Apocalypse April 2022
Discarded Pepperonis
Inhale, exhale. Fantastic, joyous day. Eke out a living. Manic, sleepy, angry. I’m singing under my breath — It’s a struggle, to make ends meet — Under pressure, to express yourself… No one having the luxury of time anymore it seems. In the ramshackle gazebo, long on the verge of collapse. Genetics, time, willpower. Should we give up or should we try harder? We’re all the heroes of our own memories. Everything was perfect. Only there was never enough time…
Every point of view is particular to a social situation — we each of us interpret through a worldview lens. I’m interpretating it like abstract. Learning experiencing firsthand what things are. Classic alienation I guess. Very hard to break out from the introcosm into the exocosm. Less attention on beings, more on Being. The person I am is the circumstances I am in. Awareness of the injustice of the present. Taking in so much information there’s no space for retention. Biodiversity loss, not as many insects about. Good, I don’t like creepy crawlies. Good to be alive, before it’s too late, in the right time for me.
More of the same, what to make of it? Enduring horrors in Ukraine, general patterns of democratic backsliding. Psychosis inducing, grinding against 20th-century systems and norms, cultures sinking into the corporate hollow. Germany presents as dallying, weak. Baerbock calls out the Kremlin’s unbelievable brutality and boundless will to exterminate, but she isn’t in the top job. Corruption to the hilt over in Westminster, intransigence to do the good fair thing. Britain operates as a gigantic loophole, undercutting other countries’ rules, massaging down tax rates, neutering regulations, laundering foreign criminals’ money. We’re not a policeman, like America, we’re a butler, the butler to the world, the rich (1).
Is it sustainable? Is it humane? GDP growth economics, essentially designed to rip apart the natural world, pillage resources until nothing is left unbroken. Growth of what, and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how long can it last, and what’s the cost to the planet, and how much is enough? (2) Probably not gonna end well — nah it’ll probably work out, look at how we’ve solved problems in the past, how we came together to overcome obstacles in the past! Behold what we have already achieved! Breeds complacency, fundamentally misunderstands, dangerously underestimates our current impact on habitable equilibrium, maintaining Holocene-like conditions (stable warmth for the last 12,000 years, far from a constant, inevitable property of the universe). Most of us not even capable, or willing to recognise, or confront the scale of the looming crisis. It’s easier to believe the lie is truth. Free folk, it’ll be hard to get ’em to work together.
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(1) Oliver Bullough
(2) Donella Meadows
