So Near You Can Almost Touch It:
The Manager of my condo building is always telling others I am her happiest owner. I suppose on a purely personal level I might even be---there are not a lot of major problems with which I must deal on a daily basis. These days I thrive on peace, quiet, eating, walking, reading, and writing. I am well aware it will not last forever, maybe the vultures are already gathering to hover over me, at least during my daily jaunts through the forest preserve, the McCormick estate, Morton Arboretum, or Chicago's lakefront.
But there is a pensive side of me which feels sad, and the more I observe our troubled times the sadder I kind of feel, and the more I fear my prediction of 13 years ago which pegs chaotic disintegration in our country within 2 years after Bush leaves office. No one could read many of my musings without sensing a certain amount of suspicion things are too often overstated, or simply too unsettling. So I root against myself, hoping that it all amounts to the babbling nonsense of an idiot past his prime. Still, a chaotic collapse seems so near one can almost touch it.
No singular sign stands out except human overpopulation of the globe; the rest are notable because there are so many signs, in so many ways, in so many places. This musing was prompted by the murder of that gorilla family in the Congo. Senseless slaughter---not for the meat or body parts just killing for the hell of it---or maybe because humans want the land to build on or forest for lumber, whatever. The gorillas are simply in their way. Women killing and cutting out babies from pregnant mothers so they can have a baby; mindless drive-by shootings, teenagers killing teenagers (around 60 per year in Chicago alone), people cheering at dog fights, young children growing up behind barred windows and doors, 41 million people without health insurance, the existence of millions upon millions of refugees across the globe, the millions upon millions of homeless; the millions and millions of people who die from preventable disease; the wanton mindless destruction of natural resources across the globe; a species extinction rate not seen for millions of years; an accumulation of immense wealth in the hands of a few---the kind of accumulation never seen in our country's history; atmospheric pollution affecting climate which is not corrected because of the cost; a military and War on Drugs budget which totally overshadows anything else on which this country spends money, and for which cost is never a matter; a growing disparity between the poor and the affluent which is growing more disparate in this country compared to any other industrialized country; the rapidly declining purchasing power of our minimum wage; the increase in work hours, decrease in pay, loss of pensions, and loss of health care rampant and growing in our work force; an absurd obsession with technological gadgets which guts any sense of community or inter-family socialization (call it family values if you must, I call it family isolation); the incarceration of citizens to the tune now of over 2 million, the highest incarceration rate in the world (this is my country?); the near total control of our Congress, the Presidency, the Judicial system and the media by corporate buy ups; an educational system that is underfunded, mismanaged, and widely disparate in terms of money spent per child; non secure borders; employers free to hire illegal aliens; professional sport teams controlled, with no oversight, by wealthy owners and player unions; a Presidency riddled with greedy self serving slime balls, answering to no one and provided a pardon if caught and convicted; an American empire that is so overreached, so disrespectful of others, and so arrogant as to have spawned an increasingly out of control massive terrorist movement across the globe; the establishment of pre-emptive wars (Hitler kind of invented this kind of mentality); the use of military force without ever first attempting dialogue, use of international courts, or negotiation; the establishment of military bases by a country of one religion all over the lands of countries of a different religion (brilliant!); a growing pervasive indifference to the plight of others and to justice for all; etc. This list could go on and on but I don't wish to spend more than fifteen minutes compiling one.
But it is really scary. In the past our history was such that major problems were small in number, everyone could therefore focus on them. and subsequent progress was the result. Now we are inundated from all sides, we can no longer see the forest for the sake of the trees, individuals feel powerless, there is no frontier to escape to (where the hell can anyone run for escape today?), and the evolutionary event of human overpopulation seems totally beyond the grasp of human responsibility. Those who prate on about how humans, or at least their particular clump of humanity, are under some kind of protection by the Creator, are fools clinging to illusions---but no more so than I, who spends so much time sensing the tragedy already upon so many, and encroaching ever so rapidly on the rest of us. I need to shape up, put on my blinders, party myself into some sort of induced hedonistic stupor until the end-point cliff arrives, or natural death first---either way death levels all, and I will take my last voyage---a giant leap in the dark. The curtain will be drawn and the farce played out. Well, it was a fun, interesting run. I just don't like the finish.
Of course there is no finish. The Created evolutionary process has been in existence for billions of years---this 'little gleam of Time between two eternities' of which constitutes our own existence, is but a footnote in the continuum of life---these mysterious little molecules of DNA, of which our own unique lives were generated---these molecules continue on, get shuffled again and again, giving rise to new forms of life, thus presenting us with the clearest understanding our current human mind can grasp, namely----time doesn't pass; time stays, we go.
'Say good-night Gracie'.
