Howl

[lykomancer]

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?

Comments

[cephiedvariable.livejournal.com]

I'm drunk and depressed because my roomate and I were just talking about this.

I... I can't even add anything to your words because you've so eloquently and exactly described what is decadent, what is ignorant and selfish and destructive about the way we Westerners live: with no concern for anyone or anything else.

Unfortunately, being aware isn't enough. UNFORTUNATELY, what can we do that IS enough?

Perhaps I will have something more intelligent and less hopeless to say about this when I've sobered up.

[maxxim-huzzah.livejournal.com]

It's depressing as all fuck, but damn, I'd rather have you shouting that truth than keep buying into the lies that society's still trying to feed us.

[clio-selene.livejournal.com]

I like your post. I live in Finland, probably the last land of the sane people in the world. Finns REALLY care about environment, the global warming, and so on. I remember talking with my friend about using public transport, about lowering energy consumption in our households, etc. Of course, there are limitations in everything and no-one mustn't go in the opposite direction - like if you have congenital problem with your body temperature, there's no point in sitting around and getting cold. And of course, it's not like all the Finns are taking the topic seriously - but I admit the situation in here is totally different from the one I met in my home-country of Poland. The difference in mentality is overwhelming.

But at the same time I agree: one person, even one nation, cannot change anything. That's the sad truth, regardless of how optimistic one would be.

[lykomancer.livejournal.com]

It's just so damned depressing. I feel so useless. Everything I try to do is futile, because I am just one person. Whenever I talk like this-- and I do talk like this, much more often than I write like this-- those already lost to the system snort derisively and say, "Yeah, so? What are you doing about it? Aren't you just part of the problem?" and I just start crying. I'm not Mother Teresa or Mohandas Gandhi or Desmond Tutu. I'm not even Amy Goodman or Michael Moore. Maybe I will be someday, but right now I'm not, and I don't know what that one thing is, that one thing I can do that will actually matter.

[lykomancer.livejournal.com]

If you can stand it, try reading Derrick Jensen's EndGame, which is a two volume work focusing on anarcho-primitivism. The first is subtitled The Problem of Civilization and the second is Resistance.

I'm only about a third through the first book, so I'm not an expert on these books nor do I completely 99% agree with him, however...he writes eloquently and movingly on our culture's willful destructiveness and successfully-- I believe-- critiques what doesn't work.

I'm just losing my mind over here.
A small but vocal chunk of people I know look at me like I've got a screw loose when I talk about these things. So why, they ask, are you living in a city? Doesn't that make you part of the problem? Are you willing to give up your metal computer and ipod, your morning coffee and banana imported from Guatemala? If you are still listening to podcasts, checking your email, and having breakfast, then shut up, they tell me. And I cry, inside if not out, because the criticism hurts even if it's irrelevant. These are the same people who don't understand why I buy the majority of my clothing from thrift stores.

A larger chunk of my friends understand, but they feel useless. Our actions are futile. Some of us shove all thoughts of it aside; we can't help, so don't linger on it- it just hurts. Others acknowledge it and struggle to perfect their own lives, willfully ignoring that the problem isn't them, it's the companies clear-cutting and dumping toxins. None of us know where to start. The problem's too huge. We're tiny toy knights equipped with tinfoil swords facing off against a real three-story high fire-breathing multi-headed dragon.

I'm wracking my brains here, Cephied. I want more than anything to throw myself into the traces and work for something better, but my idealism needs to be mated with pragmatism in order to work. I need the how, where, what.


...I hope you aren't hung-over today. Heh.

[ozen.livejournal.com]

"If you are still listening to podcasts, checking your email, and having breakfast, then shut up, they tell me."

And who, exactly, is going to save their souls?

It's risky sounding like Jewel, but shit, man, just 'cause they choose to actively give their consent to Western avarice doesn't mean they should try to stop other people from caring.

...I want to vomit. I feel sick.

icon used ironically.

[lykomancer.livejournal.com]

No, I understand it. They either don't see the problem-- and sickly, there are some people who think that the movement of little green pieces of paper is more important than brown peoples' rights or the existence of an entire species-- or else they can't confront the problem so they blame the messenger: Unless you yourself are homeless, stop talking about people living on the street. You have a house, so until you give up your shelter you're just part of the problem.

No one likes criticism. No one likes to hear that their way of life is causing Tasmanian Devils to die out, or holes in the ozone, or Iraqi children to be born with grotesque birth defects. Telling people that makes them aware and guilty and shamed and sick. No one wants to feel that, and it's easier to ignore it. Those who speak out, of course, are pariahs, outcasts, hypocrites, insane.

Ad hominem tu quoque attacks are easier to formulate than answers.