They Said It So I Don’t Have To
Anybody still reading this blog might have noticed that I’ve stopped writing essays. After posting “Brave New World” in December, and after my spiritual experiences this past winter, there doesn’t seem to be anything left to say. In one sense, we are so screwed. In another sense, it's way beyond that, and it’s really not so bad, it just is. But still, despite my insights, my nattering chattering word processor keeps chattering away, even though I’m not sharing the output in public like I once did.
Today I ran across an article on culturechange.org, “Struggling to be Fully Alive: Reports on Coping with Anguish.” A few weeks ago Robert Jensen put out a call asking people to share with him how they are coping with the ongoing breakdown of just about everything. He received 300 replies, and shared a number of them in his article. These are my favorites; I could have written most of them myself:
"My personal ambition seems to decrease in proportion to the increase in world suffering. I think that's part of my emotional reaction to crisis. I don't think I am fully alive. I'm not depressed, just weirdly diminished."
"[W]hat I see as the reality of our situation -- ecologically, politically, economically, and culturally -- is that we are in the last days of our species, and I just don't know what to do with that. The emotions are much too powerful, the grief, the sense of doom -- how does one deal with the real possibility of the extinction of not just millions of species, but of one's own species?"
"I feel hopeless. I feel sad. I feel amused at the absurdity of it all. I feel depressed. I feel enraged. I feel guilty and I feel trapped. Basically the only reason why I'm still alive is because there are enough amazing people and things in my life to keep me going, to keep me fighting for what matters. I'm not even sure how to fight yet, but I know that I want to."
"I have been writing for a year and a half on a lot of things as it pertains to humanity's lack of awareness and the potential to reconnect before we destroy the earth and each other. People get angry at me for it and call me 'dark' and 'negative' and 'sinful' telling me to instead move to the 'light,' 'positive' and 'love.' Whatever."
"It is considered feminine and naive to care about trees or animals. ... In addition, it is also considered weak and feminine to empathize or display a proper emotion. We are becoming a nihilistic culture which is creating citizens who are numb to their emotions. This is doing us all a disservice. We are missing out on our bodily wisdom and becoming less and less in tune with our earth."
"I have thought for a long time that the human species, notwithstanding its endless self-flattery, really is not very intelligent. One of the signs of its stupidity is, in fact, the very way that it equates intelligence with technological prowess."
"[T]he only way that the terrible catastrophes on the way could have been softened would have been for everyone on the planet to have dropped business as usual 10 or 20 years ago, and to have started retooling all of society while there was still a reasonable surplus of high EROEI (energy return on energy investment) fossil fuel left to power the *energetically* costly conversion process of re-engineering energy production, housing, cities, suburbs, farming, fishing, and transport. That didn't happen. And having lived through the period, it would have been completely impossible to motivate in the first or third world. But just as important, it is *even more* unlikely that this will begin to happen now. This is because growing energy scarcity will cut into our flexibility as people scramble to prop up floundering systems."
"[W]e in the U.S. are essentially living behind a military barricade. I heard a quote recently that 'collapse means having the same lifestyle as the people who grow your coffee.' I really, really liked that."
"Americans today are living with a profound and apparently irreconcilable disparity between what we say we are, and what we actually are. Between the promise of democracy and the reality of a crumbling empire. The result of this schism, I believe, is the national equivalent of a disassociated personality."
"I spend a lot of time in my own head going back and forth over theories, philosophies, etc. Pretty much going through a process once a month of discarding everything I thought I knew and re-learning it. While this may be a good thing in the future, it does not feel good now. Sometimes it makes me feel like I am alone and lost and that I can't find any truth in anything because I have so many different voices telling me what is right and wrong. Yet, I can never stop going back and looking at what's happening to this real, physical, lovely and loving planet and feel outrage, sorrow, and confusion and why this culture is so insane."
"Being the parent of a young child right now is a mixed blessing: He's my reason for waking up every morning and doing whatever it takes to keep up some semblance of normalcy, but it also frightens and worries me deeply when I think about his future."
"I would like to mourn but have not been able to let my guard down. I could understand 9/11, but now I am witnessing the destruction of the planet and I don't understand the magnitude of what that means. I feel on edge. I feel like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop."
"Recently several of our visionary thinkers have moved from the illusion that 'we have 10 years to turn this around.' They now say clearly that 'we cannot stop this momentum.' It takes courage and faith to speak so plainly. What can we do in the face of this truth? We can sit face to face and find the ways, often beyond words, to explore the reality that we are all refugees, swimming into a future that looks so different from the present. We can find pockets of community where we can whisper our deepest fears about the world. We can remain committed to describing the present with exceptional truth. We can cultivate a practice that enables us to witness suffering with hearts and minds open and with our faces turned toward one another."
"I'm about to celebrate my 70th birthday. I live in a rural intentional community, close to land that feeds us and supports us. I've lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn't grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them. But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won't understand why. They don't see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can't hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can't imagine that anything else will convince them. My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the 'collective' is still in denial."
Today I ran across an article on culturechange.org, “Struggling to be Fully Alive: Reports on Coping with Anguish.” A few weeks ago Robert Jensen put out a call asking people to share with him how they are coping with the ongoing breakdown of just about everything. He received 300 replies, and shared a number of them in his article. These are my favorites; I could have written most of them myself:
"My personal ambition seems to decrease in proportion to the increase in world suffering. I think that's part of my emotional reaction to crisis. I don't think I am fully alive. I'm not depressed, just weirdly diminished."
"[W]hat I see as the reality of our situation -- ecologically, politically, economically, and culturally -- is that we are in the last days of our species, and I just don't know what to do with that. The emotions are much too powerful, the grief, the sense of doom -- how does one deal with the real possibility of the extinction of not just millions of species, but of one's own species?"
"I feel hopeless. I feel sad. I feel amused at the absurdity of it all. I feel depressed. I feel enraged. I feel guilty and I feel trapped. Basically the only reason why I'm still alive is because there are enough amazing people and things in my life to keep me going, to keep me fighting for what matters. I'm not even sure how to fight yet, but I know that I want to."
"I have been writing for a year and a half on a lot of things as it pertains to humanity's lack of awareness and the potential to reconnect before we destroy the earth and each other. People get angry at me for it and call me 'dark' and 'negative' and 'sinful' telling me to instead move to the 'light,' 'positive' and 'love.' Whatever."
"It is considered feminine and naive to care about trees or animals. ... In addition, it is also considered weak and feminine to empathize or display a proper emotion. We are becoming a nihilistic culture which is creating citizens who are numb to their emotions. This is doing us all a disservice. We are missing out on our bodily wisdom and becoming less and less in tune with our earth."
"I have thought for a long time that the human species, notwithstanding its endless self-flattery, really is not very intelligent. One of the signs of its stupidity is, in fact, the very way that it equates intelligence with technological prowess."
"[T]he only way that the terrible catastrophes on the way could have been softened would have been for everyone on the planet to have dropped business as usual 10 or 20 years ago, and to have started retooling all of society while there was still a reasonable surplus of high EROEI (energy return on energy investment) fossil fuel left to power the *energetically* costly conversion process of re-engineering energy production, housing, cities, suburbs, farming, fishing, and transport. That didn't happen. And having lived through the period, it would have been completely impossible to motivate in the first or third world. But just as important, it is *even more* unlikely that this will begin to happen now. This is because growing energy scarcity will cut into our flexibility as people scramble to prop up floundering systems."
"[W]e in the U.S. are essentially living behind a military barricade. I heard a quote recently that 'collapse means having the same lifestyle as the people who grow your coffee.' I really, really liked that."
"Americans today are living with a profound and apparently irreconcilable disparity between what we say we are, and what we actually are. Between the promise of democracy and the reality of a crumbling empire. The result of this schism, I believe, is the national equivalent of a disassociated personality."
"I spend a lot of time in my own head going back and forth over theories, philosophies, etc. Pretty much going through a process once a month of discarding everything I thought I knew and re-learning it. While this may be a good thing in the future, it does not feel good now. Sometimes it makes me feel like I am alone and lost and that I can't find any truth in anything because I have so many different voices telling me what is right and wrong. Yet, I can never stop going back and looking at what's happening to this real, physical, lovely and loving planet and feel outrage, sorrow, and confusion and why this culture is so insane."
"Being the parent of a young child right now is a mixed blessing: He's my reason for waking up every morning and doing whatever it takes to keep up some semblance of normalcy, but it also frightens and worries me deeply when I think about his future."
"I would like to mourn but have not been able to let my guard down. I could understand 9/11, but now I am witnessing the destruction of the planet and I don't understand the magnitude of what that means. I feel on edge. I feel like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop."
"Recently several of our visionary thinkers have moved from the illusion that 'we have 10 years to turn this around.' They now say clearly that 'we cannot stop this momentum.' It takes courage and faith to speak so plainly. What can we do in the face of this truth? We can sit face to face and find the ways, often beyond words, to explore the reality that we are all refugees, swimming into a future that looks so different from the present. We can find pockets of community where we can whisper our deepest fears about the world. We can remain committed to describing the present with exceptional truth. We can cultivate a practice that enables us to witness suffering with hearts and minds open and with our faces turned toward one another."
"I'm about to celebrate my 70th birthday. I live in a rural intentional community, close to land that feeds us and supports us. I've lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn't grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them. But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won't understand why. They don't see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can't hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can't imagine that anything else will convince them. My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the 'collective' is still in denial."
posted by Gordon Solberg at 3:31 PM
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