Sunday, December 31, 2017

Future Sky

Current Assumptions


This has been a hard season.  I understand; it's worse, Somewhere Else: so many places in the world outside the United States continue to experience some of the greatest human suffering of the past forty years, since we stepped away from That Land War In Asia.

It's just that -- relative to our own culture, many have it bad, here: no matter what that paragon of conscious life, Nikki Haley, believes, the United Nations just issued a report stating that of First World nations, America has the highest level of extreme poverty.

And here among my tiny circle, it's been a hard season. For the West, it's been cold (what the parts of America with record snowfall are experiencing would be unimaginable, here). Two friends have a parent, now dying (one a Survivor -- of Auschwitz, no less). Health issues abound; everyone seems to have a cold or the flu; all more or less normal -- but, people in my Cohort are Olds, and those with chronic health problems seem to have been hit particularly hard.

Christmas parties at The Place Of Witless Labor were lavish -- our department was taken to a three-star, name restaurant in Kiddietown -- but the dinner had an odd undercurrent ("Enjoy it," my director said to me archly, like a warning. "Next year we won't have budget for this").  I work in Healthcare; no one discusses the future, but everyone is waiting for Wonderboy's other three shoes to drop, and there seems to be an expectation of Hard Road ahead.

For those who are aging with few social extensions, isolation and anxiety are a constant undercurrent, a consuming negative feedback loop. Memory and unfocused thinking slide rapidly into regret and blame -- for oneself, for all the bad decisions; for a life as it is now. It's useless, but people do it all the same.
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Surrounding us and all the details of our lives is the unpredictability of the future, dictated by America's political Right, with Trump as its foil and figurehead. We feel we're at the brink of -- something, some place which no one now living in America has ever seen; and whom no one, except the wealthy, believe it will be anyplace good (and not even They much believe that). Daily, Trump and the creatures around him poison our experience of living with fear and negativity. They appear to pay no penalty for what they do.

There is no hero coming to save us. The Democrats have no coherent plan to rebut what's being done to America, now. I have a bad feeling the DNC will put forward candidates for the 2018 midterms who are as Centrist and inoffensive as possible -- not like those Radical Republicans; no, sir. Recently, the media floats the image of Joe Biden as the Perfect Democratic Presidential Candidate. Draw your own conclusions about how successful any of that excuse for a strategy would be.

Everyone wants things to Be Like They Were -- but the status quo which America's political parties  support is one where Jeff Bezos, World's Richest Human (and the 499 other Oligarchs in the world), can continue having it all. The rest of humanity? Submit your resumes to be considered for 12-hour sweatshop shifts at minimum wage in one of Jeffy's Fulfillment Centers (an exaggeration, but not by much).

Life is unpredictable. We really do live it on a razor's edge. Every day above ground (as a specific part of my Cohort can say from experience) is a Good Day. But the apotheosis of Trump is forcing us to confront another layer of uncertainty in this new year: that things must change, fundamentally -- that the status quo cannot continue. 

Everyone gets that -- and not only in America. But here, no one wants to talk about it. We're frightened, because no one knows what form that change will take, or where we will be at the end of it. And no matter how much we Americans like to think of ourselves as hardy and resilient, reading about Depression or Revolution or Fascism isn't the same thing as experiencing it.

People may begin to understand that, too, in the New Year. I hope, as sincerely as I can exclaim, that we don't have to.
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I called the Oldest Friend, a Bernista who listens politely to me when I rant about an In-The-Dock-At-Nuremberg culpability for the GOP and Democratic party's hierarchy, listened to me this season for a while.

After a pause, she said, "Years ago, before Twitter and all that crap, remember people just forwarded emails to each other as 'social media'?

"Sometime in the late Eighties, someone sent me an email which quoted, I think, a Hopi prophesy; there's a lot of this stuff floating around out there -- which said times were going to change. Everything would be affected. It would be like a flood; that was the metaphor. And there was nothing we could do to prevent it.

"Those who tried clinging to the banks, holding on to their land and possessions, would lose everything and die," she said. "Only the people who surrendered to the current might survive -- no guarantees on that, by the way. They would have to give up everything, and end up wherever the flood took them.

"I got really pissed, reading that. I'd struggled in getting a better job, working on my marriage, taking care of my mother, having a great house and garden," the friend said, "and I understood this was metaphoric -- but, shit.

"We grew up in a generation who believed science could explain or solve any problem. The future would be a continuation of that post-WW2 economic Boom, forever. Americans were going to live in a world that looked like 'The Jetsons'. Television and movies told us that was the future -- if you were white, and mostly male; but never mind that," she said. "So what's this flood about?

"Then, the more data on climate change was available, the less that email seemed so metaphorical. I began reading reports that made it more literal. I might have to lose everything, just to survive?" She laughed. "Well fuck that, I thought."

We talked a while longer. "It had more to do with aging than anything, but over time I began feeling that letting go wasn't so terrible. There are a lot of chickens coming home to roost now. Think of the people raised in peace, before the First World War, and then watched all the reference points in their universe fall apart like a theater backdrop. The more they held on, the harder it was, psychologically.

"If we're seeing the beginnings of a societal collapse coming, or not -- how you see all of that depends on whether you perceive the universe as essentially supportive, or malevolent. That won't change things when there's no money, or food and water. But, 'as a man thinketh', you know?" She laughed again. "Our perspectives are all we really can change in the end, anyway."
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And as gets said over at the Soul Of America, I don't know where the New Year will take us; I barely know where the Old Year went.  Also, too, I don't know where this shitty little blog will go, except to note it doesn't seem to be going away, either.

As a New Year's resolution, however, the Comments have been switched back on. Not sure what that means, but play nice.
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4 comments:

  1. I'll bite. Or bark. Welcome to '18. Speaking of economic boom, over here, every year, the entertainment explosives are enough to scare cats into hiding places for days and sometimes even shatter a window or two. Last night the bangs were about as unnerving as usual. I have wondered about those fascinated with such toys and imagined a propagandistic profile of the perps we're told to be afraid of, then've recalled acquaintances who, to my annoyance, enjoy engaging in fire fomenting activities.

    The explosions, though, are indeed a taste of what others, worse, somewhere else, might go through, and even then, not so much a real taste at all. From my window, this way of ringing-in is not playing nice. But then I remember, again, there's no shortage of people who like to play really loud and the collective doesn't seem to complain as much as revel.

    This morning I went to see if any stray rockets had made it onto my balcony. Last night's volume told me 'yes', but when I looked, the only rocket had remained from last year, at which point I placed it neatly on the ledge where it's lain since.

    The thing I like most about the 1st is that this is when, in my relative comfort zone of an urban province, a cease fire goes into effect until the end of the year. Let's make it a good one and hope our fire isn't washed away at least until Black Friday.

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    Replies
    1. Danke Sehr. I keep thinking you're in the north-east, but forget which district you're in (Neukölln? Friedrichshain? Kreuzberg?).

      Here in Kiddietown, we have our own bangs. It's a mandatory, Wear-Your-Baseball-Cap-Backwards zone, and there's no shortage of loud, either. We also have two days in October where attack jets screech overhead and culminate in an 'Air Show' over the Bay.

      When the Annual Armistice goes into effect, we all breathe easier. Im 2018 Alle Besten! Vorvarts!

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  2. First to the new re-turn on. Best to you and yours.

    Old beats the alternative, but yes.

    We are being forced into Kindness to survive. Perverse, the evil that uses Kindness as justification for evil's intent.

    Here's hoping My Three Trolls don't appear here, but if one or more of them do you turn on mediation rather than turn off comments.

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  3. You get to be 2018's First Responder, and receive the traditional complimentary Defib kit.

    Thinking about that Kindness perversity recently; but, you know -- evil is... well, evil. Of course it will use Good as a self-justification.

    I only seem to see Bots. Not evil, just In The Pay of.

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