound waves louder than a nuclear blast and then claim that those killing blasts are unrelated to the dead whales washing up on beaches.
852 million people don't get enough food to survive. 1.6 billion people are obese. Can't we split the difference?
A cup of coffee costs me 3 bucks. How much of that money gets back to the farmer who grew the beans? What's lost when fields are converted to monoculture and sprayed with inorganic pesticides and fertilizers? How many trucks are involved in getting that coffee to me- trucks made out of metal that needed to be mined and refined and which run on oil that must be pumped from the earth? How much potable water is used for irrigation? How many rivers diverted or wells dried up? How many middle men are there? And how about the cardboard cups and the espresso machine in all its shiny glory, and the wood of the building and the cloth aprons, and yes, even the barista, making just over minimum wage?
...three US dollars? Really? Who even gets that money? Anyone? Does it vanish into that black hole we're calling global economy, which is impatient and easily bored, which is hungry and has only one rule: more?
Even solar panels need metal pieces. More mining. More burning fossil fuels. More carbon. Damn it!
It doesn't matter what I do, as a consumer, as a cog in a violently capitalist system. I don't own a car, yet car culture continues. I can buy organic apples and grass-fed beef, and those apples are still grown in monoculture and the cattle raised on land that used to shake under herds of bison. It's the corporations, stupid. Du Pont does more damage in a day than I could ever do in a lifetime. And I let it, because I don't know how to stop it.
We go to war because I don't know how to stop it. I bet you don't either.
We're lied to and manipulated by advertising and by people who have more money than us.
I watch people buy twenty dollars of gossip rags full of news about Tom Cruise and Suri, Brad and Angelina, Brittney and Paris, and I want to grab those people by their collars and scream at them about how the world is dying and everyone's insane...but I can't, because they'd just blink their big, dumb, blank, glazed-over cow eyes at me and tell me that I am the crazy one.
Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?
Are words lost in the dull echos of meaningless white noise, so devoured by the frantic static of modernity that even those who are full of sound and fury are drowned out?
Yes, the economy's slipping more. The Senate and the House both agreed to the $850 billion bail-out and it seems right now like that was just throwing good money in after the bad. Strange, how last year-- when the economy was supposedly so robust-- we didn't have $100 billion for healthcare for the nation's poorest children, but suddenly now we have seven times that to spend on Wall Street.
And of course we spend more than that on the military in any given year, especially lately. The figure for the Iraq war is well past 3 trillion.
Palin doesn't believe in global warming, but I do. There's not enough Arctic ice. Polar bears are swimming now; they'll drown soon, and the dark ocean water will keep absorbing more and more solar energy, get warmer, release more methane, melt more. Water has a high specific heat; it may heat up slowly, but it also holds that heat longer.
Another degree Centigrade and we get three times as many Katrinas. How long can the people of New Orleans keep swimming? As long as the polar bears?
In New York, a mentally ill man fell to his death from a fourth-story fire escape after being tasered by the cops; later one of the officers committed suicide. What the hell was the point?
The extinction rate for amphibian species is over 200 times the natural background level. The pollutants of the rivers in southern England are causing fish to gender-switch. Scientists map the ocean floor with sound waves louder than a nuclear blast and then claim that those killing blasts are unrelated to the dead whales washing up on beaches.
852 million people don't get enough food to survive. 1.6 billion people are obese. Can't we split the difference?
A cup of coffee costs me 3 bucks. How much of that money gets back to the farmer who grew the beans? What's lost when fields are converted to monoculture and sprayed with inorganic pesticides and fertilizers? How many trucks are involved in getting that coffee to me- trucks made out of metal that needed to be mined and refined and which run on oil that must be pumped from the earth? How much potable water is used for irrigation? How many rivers diverted or wells dried up? How many middle men are there? And how about the cardboard cups and the espresso machine in all its shiny glory, and the wood of the building and the cloth aprons, and yes, even the barista, making just over minimum wage?
...three US dollars? Really? Who even gets that money? Anyone? Does it vanish into that black hole we're calling global economy, which is impatient and easily bored, which is hungry and has only one rule: more?
Even solar panels need metal pieces. More mining. More burning fossil fuels. More carbon. Damn it!
It doesn't matter what I do, as a consumer, as a cog in a violently capitalist system. I don't own a car, yet car culture continues. I can buy organic apples and grass-fed beef, and those apples are still grown in monoculture and the cattle raised on land that used to shake under herds of bison. It's the corporations, stupid. Du Pont does more damage in a day than I could ever do in a lifetime. And I let it, because I don't know how to stop it.
We go to war because I don't know how to stop it. I bet you don't either.
We're lied to and manipulated by advertising and by people who have more money than us.
I watch people buy twenty dollars of gossip rags full of news about Tom Cruise and Suri, Brad and Angelina, Brittney and Paris, and I want to grab those people by their collars and scream at them about how the world is dying and everyone's insane...but I can't, because they'd just blink their big, dumb, blank, glazed-over cow eyes at me and tell me that I am the crazy one.
Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}