Victory

It occurred to me today that it's probably time for humanity to stand up and declare it's victory over nature. It's hit me before, on an intellectual level, that there is no reversing what we've done. But today, on a more emotional, intuitive level, I realized just what that means.

What was once the pillar of humanity's elegance has fallen. Instead of community working in concert with nature, we have Home Depot. Instead of rains falling to feed the Earth, we have dying oceans and crumbling ecosystems. Instead of newborns suckling their mothers, we have BPA-free plastic bottles.

Well, there's no BPA, so this plastic is ok! It won't kill your child directly, but it will destroy the planet! No problem!!!

It's universally accepted by astronomers that the planet is supposed to be in the midst of a cooling cycle, on the way toward another ice age, perhaps. But somehow, the planet is getting hotter. If that is not enough to convince us that we're royally screwed the pooch, then I don't know what will.

I was overcome by a profound sadness; not depression, but sublime, intense sadness for what we've managed to destroy in roughly 200,000 years. It's tough to believe, and tougher to accept, but I think that people are starting to become familiar with the idea of collapse, and just what it means. We've no choice.

What I have to focus on is getting past this compulsion to punch everyone I see in the face. That's probably not healthy.

Degradation

Sometimes it just baffles me how badly wrong we can be. People get so hung up on stupid separators like nationality, race, religion, blah blah blah. So some Muslims want to build a Community Center near "Ground Zero."

People say they oppose this because it's an insult to the fallen.

I think people have just forgotten what the word COMMUNITY means... or perhaps they never knew. I myself forget that we are born into a world where there is no community. The ways of nature have been removed from our collective consciousness. I had an interesting talk with Tricia a couple of weeks ago about how different humanity looks now, in terms of evolution, when compared to itself before the advent of surplus agriculture. She said that the differences would be negligible, but I don't think I can agree with that. Because something is clearly fucked up; the world is burning down, and we set the fire and continue to fan the flames. We've changed; we seem to be born with an innate acceptance of civilization, and an uncanny ability to tune out the destruction and devastation that it wreaks upon the natural world. We think that "humanity" and "nature" are opposed.

Maybe for good reason, I suppose. Maybe humans really aren't a part of nature anymore. Maybe we've let ourselves go.

Fuck ground zero. It's better where it is. I'm sorry those people died, and when I say "those people," I mean the people that were in the buildings as well as those that flew the planes. Ward Churchill was right in a sense, that chickens were coming home to roost. But they weren't America's chickens. They were civilization's chickens.

And it was likely only the beginning.