WHAT THERE IS - IS ALL THERE IS

We stuff our jails with locals, perhaps torture them, after all they are “enemy combatants,” whatever that means other than we can hold them without charge for as long as it pleases us. And now, after all these years, there is a debate over how long we should stay. A hundred years, one candidate who wants to be the next leader, says. A few years, the other candidate says. And maybe we should also invade the next country over, because they now have gained a great deal of influence in the country we rescued from an evil dictator. Is it our job to get rid of bad dictators? I can name several more countries where that badly needs to be done. Is it really our job to police the world? We, the people, weren’t asked; we are assumed to nod our heads. Yes - if the boss says so?

Why have we not asked these and a hundred other questions? How can it be that our government spends more than twice what all those “socialist” countries spend on health care, but the statistics are very clear that we are far down the statistics of “health” of the people (measured in the usual way: longevity, infant mortality, access to health care etc.). How can it be that most other countries have long made cars that get fifty, or even a hundred miles an hour? (Tell you a secret: because gas there costs twice what we pay).

What is going on?

We the people have been tamed. Kept occupied with a never ending stream of ever more clever gadgets that are now part of our very existence; kept busy buying an apparently unstoppable avalanche of cheap stuff made in China sold by the largest retail business in the world; kept entertained by the most powerful corporations in the world; fed junk food that makes us fat and sick and asking for more. Let’s face it, we are being manipulated. Kept under a spell: Rest in Peace while the real world, under our feet, is being systematically raped, impoverished, destroyed.

Until one day -- not in the far future, but tomorrow -- this house of cards will collapse, and we must wake up. Rubbing our eyes, yawning, we look around and find ourselves in a garbage dump, storms shaking the levees, not enough water for our four baths, one of them a jacuzzi. Our enormous cars are made for gas priced below two dollars a gallon, but the price now is four, five, ten dollars and who could have foreseen… The car manufacturers, who once were our pride, sold us on the idea that everybody needs a seven passenger van or a truck with four doors as well as an eight food bed; live it up; our slogan was always, in America gas is cheap. Now, we can no longer afford the three hour commute, if we even have the job that evaporated because the raw materials of the product we were promoting are no longer affordable.

The price of cat food has gone through the roof. Heating oil is not even available any more, the trucks do not run. The city does not pick up garbage any more -- what do we do with all the plastic? How to get to a doctor when all doctors are in the same building, nearer to the labs and the hospital, 20 miles away. Our insurance has been cancelled. Bread, the staff of life, now costs eight dollars a loaf. They made it super easy for us to buy a house we really could not afford. Now, we can’t pay the mortgage that suddenly was raised to two digit percentages. They sold us on a war that has bankrupted us. They promised us a free market would take care of us. They…

Who are these they? They who look after themselves, again it is all men, women and children for themselves. Back to the way back beginning; back to nature.

Nature, another word for chaos, the womb of all possibilities.

Forget about promises, programs, planks. We must start over again. From the beginning. Me and my family. My family and our neighbors. How do we grow enough food without commercial fertilizer, without machines, without the world we lived in so comfortably?

We must learn again to share, rather than compete. Just us, around here. Countries? Countries are artificial lines drawn on a piece of paper. Get me a bicycle and I’ll get around. We must learn to make footwear from what is in our neighborhood. How do we keep dry and warm without electricity, without trucks to bring building material made a thousand miles away? What do we do for roofs? How about clothes to keep us warm?

All that, of course, and more, much more, after the big boys have exhausted their ambitions, their bombs and missiles. After the noise of the ultimate war has died down, the war that almost killed the planet itself.

Can we survive? Yes, we can. We did it before -- for the first hundred thousand years of our existence as humans. We can do it again when we are sane again, not tamed and lulled asleep with sugar, fat, and television. Living - reduced to finding food and drink, some shelter, and friends.

I’ve done it; more than once.

A very good way to be.

robert wolff © 2008

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