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Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Halloween, Homeland Security, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public
Halloween is around the corner and it’s become a bit of escapism for me from the real monsters sitting at our doorstep. When I was a kid I never had any idea or warning from my peers that everyday life would be wrought with so many bloodcurdling terrors. Such realities as climate change and ocean acidification are ever-present boogeymen slowly and methodically stalking us. Compounding the fear was the revelation that the cause of such civilization-ending phenomena stemmed from our exploitation of energy sources serving as the very foundation for our economy. We were killing ourselves and no one could stop it! This is a scenario more frightening than anything dreamed up in a Hollywood horror movie.
Delving deeper into these subjects only brings more unease as we learn that our self-inflicted eco-collapse is happening concurrently with the depletion of our carbon-based energy sources. Good God! Our food supply is at risk! We’re running straight for a cliff! Surely if we turn on the television set we will be greeted with warnings of our impending calamity, and our leaders will be doing everything in their power to save us. Holy Christ! Television has devolved into a mere propaganda tool of corporations! The politicians are whores to big business! The democratic process and elections are no more than an ultra-expensive ‘reality tv’ series funded by monied interests! The Supreme Court, along with all other mainstream institutions, has become a puppet of the corporatocracy.
Well then certainly the captains of industry will be intelligent enough to steer us away from this approaching doom. For the love of God! They are corrupted as well! The masses are simply pawns in their game of profit accumulation and market domination! The purpose of the Security and Surveillance State is to protect the interests of the elite and crush dissent! The Earth is just another planet to be commoditized by the ‘Free Market’, a force looked upon as more tangible and important than anything in nature! We’ve constructed a dual reality in which money is more important than air, water, and soil! God help us!!!
My last hope is that I can talk to people about all this scary stuff and maybe get some consolation. For the love of God! They all think I’m a doomsday nut and don’t want to hear about any of it! They say that I’ll be locked up in a mental institution if I keep talking about such crazy things, or I’ll get caught up in the net of Homeland Security for rocking the boat! Everyone is going about their daily lives as if none of what I point out is real and that things will go on as they have in perpetuity! “Technology will solve everything,” they say. “Don’t worry about it!”
You see, I wasn’t kidding about the frights of Halloween being pretty lame when compared to what’s confronting us in the world of globalized industrial civilization.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
I am 63 and I remember when I was about 8 that I asked my father what will happen when increasing population covers all the land and there isn’t room for farms or forests. He laughed and said there is so much land that it simply could never be a problem. But, I said, if population increases continuously in the future, there will come a time when there won’t be enough land. I didn’t convince him. But it bothered me that he didn’t get what I was saying. I was right and this adult couldn’t understand my point. Or wasn’t interested.
In those days it wasn’t thought possible that we would overtake our resources. Technology was skyrocketing, and all problems would be solved.
Still, the idea that we would one day have crunch time persisted in my mind. Eventually, since even I knew that time could not come in my lifetime, I mostly, but not completely, forgot about it.
Until I was 22. That’s when the book Limits to Growth came out. I wasn’t much of a reader then, but I devoured that book, studying every graph and fact that the Club of Rome presented. I talked to friends and family about it, and they were completely disinterested. How could they be? I was then realizing that I’d be alive when these resource and pollution problems would come about!
Soon the media pundits were insulting the book, laughing about the predictions, and I became ashamed to bring it up to people. I put my fears aside and continued in school, joined the Navy, had kids, got very busy, and then was stung by the global warming issue. And then it all came back….
We really ARE heading toward catastrophe, I thought, back about twenty years ago. The book was right. I was right long ago. But how can it be, now, in 1990, that still no one is interested? The facts are in, scientists from all walks of life are agreeing about global warming and other environmental calamities to come. What is going on?
And now, here we are in 2012, a presidential election in two weeks, and nobody mentions our monumental dilemma of global warming, not to mention the rest of the resource and pollution problems. I don’t get it. My best friends, smart people with usually open and inquiring minds, simply aren’t interested. Their eyes glaze over when I bring it all up.
I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Don’t know where to go from here, other than to just watch it all happen. I just have to realize that our modern civilized society is simply rudderless, absolutely incapable of dealing with issues that will lead to its demise.
Just feel so alone in all this.
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Zygmunt Bauman: ‘No one is in control. That is the major source of contemporary fear’…
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