Jack Burns Lives!

Now Hear This

I frequently feel as if I’m fighting for a hopeless cause. That ultimately, at least in my lifetime, the growth maniacs and economic cultists will win. Growth will continue unabated, more habitat will be lost, the planet will continue to warm, human populations will continue to expand and the whole damn planet will eventually look like Detroit. Highways everywhere. Massive, energy intensive skyscrapers. Windmill farms across the prairies. Nuclear plants. More damn dams. Subdivisions as far as the eye can see. Bodies piled up in the Middle East like bales of cotton in the Delta.

“This successful life we’re livin’ got us fueding like the Hatfield and McCoys….”

Try to get away? Where you going, pard? Millions of others will be thinking the same thing. If you think waiting ten years to raft the Grand Canyon is bad, you may one day have to wait years to get a hiking permit in the Smokies. The parking lot at Arches will be constantly filled to capacity.

Why should we have any hope? Why should we even expend the energy fighting? Look at the Presidential race. It’s a farce. The media is against us, pushing the “approved” candidates, the with all-important growth ad infinitum imprimatur stamped on their foreheads. Growth cultists have hijacked the term “green” and are now successfully using it to sell even more stuff and to develop so-called sustainable methods designed to keep the machine moving forward (backward). Turning natural resources currently used for food production into resources to support automobiles. And at the highest levels, economic madmen are twisting, manipulating and maneuvering the cogs and pieces to make the rich richer while the rest of us wallow in their pits.

Just yesterday, I read where the plan is for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq until at least 2018. People cheer wildly when they hear Mike Huckabee talk about instituting a Christian constitution:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do, to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Say what?

Is anyone paying attention, here? Are humans really this fucking stupid?

I guess so. (more on that in a subsequent post)

I’m hesitant to use the word “fight” since it has so many negative connotations, but fighting obviously doesn’t necessarily mean the use of violence. It doesn’t have to be wasted energy. It can be, as Gary Snyder has said, it can be “standing against the tide; refusing to flow with it.” An interesting and appropriate position in these times. Taoism teaches “going with the flow,” in nature, but when something is so completely and clearly against nature, I believe you must stand against it. You have a moral imperative to resist.

So why even try? I mean, what’s the point? Why not just get all you can for yourself, hoard and stick your big middle finger in the air and say “fuck you” to the whole world. Load your gun, stock up on ammo and supplies and try to hunker down on whatever pitiful little piece of land you can find.

Here’s why.

We can’t just lie down and do nothing. We can’t just let these bastards walk all over us and the voiceless. The lynx. The polar bear. The jaguar. The owl. Songbirds. We have a moral imperative to stand up and be heard! Even to make our own, brief existence more palatable. Just to be a thorn in the side, a pain in the ass, to those that want to destroy life for their own economic benefit.

And dissent develops democracy. You can’t have democracy without dissent.

Last night, my seventeen year old son, stated that “we’re going to have to resort to real revolution.” Meaning violence. I responded by telling him that violence wouldn’t work. It would only bring more violence, and that the ability for the citizenry to successfully resist with arms ended with the invention of the Gatling Gun. The enforcement arm of global capitalism is well armed. In fact, it has 14 Ohio Class submarines that can effectively end all life on the planet. But they don’t need a Trident sub to handle a bunch of peaceniks that want clean water, clean air, decent food and egalitarianism. All they need is a single battalion of militarized, jackbooted goons with tasers to control the streets, while their bosses sit in their ivory towers and control the world.

Welcome to Abbey’s Good News.

In the end, the ultimate end, our side does win. Us folks that want a sensible world where humans live in harmony with the planet and don’t try to kill everything that moves while piling up unnecessary profits in process. Humans can’t continue their industrial domination of the planet for much longer. The fossil fuel boondoggle will end and the planet will stand up and knock us back on our fat, gluttonous asses. Bruised and humbled, we’ll learn how to live in place, how to live sustainably, or we will cease to live. It’s pretty simple.

And speaking of sustainability and living in place, no amount of industrialization, within the context of our current virulent strain of growth capitalism, is sustainable. There is no such thing as sustainable industrialization. It depends on a new-renewable resource and it is the ultimate oxymoron. Abbey’s dream of “a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists” is probably a false hope. That can never again be recaptured as long as growth capitalism is allowed to exist, mutate and metastasize in a fossil fuel dominated world.

After the Age of Oil? Well, that’s another story.We can talk about steady state economics and the world of simple capitalism, barter and trade after this aberration is past.

Be heard. Be LOUD. Take heart in the fact that although we may never live to see the fruits of our labors, balance and sensibility will ultimately be restored.