Sometimes these days I feel like a guy in a boat who can see a massive thunderstorm bearing down on him.
But can't row fast enough to escape it.
Can't shake the feeling that Mother Nature is angry, and that we're on the verge of a cataclysm.
And in the Globe today Jared Bland takes that feeling all the way to the End Times.
Despite seeming reasonable in other areas of my life, I believe that we are quite likely living in or near the fabled end times. Not necessarily a Book of Revelations type of end; now it’s easier to imagine a secular version caused by climate change, which is quite possibly irreversible, or nuclear war. Both options seem more probable at this point than an assemblage of horseman.
And I think that this belief is increasingly common. That, whether it’s articulated as such or not, it’s becoming easier and easier to feel that the shadow hanging over us isn’t just another massive rain cloud. That it’s something bigger, something worse. And that it’s moving in awfully quickly.
And who can blame him eh? When everywhere you look these days from the news to the movies all you see is ecological catastrophe, economic upheaval, and the Zombies of the Apocalypse.
And that was before it started raining sharks...
For what could else could explain that? Or this?
But the kind of escapism that comes from this kind of resignation:
I carry this particular light with a feeling approaching joy, because believing in the end makes the present so much better. We’ve all been asked what we would do if we had hours, days, weeks or months left, a thought experiment meant to compress our passions and compassions into hard jewels of meaning.
Believing that our age’s crescendo of disaster, its heightened hatred, is the beginning of the end allows us to take those priorities out of the realm of the theoretical. It permits the type of emotional honesty that might otherwise be deemed maudlin or excessive. It allows us to think and feel and act in ways we otherwise might deny ourselves. It encourages us to be more direct, more honest, more loving. It says, in fact, that we must.
I know where this pervasive gloom comes from. From the young people staring at a bleak future. From the old people feeling their end times looming. From all those who feel helpless to shape the future, in a system corrupted by ignorance and greed.
Or those who dream of a better world, but live in a country like Harperland. Where all is fake and grubby and hope goes to die.
But all I know is that I could NEVER surrender so easily to the evil forces that are wrecking this country and this planet. I don't see these troubled times as the beginning of the end, just the end of the beginning. Not a time of resignation, a time for greater RESISTANCE.
A time to fight the REAL sharks before they claim more victims.
A time to organize, unite, take back our country, believe in the future again. Write our own history.
Make our own disaster movies...
Which of course is one of the reasons I blog eh? Not just to speak out against the atrocities of the Harper regime, and all the other Cons of this world.
But to cheer up progressives of all ages, and encourage them never to surrender to the gloom of this age. For the future does belong to us no matter how bleak it appears right now.
And of course to remind the real sharks of the world that THEIR End Time is almost here.
For as I said the other night, they too should see the coming storm...
And know that it's also coming for THEM.
For you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing eh?
Even in our distracted world.
Or there will be justice.
Or there will be TROUBLE...
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4 comments:
I didn't take the article as a suggestion to lapse into resignation, but as a recognition that accepting our own mortality - and possibly the mortality of our species - and taking stock of our lives can make us better people. Why wait until disaster strikes to be intensely kind and generous and empathetic when we might have reason to do it right now?
I'm won't give up the fight with Harper (and the IMF and the UN's Security Council...), but carrying an awareness of death can help change our attitude towards our neighbours and our collection of stuff in a positive way.
Interesting video, Simon.
The manufactured "end times" are almost upon us, indeed. Out of all the fear and despondency will emerge a new predestined, of course, "hero" for the ages to save us all from the now-known terrors that threaten to engulf us all. And, of course, that "hero" will be our all-knowing and omnipotent "father or fathers" in government (depending on who emerges as the most powerful) who will then bring order out of chaos and set all to rights by declaring a new "One World" government with a one-world currency and a whole new system of caste for the entire population of the planet. This has been the plan ever since the 1700's because it can be done by so few in power (see Adam Weishaupt) as a result of the so many who let themselves be cajoled into a complacent, apathetic mind set that only requires them to get their "fair share" right here and now with no concept of a larger picture of humanity or the far-reaching consequences of the future.
Now that it illegal to protest corporate "humanship" here in Canada, it makes the complete takeover just that much more easy and moves our "salvation" that much closer to the brink of our "transformation" as a new world run by our benevolent "fathers" because they consider us too stupid and bovine to know what is in our own best interests. And because they can. It will take a huge effort on the part of the youth of Canada to defeat this evil in our country. I don't hold any hope for my own generation. We, as a rule, are so entrenched in the "new world order" way of thinking and blindly trusting any fucking idiot "elected" (see Guelph) to office that we, as a rule, will defend to the death their right as "elected officials" to fuck us in any new manner they can contrive of (see harper, mcguilty, scarpitti and ford) because it is their divine right to do so, somehow, regardless of what it does to our children's and grandchildren's futures. As "Miracle Max" in the Princess Bride said, "it would take a miracle" to set this right.
hi Marie...I already try to live my life as if there is no tomorrow. But I reject all this talk about the End Times. A few years ago only the religious fanatics trumpeted that fantasy. Now it's everywhere. And it's one thing for an older person to talk about that, but what do you tell a young person. Relax, enjoy it, be good, for the world is ending soon? My view is that most of the problems in this world are caused by people who are profiting from the destruction of the planet. And I certainly don't intend to be good and kind with them. We can save the world, but it's going to take a global revolution of some kind. Maybe it won't happen, maybe we'll lose, but if we don't go for it how will we ever know?
hi anonymous...I like the video because it assaults us with all the images that tell me we've lost our way. The ones that fragment our reality, and make it almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. And like you I also believe that this End Times meme is manufactured or at the very least encouraged by those who are wrecking the planet for profit, and would pose as our defenders.
My view is that Mother Nature is sending us a warning, and that far from accepting that the planet is heading for destruction, we should fight back even harder. This is a time for creativity, unity, and new forms of political protest. For surely there can be no greater crime than failing to hand over the world as we received it to the children born today, and all the generations that will come after them. How we do that is up for discussion, that we must do it is not...
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