Free falling

It's a new year. A time when we can start from scratch and imagine great possibilities or catastrophic imaginings. For me, watching the crystal laden ball drop in Times square was like so many re-runs tweaked only differently by a news anchor interrupting two gay men smooching it up behind the police barriers. We've come a long way baby! Perhaps the only cultural achievement this century will give us - openly loving whoever we want. Might be what mankind needs when its huddled in bomb bunkers under so much nuclear ash. Like I said, great possibilities or catastrophe, 2013 might be that year. One thing is for sure though, 2012 wasn't that year. While I never bought the Mayan hoopla per say, I had expectations that are now unfulfilled, namely that Iran would be attacked. Instead, Iran, since around the elections has really fallen off the media radar and doesn't seem to be on any one's agenda. No, instead we're free falling off this alleged cliff the news keeps blabbing on about. I don't know about you but I think we lost perspective of the cliff a long time ago. A country like the US no longer worries about paying its bills, it just keeps raising the debt ceiling like a celebrity with a platinum card; that is to say "no limits," on a orgy of spending to maintain the American dream at the expense of everyone else in the world. So far, the people running the show have managed to keep the wheels of spending well greased, and the poor fed with food stamps and their electricity paid for with welfare. All the while they've managed to subsidize highly profitable corporations while expunging their tax liabilities. They continue to build innumerable foreign military bases, finance countless drone attacks, and bribe foreign officials into being nothing more than an extension of the Obama administration. All the while carrying huge deficits that the international money cartel readily finances to the whim of whomever is really in charge. Speaking for myself, I'm pretty sure it's not Obama. Probably some Goldman Sach's rockefeller type smoking a Cuban cigar housed up in some fortressed estate somewhere. Obama being nothing more than his political bitch. Alternatively, and this is the really scary part, things are haphazardly orchestrated by a bunch of suited buffoons capitalistically and socially wedded to their political ideologies. Give me the evil genius any day over this circus! Few can see past what the stock market is doing on any given day instead of what's really screaming for attention - our environment! It's estimated that we lose 200 species every day and this last year 73,000 species were lost in the name of industrial capitalism, that glorious financial system that the majority revere. Worship it even as we destroy the womb that shelters and feeds us - Earth - a celestial body that's unique in the solar system. Perhaps in several solar systems, or even the universe (I hope that's not true, and it's probably not). It wasn't even commented on during the 2012 election! Quite the opposite actually, too busy trying to save the floundering economy, the very thing that's melting Artic sea ice and releasing massive methane from the oceans. It's destroying forests, causing Frankenstein hurricanes, and firestorms throughout the inter mountain West. Yet we WANT it to continue, worse, we demand more growth! It's no wonder Obama made no mention of it in any of his speeches. A booming economy doesn't marry well with radical carbon reduction, and radical is what we desperately need. I look around and listen to people, I look at my own  life and its modern amenities (piped water, coal burned electricity, small truck to go to work, a mortgage, the grocery store, etc, etc), and realize the radicalism that's necessary to have a real effect on co2 emissions is untenable. We're just not going to get there. Perhaps that's what these politicians and evil genius see too and therefore see no point in making mention of it. I for one would really like some honesty, however brutal and fatalistic it becomes, if for no other reason then to bravely face our true fate. That fate isn't going to be some futuristic world of tomorrow where we buzz around with jet packs and flying cars. I would bet that every 70's child asked to draw what they thought 2012 would look like would give us images that today's children would expect 2030 to look like. Except maybe they're doodling it on a ipad instead while trying to avoid alarming school officials. A teenager recently was arrested for doodling some violent images - See here - for example. His drawing was probably much closer to the truth of what we can expect. Weird kids have a knack for that.

So here we are, free falling off a cliff that has nothing to do with government spending, and has everything to do with industrial capitalism. Down below us is a maelstrom of firestorms, mega-droughts and floods, widespread extinctions, concrete jungles, bombs, and starvation. I have no idea how long it will take to reach bottom, but we are indeed free falling while acting like a loony toon coyote for as long as possible. If it wasn't so grave in portent it would be entertaining.