Am I starting to feel comfortable? My abode is furnished, I settle down to TV and cooked dinners, and indulge in Pringles and soda from the downstairs cafe. My Cannondale hovers above my bed, and I float from my chair by the computer, to the refrigerator and back. What am I doing?
When I catch the bus I have about 10-15 minutes each day to ponder. Like everyone else, I don't know what's going to happen next month, let alone next year.
Increasingly though, I have a strengthening sense of confusion, and dilemma. I think we are, as a society, supremely addicted to oil (and that's not just a catchphrase), and as a result, our lifestyles are abnormal.
My food in the refrigerator comes from a huge warehouse like building called Carrefour (a French supermarket company in South Korea, Britain's Tesco's is also here as is America's Wal-Mart) a few blocks away. I have olives from Spain, oranges from California, fruit juice from South Africa. It's all so comfortable I don't really think about it. To get to work I walk to a designated area, wait for a number on a moving orange or blue rectangle, get on, put in some coins and fifteen minutes later I'm where I need to be.
All the children I teach, well, a lot of them, catch buses to school too. The television I watch, the computer that serves me information, the lights shining overhead, all these are AFFORDABLE courtesy of oil. Oil is cheap today, and that represents an easy, laid back approach to squandering massive amounts of energy (personal energy, the energy of this planet (in foods) and the stored reserves on setting up supermarkets and cities where they should not be) that other generations labored and sweated blood to achieve.
I'm reading a book called The World is Flat, which basically gloats on how wonderful globalism is. That India is now handling lots of America's outsourcing. It's a book about how clever we all are. It's usually when we are in the middle of the party, when it's all flowing oh so swell, that the cops come, or the wine runs out, or someone falls and breaks a leg. Globalisation is a party like that. Just now France and the Netherlands have kind've shaken themselves and their immediate neighbours out of the we're all moving together trance, by saying, "Hang on, this isn't so good for us."
Now the Euro is starting to slide, and destabilise. An isolated event? I don't know. I just know it's happeninng. I know we need a stable system now for things to be 'good', and I see some serious cracks sprouting here, there, everywhere.
Globalisation is like the internet. The internet was initially invented with the idea of sharing scientific information. The WWW is Wonderful. Useful. Ubiquitous. But potentially quite terrible too. This same system feeds us virusses and ensalves us or subjects us to many useless communications. Spending time emailing is better at dumbing down a population than taking marijuana. Have you ever sat in front of your computer waiting for stuff to download. Have you noticed how much time you wasted doing that?
We have lots of connectivity but it's pretty meaningless. We have the capacity to send pictures, movies and jokes to each other, and we do so because we can, not because we should.
We're globalising for the same reason, and I don't believe we should. A very bad virus that gets into your computer will erase/corrupt a few files, make your computer run slow or at worst, you'll have to throw it away. A virus that infects globalisation will erase files too. It will spread very effectively, along the very pathways of efficiency we've put there...the carriers, the jets, trains, planes, automobiles. Those files are us, by the way. The virus may be a failing currency, or a terror network, or an actual sickness, or just plain high prices of a particular commodity. Now one places problem becomes everyones problem. Your problems become mine. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I want your problems, and do you want mine?
What the hell is normal, or should be normal in this Windows Operated World? Is this stuff as WOW as we think it is?
I'm feeling a bit lost myself. It's one thing to glimpse the end of suburbia. It's another to know how to disinvest out of it.
Kunstler predicts that the next phase in the world will produce a vast majority of Losers. That is, financial losers, basically a middle class unable to function.
All this speculation depends on the rate at which economic and other calamities meet us. This year, the experts tell us, is THE year.
I have lived, it seems to me, in the Age Of Doomsdaysayers. The years running up to the millenium were supposed to be IT.
I'm not really arguing the case for or or against Doomsday, whatever that may be.
I am just wondering, on my lonely pedestal, what the hell is normal anymore.
I am beginning to think it is stuff like eating an apple, drinking from a mountain stream, walking on a path between trees and over rocks, holding the hand of someone close to us or someone we love.
I feel something like Neo felt confronted by the red and the blue pill. I am one of those who feels, having ingested the red pill, I have been some of the way down the rabbit hole, and the little light at the top is a bare pinprick now. It's frightening to have a world that is so caught up with itself and bent on its own distruction/consumption.
I'm 33 and the next 20 years are likely to be a huge downshift. I wonder how I will explain to my teenage son how the world functioned before he was born, and what I was doing in it. I wonder if he will believe me if I say, "You know, I really wasn't sure exactly what to do."
He would respond by saying, I suppose: "You could have done something, you know."
What?
I have more questions for Mr Kunstler.
No comments:
Post a Comment