Every minute counts
Bradford Wright described Watchmen as "Moore's obituary for the concept of heroes in general and superheroes in particular."[17] Putting the story in a contemporary sociological context, Wright wrote that the characters of Watchmen were Moore's "admonition to those who trusted in 'heroes' and leaders to guard the world's fate."
He added that to place faith in such icons was to give up personal responsibility to "the Reagans, Thatchers, and other 'Watchmen' of the world who supposed to 'rescue' us and perhaps lay waste to the planet in the process".
On Sunday morning I was in the gym busy with a 15km run. I followed it with a swim, and while in the water I realised with a pang that if my workout exceeded 2 hours, I'd have to pay a parking fee - just R7 in small change, but it was money I didn't have on me. Nor, I knew, was there any coinage in my car.
So instead of doing the 50 lengths I'd scheduled, I did thirty. I still hoped into the jacuzzi for a few seconds, and weighed myself. I went downstairs thinking that the hurry was all for nothing. Guess what. I inserted the parking ticket, swiped my membership card and saw the voluming:
Parking credit: 0:01
I'd made it with one minute to spare.
The relief I felt was palpable. Had I missed this deadline there would have been a lot of fussing and stress and rigmarole. I'd avoided all this by being alert to my circumstances, flexible to respond, and moving with a certain amount of urgency.
Of course, none of these are present in our circumstances and scenarios. In a few years from now we will look back and remember how caught up we were in our obsessions and entertainments, our leaders were distracted by opportunities for enrichment - but so were we. In the end, in whatever shape or form, it boils down to greed. Selfishness. Self-indulgence. How else could things come to a grinding halt? How else when each person demands a vibrating toothbrush (or phone, or handbag) with one's initials stenciled on it, and the particular hue we want.
It is difficult to convey how vulgar some of our wants and needs are. Perfectionism has its place - in business, in making well crafted films, in winning the Tour de France 7 times. But perfectionism is also utter selfishness. Perfectionism demands slavish attention, huge amounts of energy in service to trivial details. Unfortunately, perfectionism in service to lifestyle, in decorating our homes, in being the perfect Christian, in dressing appropriately for having the right sized breasts, well, it adds up to a delusion Disconnect with the real world. And by real world I mean the world that is a forest. The health of a bunch of trees on a hillside, the health of a patch of land that was once able to support an orchard, but has since become a sponge that sucks up more and more chemicals and fertilizers each year.
If you scroll down the articles below this one you will see all the symptoms for the ongoing wrecking of our world. Even our entertainment, flicks like Dark Knight and Watchmen* are bullseyes for what our inner zeitgeist knows to be true.
*WIKI: Watchmen takes place in an alternate history United States where the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, freelance costumed vigilantes have been outlawed and most costumed superheroes are in retirement or working for the government.
A Great Darkness is coming that will spell the end of convenience, the end of the most lavish era human beings have ever known, or will ever know again. Enjoy each day, because this pinnacle of selfishness, where we can have 1000 songs on a little device at our beck and call, where we can drive to a shop to buy a chocolate without fore or afterthought, where we can sit down on the coach and roam through television channels, where we can indulge every sexual fantasy online, where we can fatten ourselves on any morsel we can spend money on, well, it's a long slippery slope down that highest of all mountains.
My weight on Sunday slipped to under 78kg. That is Ironman territory. I decided against doing the Ironman this year, partially because while I am strong and fit and healthy, I am not as strong as I would like to be, and to add insult to possible injury (and a definite strain), the cost to enter is around R5000. I'm not going to pretend that I can afford that. At R2000 I may have been less cautious.
And I do have to wonder - next year, will Spec Savers (or any sponsor for that matter) step forward to sponsor the ironman. Because things are disappearing so quickly, there is no telling what is going next.
You may think I am exaggerating, but the media is silent on the clusterfuck fiasco that is infesting financial systems each minute. Credit is drying up, banks and the world's largest insurer of banks (AIG) are failing. In short, world finance is collapsing like a rotten piano on itself, with one last maniacal, but muffled wail of notes as it sends a puff of chalked keys into dust.
It may seem like just a pile of money that went up in smoke. Actually, that money is what allowed the fantasy of suburbia - the American Dream - it's few decades run. There was a time when tribes and clans build castles and lived within those walls. Suburbia, this endless procession of patches of land, each with its own car, own security system, own refrigerator, stove, garden, swimming pool, entertainment centre....that couldn't expand indefinitely. For a few giddy generation (2 or 3) we thought it might. It began to feel like 'this is what life is all about'.
You may want to read this paragraph 4 or 5 or 45 times, over and over. Let your imagination run riot. Because in these quatrains lie your fate, and mine. Humanity's run of dominance is over. Fundamentally. Our fortunes are about to change. Collapse is taking place rapidly, but systems are large and elaborate, and with instantaneous data via the internet it may seem slow. One day the Dow breaks through 7000. The next 6900. It's like a countdown. And yet we sit at our computers, blinking at incomprehensible information. This is why I say we suffer from a chronic lack of imagination, and discernment. Our intelligence is narrow minded - it lacks insight, it lacks foresight, it lacks conscientiousness. Our individual attitudes and mindsets mean we will be propelled, naked and alone into the night, to fight for scraps. Lest we can start to hold hands, and change what we're doing.
Change what you eat.
Change how you live.
If you smoke - quit.
If you're fat - lose weight.
If you're depressed - find a way to control your thoughts, to exert your will, to get congruence in your life
In the difficult time to come, our addictions and afflictions will be added stress to a very strenuous period. It will wipe us out in stages - first the sick, the destitute, the have-nots, then in rising tides of xenophobia and national hysteria, it will escalate. If ever there was a scenario where conflict could credibly escalate in a nuclear holocaust, where a world loses its head in a rage of confused delirium, this would be it. In a crazy cauldron of change, the nuclear option won't seem so crazy. But many dominoes are due to fall before we get there...
Imagine:
The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other's failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.
For the first time in a long time, humanity will be unleashed, untethered, by governments, or cohesive authority. It will be the undisciplined mobs - used to computer games and cellphones, sporting cargo [ants, big tits and tattoos. We will see more and less organised mobs, arranged in groups sharing similar races, skills or perhaps beliefs. During a time when survival will in any way be difficult, we will fight each other, expending the very last sparks of our energy of fighting off competitors to scarce resources - food, water, shelter. Disease will spread and cut humanity down like wheat.
It will probably be a very long time before we can make sense of how it was that we got to where we are now, and somehow believed this was normal, and meant to be.
From the aboveyou can see that commerce and manufacturing are contracting. This will be followed by the abrupt breakdown of transport systems and farming. Part of this process will involve:
- electricity grids going down
- municipal services failure
- spreading urban and suburban violence (looting, militaries deployed to crush insurgents etc)
- the inability of farms to sustain and the subsequent looting/seizure of farms (except farms need time to grow food, and once food is seized, it's gone unless someone is growing it).
- spreading internecine conflict, civil, national and international
All of this seems imminent, however 'normal' it may seem wherever you are, comfortably ensconced in suburbia. Enjoy the privilege. Every minute of it.
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