Thanks. I am thinking along the sames lines. Nicely put about the
future copse.

Michael Irving

http://www.allposters.com/-sp/82-Soldiers-Posters_i2882610_.htm

I’D LOVE TO SEE THIS EXPLORED IN A FUTURE COLUMN

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE FOR THE MAJOR MEDIA TO EXPLORE REASONS FOR PANIC?

I saw the new movie 2012 the other evening. I thought the political machinations of the president and the US government were portrayed pretty realistically.

Interestingly, as time progresses, I have begun to detect some doubts in news reporting about the certainty of a rosy future for Americans. You hear more comments about jobs and industries that have left our shores permanently. You hear young people complaining about not being able to jump start their planned careers right out of college. You hear about how many people are on food stamps.

When is some pundit going to explore when we might identify ten good reasons to panic?

When is hope itself going to be questioned as irrational?

I think there are more catastrophe-oriented movies about to be released. 2012 was obviously a fantasy flick.

Sooner or later some finger pointing will have to begin and some uncomfortable truths will need to be aired.

Maybe some high school or undergraduate student will produce a little flick on YouTube that will spread like a virus and force recognition on a large scale.

I think what is really needed right now is for some intelligent young folks under the age of 21 to get themselves educated and start talking online, start creating a picture of what they see and what they would like to see, and try to stir things up with some web-based dialogue that cannot be ignored…

Stan Moore

It’s a thin line that leads us and keeps a man from shame
And dark clouds quickly gather along the way he came
There’s fear out on the mountain and death out on the plain
There’s heartbreak and heart-ache in the shadow of the flame

Chorus:
[But]this love will carry, this love will carry me
I know this love will carry me

The strongest web will tangle, the sweetest bloom will fall
And somewhere in the distance we try and catch it all
Success lasts for a moment and failure’s always near
And you look down at your blistered hands as turns another year

Chorus

These days are golden, they must not waste away
For our time is like that flower and soon it will decay
And though by storms we’re weakened, uncertainty is sure
And like the coming of the dawn it’s ours for evermore

Chorus

I have heard Guy speak of your Hawk, and now I know a bit more. I gather that Guy is fond of the little guy, too. I wonder what your Hawk thought about the Falcon (Balloon Boy) who was in the news recently.

I wish you could explain to me why you feel your moral compass is vulnerable to a shift in the human paradigm. I tend to think that love, respect, honor, etc. and more or less universal and not defined by the world outside, but by the person inside. But perhaps I am dense and need to think more clearly.

I don’t think that what lies ahead for humanity will be new for humans as individuals. It is the scale, the enormity, of the catastrophe that will be unprecented.

But I hope and I doubt that you and your family will ever, for instance, have to endure what some US detainees have had to experience in the so-called “War on Terror”. I hope that you and Hawk are not subjected to long-term sleep deprivation, exposure to extremely loud noises, beatings, intense light, intense cold, etc. by direct act of malevolent humans.

I hope that you and Hawk do not have to live like many Palestinians do in their own homeland, living for decades in refugee camps with fear of violence by occupying soldiers, with lack of access to your own relatives, your own properties, inability to travel or even to receive necessary medical care. I hope you never have to suffer as most Palestinians have been doing since 1948.

What amazes me is that human resilience has allowed people to survive almost unimaginable horrors, victimhood, and catastrophe with their dignity intact, their family bonds strong, and with ability to press forward under the most dire of circumstances.

I believe that the future of humanity is bleak in terms of our accustomed civilization, but the future of many humans will not be so bleak. I think individuals will survive and will thrive. I think the greatest single factor that will allow people to endure and survive will be love. Love for family and friends, love for the earth, love of life. Nothing can permanently detach us from such love.

I think that is universal among all humans in all eras, including that which is to come.

Stan Moore

Wouldn’t it be great if, indeed, we could just pull that moral compass out of our breast pocket for a quick consultation! We surely wouldn’t have to spend the precious hours of our only life reading and contributing to blogs like this for the occasional support or possible change of a point of view.

If I were to engage in self-criticism (and I often do), I would accuse myself of callousness toward the changes ahead. I also am a bird man, a conservation biologist, and have gone through my share of mourning over this mass extinction and the collective failure of our species to rise to the occassion. My skin has become thick. Dieoff? Sure. End of the Holocene? Why not? Swainson’s Hawks littering the floors of Argentinian woodlands? Just another day on Earth.

Still, I am the father of a six year old. His name is Hawk. When I look into his eyes, and consider his life and his future, I know that the questions I asked in the previous post are not universal through time. There is no playbook for the twenty-first century. Yes, there is the Golden Rule, which you described above, but that doesn’t answer all questions. The global economic, political, and ecological collapse we are facing in this century is not just a another historical shift. It is a fundamental change in the story of our species, what it means to be human. I can’t answer all of the questions alone, inwardly gazing at my navel. Hawk’s future will emerge, along with my own evolving moral compass, in a process of reciprocity.

Mike

The other day in my area, there was a horrible gang rape of a 16 year old Latina girl at a high school dance. Several young men participated in the crime, and some of them casually told others about the crime in progress, as if to say: “Here’s your opportunity to screw a drunk, passed-out chick over there”. One young man that I heard interviewed on the radio did not want to avail himself of that opportunity. Instead, he thought of his own sister and how it could be her in that situation, and he called the police. He did not know we are at the end of a human era and that his moral compass could possibly be reset.

Those questions seem to me to reek of sanctimony. They seem to be saying, “I’m okay, are you?” “If not, why not?”

I don’t know if it is possible to detect via email messages, but I am not a big fan of sanctimony or self-righteousness or public displays of such. Let each person ask those questions of himself, privately.

By the way, I have a direct tie-in to a movie on this last paragraph! The movie is called “Soul Men”, with the late Bernie Mac and Samuel L. Jackson as a couple of washed up back-up singers from a 1960′s-era soul group broght together after the death of their estranged late partner/lead singer. Towards’s the end of the movie, the Samuel L. Jackson character (who is quite the philosopher and reader of philosophical teachings) descrbied how he had progress in dealing with some of his “issues” and how he had been forced to “go inside” and “do the work” and to effect gradual change in himself. This is very funny movie with great, great music and acting and one of the rare movies where profanity can be appropriate and so funny that it maches your sides ache! There was a scence towards the beginning of the movie where Bernie Mac was ranting with profanity over the reaction of his old partner to his plan while pacing the hallway outside his friend’s door, that was about as funny as anything ever gets. “Soul Men” is a great, great movie on several levels and if you watch it on DVD you might want to keep it a few days and watch it three or four timese in a row because you will find little things each time that you missed before. And the music is absolutely top knotch if you like old-fashioned R&B.

Stan Moore

Ken Livingston on Congestion
“Ken Livingston: The traffic speed in central London was so low that Big Business came to me and
said you’ve got to do a congestion charge or firms are going to start leaving here to go to Paris or
Frankfurt … if we hadn’t done that, by now, London would be in permanent grid-lock, it would be a
disaster.
“Fran Kelly: So it was business that can up with the notion of the congestion tax?
“KL: The original person to think of it, back in 1952 was Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher’s favourite Economist; it wasn’t some just old Leftie idea that had been kicking around. Just
recognise that, at the moment you are spending so much time in traffic jams, in a sense you are
managing traffic by jams, it is better to have a pricing mechanism and people can make rational
decisions whether to drive or get public transport. It [a congestion charge] gave us about 150 million
pounds a year which we invested in buses and building new light
rail so we increased the [public transport] capacity. When we
introduced it 40% of people stopped driving their car [into London’s
city centre]. It happened from day one. And suddenly it looked like
London was a different city.
“FK: And how did the people feel about it …
“KL: For the four or five years after we did the congestion charge,
the retail trade in central London, went up four-times the annual
rate, [compared] to the rest of the country. Although it seemed
very different, in actual fact they [the shop keepers] were doing
very well. People were just prepared to get on a bus or the Tube to
come in [to London]. … We didn’t introduce the congestion charge
until we’d improved public transport, otherwise people don’t have
anywhere to go. And the other big thing that we found, just by
making the roads more tolerable, loads more people got on their
bike, which is perhaps the best answer to all this problem. And
also given our obesity problem, which all the English speaking
world seems to have, it [the congestion charge] tackles another
problem as well.”
Ref: ABC Radio National – Breakfast, 16/9/09
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2009/2687058.htm