This piece was written by Pulitzer-prize winning author and New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, and read by George Atherton. It’s powerful, chilling, but not without hope. Rather like The Key, in that sense.
It addresses many of the concerns discussed on this blog from time to time, and on other blogs. Nancy Atkinson’s blog has gone into some depth about sustainable communities, one of the things Hedges talks about. It’s worth listening to in its entirety.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSzACcQ368&feature=player_embedded#at=45
I think the old truth “think globally, act locally” holds true. It’s very important to know about the many, many hopeful things going on. As far as community, check out the Fellowship for Intentional Community website – they have an annual conference that brings together communities from all over. I also posted a few months ago some videos from different ecovillages and communties I know of or have visited. So hopeful!
https://www.ic.org/
https://threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com/2011/03/good-news-eco-villages.html
Thanks for the links!
Hmmm……………..I just see human lights being switched on, slowly but surely, and my heart is glad.
I like the focusing on sustainable/intentional communities. Even if we can’t have an actual community in a specific place we can still gather those near and dear to us and create a community of sorts. We need to stick together, pool resources, talents, sharing of things we already have available in our homes for the betterment of the intentional community. I put together an email to my own family this morning about just this topic. If we can get our needs met within the circle or community we create, whether it be family or friends all willing to participate… it might alleviate some of the pressure we are feeling at this time. Make it so we don’t need the corporations enslaving us. Bartering and sharing instead. I honestly believe we can have a much better life and more out of life if we step off the wheel and become more self reliant. .
This video was powerful. And like Mike I think we can get through this but it’s going to take different ways of going about getting our needs met. Thanks R&T.
Maybe we already do this virtually, through blogging, creating communities of ideas and the sharing of info and perspectives.
I have just put myself into a semi-altered state of consciousness with closed eyes, turned this video on low volume, and allowed the words to register in my subconscious without interference or interuption. As I listened, I had a vision of a several unexpected things. I did not guide my thoughts, just turned them loose. One, I saw The Vatican, and my subconscious mind took me on a leisurely stroll through its gilded halls and hidden vaults as I listened. Two, my subconscious mind then took me to what appeared to be the Royal Palaces of Great Britain. Three, my sibconscious mind then took me on what seemed to be an underground “city” of enormous proportions, so huge that gardens and trees were growing there fed by artificial sunlight, and there were enormous homes poepled by The Elite. A memory surfaced: The Roman Empire, and I seemed to swirl backwards through time and view both the corrupt and profane wealth of its rulers, their cruelty, and the pathetic starving citizens. I came out of this meditative state understanding that this is where we are. We must alter our course. I was given to understand as well that we DO know the way….we must REMEMBER it, if we are to survive.
Nicely put, math.
This leaves so much room for discussion, that I am at a loss as to where to focus. I have to say that ultimately, I think we face a universal paradigm crisis. Corruption in goverment, greed and the lust for power are nothing new in history, now or in the past. Corporate Capitalism has obviously failed the future, and it’s terrifying to contemplate the largest nation in the world, China, rushing to embrace it. Communism failed. Monarchy rarely succeeded in creating any equitable system. Theocracies are usually far from benign. What can work? Al Gore recently wrote, in an article called “Climate of Denial” :
“The climate crisis, in reality, is a struggle for the soul of America. It is about whether or not we are still capable — given the ill health of our democracy and the current dominance of wealth over reason — of perceiving important and complex realities clearly enough to promote and protect the sustainable well-being of the many.”
Gore nailed it. And so did you, Lauren. It really does seem to be a universal paradigm crisis. But I’m hoping Mike is right, that we can somehow overcome this!
Whoot, but to go forth and conquer, it must be done not with revolution and war and bombs and the mighty sword…..except “the Sword of the Spirit”. From my Christian childhood days, I remember a verse in the Bible which admonishes us to “Take on the full armor of God and lift up the Sword of the Spirit, which is Love”. And yep, you’re too right. I do tend to write up a storm! You’d be surprised, though, that unless I’m teaching a class, my voice itself tends towards silence. It’s only when I have a pen or keyboard that I am overly prolific! I’m a chatterbox through the written word, but otherwise don’t speak much. (Hard to believe, huh!) Don’t mean to be such a long-winded writer here! 🙂 Your Bay area has had its share of major earthquakes through the decades, but thank goodness, none recently of any significance. And Debra, that phrase “soft apocalypse”. How appropriate to the circumstances we are living.
bay area situation somewhat serene,, but as for e-quackes,,, we both know nobody can commment,, the there’s bass ball huh rob…..
Mike was on my exact line of thought. I was mentally comparing the birthing of a baby with the birthing of a new paradigm, essentially a “New Earth”, following the death throes of the current ruling Elite! The sun sets, but rest assured, it also comes back up! Darkness falls, but dawn rises. Light after dark, Life after death, always and forever. If my convictions are true, and for me they are, our Souls are Light Beings, vibrant radiant energy, that temporarily slip inside the atoms and molecules of dense physical matter. But we are LIGHT, in every sense of that word, and there is never any circumstance where darkness can permanently extinguish Light. I believe the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., should be constantly on the lips and in the minds of each and every aspiring light-worker: WE SHALL OVERCOME.
I completely concur, T & R. The planet obviously has a compromised immune system. There seems to be a conglomerate of factors contributing to this sad state of affairs…no pun intended. In past comments I’ve mentioned my personal concept that Earth is a viable entity in and of itself; a living, breathing, animate entity that was created to sustain each and every organism attached to it and/or within it. Earth’s eco-system has gone erratic and haywire, resulting in the die-offs and extinctions of hundreds of species. The immune system in a human entity will gather its many resources and will fight against attack from invading disease, etc. Unfortunately, I fear that WE are the disease that is attacking the body of Earth and compromising her immune system, and she is fighting back with all HER resources. Earth will win. Man is never going to own dominion over this planet. She will use whatever means are at her disposal, (and we are witnessing and experiencing many of those every moment now), to retaliate and eradicate and destroy the multiple “viruses” that we humans are inflicting on her and on each other and on our companions here: the creatures and plants who share our planet. She is already tilting by degrees; she is hitting us on all sides with every weapon she has, and sooner or later Earth will prevail. The political fiascos and power elite are in the middle of this and will find themselves helpless before it’s finished. Remember Humpty Dumpty? That is this planet’s entire global political situation: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty had a GREAT FALL. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.” If we twist The Rapture of Christiandom around a bit, perhaps The Rapture actually indicates not the Return of Jesus in clouds of glory, but rather the fall of what has become yet another reign of terror of those Elite, and will usher in a fresh, newborn paradigm by whatever means becomes necessary. We just need to grab hold and hang on for the ride, and use every means at OUR disposal physically, mentally, emotionally, and especially spiritually, to assist our Mother Earth to restore herself to health. AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT…….we can do this!
makes interesting a biblical line,,,,, “go forth and subdue and conquer the world”……..
Well that cheered me up! It’s interesting that the US political parties are considered similar because it is the same in the UK and I suspect in other countries too. It’s as if UK party leaders have been cloned: all affluent, top university education and have never had employment in the ‘real’ world between them. I look at Tony Blair now rolling in money. It is said he has made over £50 ($70) million since leaving office. They look after themselves and their associates. Look at what the banks have got away with worldwide.
Though there are difficult times – and none of it through most of the populations fault – we mustn’t get into the doom and gloom mindset. This won’t solve anything. We have to think positive and do our bit to try and put things right. – even if in a very small way. There may be hardship but let us look at it like childbirth – difficult and painful (well so my wife tells me!) and yet there is a new life afterwards full of love, promise and expectation. We can get through this.
You’re absolutely right, Mike. We can and will get through it. I had no idea tony blair had made so much $ since leaving office. Not surprising, though. They all do. Even people in the bush administration who should be in prison are rolling in dough.
After listening to this, I sat here for a bit, thinking about how different our world is today than it was a mere few brief decades ago. My mind went on its own to the changes in climate more than to the economic catastrophes, (which c0-exist), because in the moment our state of Florida, alongside so many other states, is being devoured by wildfires that are out of control. Millions of acres of this country have been destroyed by fire just this year, and the result is beyond comprehension. Loss of homes, loss of wildlife habitat, loss of farmlands, loss of income, loss loss loss loss across the board….and these current losses, just from the wildfires alone that continue to burn relentlessly, are costing billions in terms of economic losses that can’t be retrieved. When we consider the ramifications and consequences of Mother Nature’s onslaughts these last several years, and the costs, not so much in lives although that, too, but the costs in terms of homelessness, diseases, jobs, and worst of all, sustainable living space, the devastation is unthinkable. And the survivors who have nothing left migrate to other places where there are similar catastrophes happening. We watch the stories/coverage on TV news, and we click our tongues in sympathy and yet go on with our little individual lives because so often none of it actually touches US. We think. But it DOES touch us. Every flame of fire, every mudslide, every volcanic eruption, every flood, every drought, every earthquake, every tsunami, every tornado, does touch us and changes our lives, shifting the consciousness of this planet. I don’t mean to sound like a doom and gloom prophet. However, as these events occur with greater and more intense frequency, my mind tends to translate the whole of it into a malignancy, a cancer, that is metastasizing all over the body which is Earth, eating away at her very Soul in one way or another, depending upon the type of disaster attacking the organ (place) and killing whatever is in its path until one day there shall be nothing left but the skeletal remains of a once-magnificent and beautiful planet. As a species, what can we humans do to treat this disease? How can we stop its progress? There is a zero-point, a Beginning point, that we must find and upon which we must focus our energies in every conceivable manner, because it’s never “too late”. We can diminish the damage and prevent further destruction….but in order to do that, each one of us, singly and individually, must accept that every thing that happens, no matter how far from us it seems, is affecting us INDIVIDUALLY, in our own tiny corner of the universe, and when we accept that it is affecting us, we will find the means to make the needed changes that will prevent ultimate annihilation. If we don’t consciously and conscientiously create change, then certainly the increasingly deadly doom will have its way with us. We have choices; we don’t have to allow the doom to occur. We know how to stop it, and we must.
It’s as if the planet has an immune system problem.
you definitely can write up a storm m.a.3322, he’s says without sarcasim,,, one of the boy’s problem is he “loves” nature,, another wood B the host isn’t into “sports” synchies,,,
like with a home state team of his,,,,, single, double, single double,,, single double, sinlge double,, on that “date” against whom,,,, wonder how come the bay area seems to escape natures rath
“It’s as if the planet has an immune system problem”.
I have often thought about that.
There is a term for what we’re witnessing:
“soft apocalypse”.
Soft apocalypse:that gives me chills.
This is the most concise review of what has happened that I have read so far. We have been gutted – and they did it legally. It does not matter who you vote for – that is an illusion. Both parties are exactly the same – they may act as though they have different agendas – but at the very top of the power structure – they are exactly the same. I do believe we are on our own and the sooner we begin to get our communities in place, the better off we will be. The game has changed, and in the end we will win. We will no longer have any money to buy anything they can produce. (Thanks for the shout-out, by the way! The series I did on the new wealthy talks about what will happen as more and more of our wealth is spent on luxury goods – which is happening right now. The only things selling are luxury goods.)
And they’re going to do it again, if the Obama admin caves to repubs on cuts to SS and medicare.
We are systematically being turned into drones.
Today I read an insightful column in our local paper. The columnist, a diabetic, had been with a particular endocrinologist for years, then the woman died. She was now searching for the right doctor – one with whom she felt in synch. During her third visit to a new doc’s office, as she was paying her bill, she suddenly felt overwhelmed and broke down in tears. Not a single person at the checkout – nurses, clerks – even asked her what was wrong. They avoided looking at her. “Whatever happened to simple human kindness?” she asked.