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“…Only those who are
obedient
to
the guidance of the Great Creator's laws will survive.
If it is the
will of the Creator, if the earth is totally destroyed
by the
willfulness of man, the true sister and brother will
give a rebirth to
recycle the earth and renew its life.”-from the newsletter of
the traditional
Hopi Elders, Techqua Ikachi, # 16
Part 1: Gridlock
It is simply beyond
me. The earth itself is dying, and most of us will die
with it. Tonight
in a restaurant, I sat alone with tears in my eyes,
watching the people
run through the routines of personality and “meaning,”
a “meaning”
adapted to a way of life that is already over, whose
prognosis is
terminal; I am all but certain I was the only person
there who knew it.
It
is not a hard job to keep them in ignorance. They are
entranced by what
the Hopi call Koyaanisqatsi, all of the things that
glitter with death,
that bind us in a spell of comfort and numbness to the
radical reality
of a life out of balance. That the masters of war and
global death keep
them all in ignorance of what is coming is made simple
by their
entrancement. It is a simple matter of keeping the
spellbound asleep,
of making sure no disturbance awakens them.
One
wonders if such ignorance is a blessing or a curse.
Was it better that
the Jews in the death camps did not know that they
were entering a gas
chamber, that the entranced among them thought they
were to get clean,
rather than that they were about to be “cleansed” from
the face of the
Earth? I couldn’t say, because I know we are not
heading for a shower,
and I cannot find the right words to break the spell.
Even if I knew
them, I would have no means to speak them soon enough
to enough people.
I couldn’t really help them prepare, and the leap from
this dull
ignorance and the hypnosis of death, into a living
rebellion and a
thrust toward life is simply too large for them to
make in the time we
have left. We have no time left. With the Nazis at the
gas chambers it
was Zyklon B: for us it’s Carbon Dioxide and
Methane. Although
they are odorless –we cannot smell them- they’re
already filling the
room, and the first of us are already dying.
No, you won’t read it in the paper,
certainly not spelled out just this way. They will
tell you certain
gases may cause death or “endanger millions,” as they
put it now. They
will never say that it is a system of profit, a way of
life, and not
the gases, as such, that are killing us. They will
only tell us, in the
words of the US
president, G.W. Bush, that their way of life is “not negotiable.”
What this means is that nothing will stop them, that
to keep what they
have – even for awhile, they will let the rest of us
die. They will
never say, “Yes, we could stop it, but we won’t.” Instead,
the sergeants among them will point their fingers,
talking about Zyklon
B “alarmists” while the President simply remains
unconvinced that
Zyklon B really kills. He will claim that there is
doubt, scientific
doubt, about where Zyklon B really comes from, and
whether or not it is
anthropogenic – made by humans. Conservatives will say
that Zyklon B is
essential for the economy, or that the nation must
break its dependence
on foreign sources of Zyklon B. The debate will rage
on the back pages
of the newspaper, the pages no one reads. And the ones
who want to wake
up, the ones who want us to live, will pray that god
sends a message,
but no one reads that paper, either. Their eyes are
glued to “American
Idol” and “America’s
Most Wanted.” Others will write essays like this one
that will be read
by 6 thousand of the Earth’s 6 thousand million
people. A few of us
will understand what we’re facing, a few of us will
understand in
depth. Very, very few. One in a million, maybe 10 in a
million. Even as
more begin to stir, it is certain that they will lack
the power to make
a difference. The guards have guns, while the inmates
have only their
striped uniforms and television sets, their inertia,
their poverty and
6th grade reading level.
Not unlike Carolyn Baker,
I am told by people whose focus is on the spiritual
that I am too
“negative,” too angry, that only love can save the
world now, that I
should give up my anger and distrust of the Good
Germans with their
Zyklon B, that I must forgive them, that I have “no
Harmony” in my
soul, that publishing “missive after missive” of bad
news only “brings
down” those who need their full attention to be placed
on creating the
spiritual conditions for the coming Shift to a world
of peace and
harmony. The advocates of the Love Solution have met
me with contempt
and anger and , as Baker points out, self
-“righteousness.
”But
the truth is that I have listened to them with deep
carefulness.
Because one thing is clear. What we have been doing
doesn’t work.
Another thing is clear to me, as well: that what we
have called our
“selves” is a temporary construct, a construct adapted
to an artificial
environment that is about to, unimaginably and
unambiguously,
disappear. But oddly, as radical as I have been these
last thirty years
– and I have been as radical as I could manage, and
even much more
radical than I could manage, I find myself stuck in
the middle now,
with no clear solution to this dilemma about love.
But,
I know this. That the worst thing oppression has done
to me is to eat
me alive, to render null the meaning and potential of
what I was born
to be, to consume my time and my emotional and
intellectual and
creative and spiritual energies, to block me in from
all sides, to make
me constantly have to react to the barrage of abuse,
poverty, physical
and emotional suffering, exploitation, indignity,
subterfuge,
manipulations and constrictions that make oppression
what it is, and
which make the world go ‘round. I’ve known since I was
16 that this is
not a way of life, but a way of death. The knowledge
was more than I
could absorb, then, but over the decades I have
absorbed it, learned to
understand it, name it, pin it, identify its games,
their rules and
their permutations.
But,
looking around, all of that has not helped me to
escape it, even though
the truth of my own private mythology is that the task
that was set for
me was to understand it so that when the Time came, as
it has come, I
could help to create a new culture, one free of
oppression, one that
would not be a living death. Nevertheless, I still
have to reckon with
the reality that my understanding has not set me free.
I know how not
to live, I know what not to repeat. But, I don’t know
how to live. I
know only a little of that.
I
assume that my situation is simply part of a larger
one, a situation
one self-appointed New Age guru has rightly described
as an all but all
encompassing Karmic Gridlock.
If
today is the culmination of everything that has gone
before it, if the
current global crisis is the singular product of
“history,” of
civilization, then all of the contradictions of that
history, in all of
their permutations, economic, cultural, social,
physical, mental and
emotional, are coming to a head as part of this
culmination, this
crisis. The totalism of the system, of this way of
death, has reached a
new threshold we can call Gridlock and Collapse. The
cat has caught its
tail, the Matrix has trapped itself. It has destroyed
its own options
and has nothing left to feed on but itself, as if it
were a cancer with
nothing left to feed on but more cancer, with no
healthy flesh left to
invade.
Part 2: The Good
News
The good news is that
the death system
is dying. It could come to no other end.
The
bad news is that it has become so all encompassing
that there is
nowhere left to run if we were able to escape it.
Escaping global
warming would be like escaping the air itself, the
atmosphere itself.
But we cannot escape the air, there are no spaceships
to carry us
elsewhere, and we probably couldn’t breathe if we got
there.
I
don’t think dying is so bad, personally. I came close
to dying a few
months ago. Later, it occurred to me it would have
been easier than
living. If it were to happen, I later realized, all it
would take is to
close the eyes. Easy, but cheap and faithless.
What
we have been doing – dying – doesn’t work. What we
have been doing –
fighting or resisting, or going along or “getting
ours” – doesn’t work.
It didn’t work.
And its time is over.
This
whole way of life is over. Everything my generation
rebelled against is
over This cancerous consumption and the growth of
consumption is over.
It can’t take another step. As George Monbiot
points out, if the economy grows by only 3% a year,
global economic
activity- and consumption- will double in roughly a
quarter of a
century.
Monbiot
writes, “In other words, if our economy grows at 3%
between now and
2040, we will consume in that period economic
resources equivalent to
all those we have consumed since humans first stood on
two legs. Then,
between 2040 and 2063, we must double our total
consumption again.
Reading that paper I realised for the first time what
we are up against.
”There are no easy fixes.
Short of a very
severe global economic collapse there may be no fixes
at all. An
article in the Los Angeles
Times
shows why. The Times reports that overall there has
been a 12% decrease
in global warming emissions since the forging of the
Kyoto Protocol.
But, the Times reports, “It [the apparent success of Kyoto]
was an illusion. The progress
wasn't due to a global embrace of green power, but
rather to the 1991
collapse of the Soviet Union,
which
shut down smoke-belching factories across the region.
"Here’s the result of the
Eastern Bloc
collapse:“Russia:
Down 29% in carbon
dioxide emissions since 1990.
Romania:
A 43% reduction.
Latvia:
A resounding 60% drop.
”Far
from reducing emissions- an utterly urgent necessity –
the Times says
that “total carbon dioxide emissions from countries
bound by Kyoto's
caps have
risen by more than 8%.” Among developing nations, China's emissions grew
138% since Kyoto
was adopted.
The U.S.,
the number one polluter, never even signed the accord.
There is no reason to
assume that a
market based plan that comes out of Bali
will do any better at all.
When
absolute survival depends on a certain set of actions,
it is pure death
and foolishness to set up a system with competing
survival drives, one
with built-in conflicts that undermine what must be
done. But any
market based plan does just that. In the real world,
survival depends
on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But in the
artificial world of the
market, for the capitalist, “survival” depends on
growth, on cutting
costs, on making as much as possible for as little as
possible – on
making profit and on making more profit than your
competitors in an
ever-expanding cycle. Any market based system of
“credits” to pollute –
credits to kill, licenses to kill - pits the short
term survival of a
few capitalists against the survival of Life on Earth.
It’s not just greenhouse
gases that must
be cut. Industrial
production itself – which produces greenhouse gases
and a million other
plagues - must not grow, certainly not at a rate that
will cause us to
produce and consume – and thus pollute - as much in
the next quarter
century as we have consumed in the entire existence of
the human
species.
Well,
there is an alternative, but it is one that no
government on Earth will
ever embrace. The only thing that can stop the
increase in production,
and thus the destruction of all Life, is a Global
Depression, which, by
definition, drastically reverses economic growth.
Maybe then we can
meet the standards science says must be met – an 80%
reduction in
greenhouse gases - or more– a rate of reduction over
twice the size of
the reduction created by the Russian collapse.
Since
any Kyoto-style accord can be nothing more than a
deadly mix of food
and poison, we may thank god that such a Depression,
and with it, real
reductions in greenhouse gases, seems increasingly
likely, even
inevitable. Take your choice: Relative poverty, even
the deepest
poverty, in the short term, or Global Death. But let’s
be more specific
in laying out the meaning of the choice. Consider
this: James Lovelock
of “Gaia” fame has projected that unchecked global
warming will lead to
conditions, where, by 2100, there will remain only 500
million humans
on Earth, and they will live at or near the poles.
Lovelock contends
that the rest of the planet will be uninhabitable.
Consider. By
2050 Global warming will have destroyed one million species
of Life on Earth. Human global population is due to
reach 9 billion in
the same year. If only 500 million humans survive in
2100, that means
that roughly 8 and ½ billion – about 95% of all humans
living at
mid-century - will die. It comes down to it: Either
this way of death-
in-life dies, or the human species will be eradicated
or all-but
eradicated, along with the vast majority of Life on
the planet. Let’s
revisit our premises. The market requires growth if
individual
formations of capital (banks, corporations, companies,
businesses) are
to survive; while Life requires no growth, or negative
economic growth,
if we are to survive. It’s that plain, that simple.
In
all
likelihood, what comes out of the UN conference in
Bali, which is meant
to lay the groundwork for a “New Kyoto,” will be
nothing but a
compromise with global death, one in which death has
the upper hand.
Economic collapse is the one thing that might give
Life itself a way to
continue.
Of
course, under capitalism, the state has a primary
function: it is not
to protect Life; it is to create a controllable
populace so that there
is a stable zone of production for capital, and to
create stable
markets for the distribution (including exports) of
commodities, and
the seizure of resources. In other words, to suppress
the people at
home, and to intimidate or conquer people abroad.
Needless to say,
economic collapse leads to war, as competing states
seek to use warfare
to maximize their control of markets and overseas
resources and emerge
from the collapse “on top,” The next
depression will be
no
different, unless the capitalists realize that
reconstituting their
system is a hopeless task. Which, given the impending
realities of peak
oil, just might be the blessed case. Economic
collapse, war, peak oil,
and a vastly over-extended US empire are all
intimately linked and
mutually reinforcing realities that lead in one
direction - to the
death of the Empire and the impossibility of its
resurrection. Let us
pray and let us work to make sure its death comes in
time for us all to
survive it. Let us pray and work as if we were in line
for the gas
chamber. Because we are.
Part 3: Renewing
the World
Let
us pray and let us work and let us learn how to build
a completely
different future once this way is finally dead and
buried. It will take
everything we have, and more. It will take what we
don’t have.
Since
this way of life is over, since this culture is over,
the fiction of
who we have assumed ourselves to be is also over. We
are not that. We
never were that. It’s just that our survival in the
system meant we had
no choice but to pretend- even to ourselves – to be
that. It is time,
now, for us to deliberately and consciously to enter
into what my
generation called the psychedelic experience, the
dissolution of our
egos- I mean our stories, the stories we have told
ourselves about what
it is to be alive, to be a human being on Earth. Like
an actor when the
stage is being torn down after the show, it’s time to
abandon who we
were, what we were, what we said, what we did, and
what we planned.
That’s what it means to die consciously, to allow the
ego to die, to
let go of a life that can no longer be sustained.
That’s what it means
to die with joy, to see death as liberation from
suffering. All the
stuff the Buddha said. It’s Time now. It’s time to
die, so that the
world might be re-born.
I imagine,
rightly or
wrongly – I
haven’t asked - that the people who’ve been
preaching love and
forgiveness to me already understood this. I don’t
know, and it matters
little. I let them work in me, I let their words
dismantle me, even
though I had felt profoundly insulted by them, even
though some of the
things that were said were arrogant and clearly
meant to be insulting. Nevertheless,
I began to give up the story. Slowly, the anger is
giving way to
sadness. Sadness is a step closer to love than
anger. That’s good.
Beneath the anger is grief, and beneath the grief is
light and joy and
renewal and the colors of the rainbow. Beneath the
grief is life, not
the phony “life” we’ve been led to lead, but real
life. I know, because
I’ve been down the road before. That’s how I knew to
listen to the love
preachers in the first place. That’s how I knew it
was time to shut up,
to sit with the impossible and let it answer itself.
And here’s the
deal.
Death’s own answer is
love. No,
it’s not death vs. love. Love is death’s own answer.
The answer we have
always needed under the death system is love - a way
to love and a way
to be loved. A way to connect, to break down, to
open up. Oppression is
nothing but a block to love, to connection, to
inclusion. Love is the
road. Oppression is not sustainable, and to that
extent, it is not
fundamentally real. It is doomed to collapse. Love
is fundamentally
real. Connection is fundamentally real. Death and
oppression have no
victory if we know we are connected, if we know that
the door is open
to our love, if we can still give it and receive it,
if we can pledge
it beyond the grave, beyond the prison’s bars. It is
our love for life,
for kids and animals, that we can pledge now, and
pledge it beyond the
grave, to a future we will never live to see. To a
new world whose
parents and ancestors we may become if we but choose
it and lay the
foundations for it. We will have to lay them the
only place they can be
laid, in the midst of the destruction and
unimaginable anguish to come.
It
is love that we, ourselves, will need, as the world we
have been
shunted into dies around us. What we will need is
those who will love
us enough to help us face death, the death of our
ego-“lives” and the
real death that will accompany economic collapse or
ecological
collapse, or both. We will need people willing to
become boddhisatvas,
people willing to try to become something like we
imagine Christ or
Quetzalcoatl to have been, people willing to be with
us, in love, until
the end, and beyond the end. It’s Time now. It’s time
to get free. It’s
time to become the True Sister and the True Brother,
those who know
they are related, those who know they are connected,
those who can
remember how to love, those who the Hopi said might
renew the Earth.
Note:
“Love” is the palpable
assurance or insurance of connection and inclusion.
It is the certainty
of one's own connection and the guarantor of
connection for the
beloved. It is a verb, not a feeling, per se, and
not only a spiritual
state of being. It is an act of will; a commitment
and a discipline and
a capacity for understanding, admiration,
compassion, risk and
expression, more than it is a feeling or a state of
being, although it
is also these, as well. The palpable assurance or
insurance of
connection and inclusion is made manifest in acts
that express
admiration and compassion , and through work, risk
or sacrifice aimed
at extending one’s self and one’s boundaries to
include the other,
their well being, survival and spiritual growth. It
is inseparable from
and identical with acts of caring.
We are, as the Hopi
Elders
and
other indigenous elders tell us, the Caretakers of
Land and Life. Our
role is to love the Earth – not to destroy Her. This
is who and what we
are, our identity and purpose outside the Matrix of
Death.
In
Nahuatl, the word for “humanity” itself is
“Macehua”; the caretakers
who are obligated to preserve land and life.
Juan Santos is a
writer and
editor living in Los
Angeles, California. He can be reached at JuanSantos@Mexica.net
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