(That little white speck in the lighter area is the Earth, in a picture taken from deep space. We are a dust mote.)There have been posts lately on Average Buyer and on The Housing Bubble Blog that point to a growing sense of foreboding of the permanent loss of physical/geographical community and of economic/social stability. Survivalists have gotten a bad rep since so many of them tend towards social and cultural phobias, but the reality is that there are a lot of leftist survivalists out there, too. Since I consider myself one of them, albeit one who has "fallen off the wagon" so to speak, I tend to think that my opinions on such matters as those referenced in the links above are too subjective to be of much worth.
This blog is very much like the journals I used to keep in my young adulthood, and as such it is a way of time travel. The me that is in the present-soon-to-be-past feels that our society and perhaps the world is on the verge of a crisis. The me that is in the future-soon-to-be-present will have to determine if such is the case. I have felt this way before, and nothing much happened. On the other hand, I was young in the 70's/80's and I couldn't sort out the poverty of youth from what I now know to be stagflation. I grew up listening to my parents' stories of childhood in the Great Depression. You know, one pair of shoes per year, going barefoot in summer, trading chickens and garden produce for staples at the store and in the case of my grandfather getting paid for his work (as the school Principal and post-master) in goods and services from the citizenry.
As I write this, Micheal is reading to me off Google News that Putin is pulling out of the European NATO treaty in response to the U.S. deploying missile shields in Eastern Europe. The Iraq War continues. Our military resources are by all accounts woefully stretched. The Republican Party appears to be self-destructing, and the Democratic Party appears to be incapable of understanding that it is up to them to lead us out of this mess. We can statistically prove that the wealthy are much wealthier. It's harder to prove that the rest of us are poorer, because of the skillful and manipulative juggling of economic data. Economically, most of my curiosity and energy has gone into studying the housing/credit bubble. That bubble has now burst, but it is only slowly sinking in to the "consumer" whose purchasing ability is the only thing keeping our national economy afloat. Which is what caused the bubble in the first place. Yet, perversely, the stock market keeps going up with only a very rare and limited down day.
I have little to no faith in the media these days, or in our national leaders (and this is regardless of party affiliation). I truly suspect that things are much, much worse than anyone in power will ever be able to admit until they totally fall apart. That being said, what can I or anyone else do about it? If there is a total collapse, we'd do the most logical thing: gather together with our family and tough it out. We're better prepared than most to survive in primitive conditions due to many things: the poverty of our youth, military training, years of camping and woodcraft.
In my more optimistic moments, I tend to see not a catastrophic change but a more gradual one. A return of economies based more locally, including local manufacture of durable goods and clothing and agriculture. Homes which are much smaller. Solar and hydro power. Vehicles which travel shorter distances and go slower. For those who yearn for the social and community supports of prior generations, here will be your chance to rebuild them. A part of me wants very much to believe that urban areas will survive and that we could all live together in greener urban neighborhoods where centralization of goods and services would be the advantage. But I suspect that for many, they will feel more secure and happy in very small towns. I suspect that climate change will dictate that areas of the country where we now have suburbs will become ghost towns; hopefully some enterprising business will develop which salvages the materials from these places. Water will become extremely important, and we will simply not be able to irrigate vast areas as we do now in order to make them liveable.
Our ancestors would be totally stupefied at the world we live in. It is the height of folly to believe that we are special, and that we are any less a part of the natural world than they were. We have all agreed to an artificial construct that we have labeled "Reality" and which includes most of what passes for civilized living. The world cares little for our Reality, has been here for long ages prior to our gaining consciousness and will carry on very well if we disappear.
No comments:
Post a Comment