suicide

by the virgin terry

my response to collapse is very different from those of u intent on preparation and maximizing your survivability during and after. i think some of u are sadly deluded re. how long, rough, and severe a ride u’re in for. barring devastating global warfare which utterly destroys civilization, i think collapse will very likely play out in many ways and stages for untold generations to come. i think within the lifetimes of some of us here, personal collapse will become severe enough to make suicide an attractive option, if available.

unfortunately, suicide is particularly problematic in a culture which generally abhors the very idea, shunning it aside, refusing to allow others to openly consider it or make plans and cooperative arrangements with those who may be sympathetic. here in the u.s.a., with it’s dominant strain of ‘christian’ puritanical intolerance and powerful ‘pro-life’ lobby, i think only one or 2 states fairly recently passed laws allowing physician assisted suicide under tight controls and restrictions, as seems always to be the case when ‘the state’ is calling the shots. for the vast majority of american citizens who for various reasons find life not worth living, suicide, however desirable, is an act which must be pursued with a degree of stealth. suicidal sheople generally have no one to turn to for help with this final act, adding to it’s difficulty and emotional anguish.

call me sentimental, but i think death, like birth, calls for celebration. who wants to die alone? who wants to carry the psychological burden of saying good bye to this life alone? it seems a natural thing to want to have companionship at life’s end, to have a hand to hold. perhaps have a public celebration of the life lived, however meager it may have been, prior to ‘the act’. also allow relatives, friends, and acquaintances a chance to say goodbye and make peace with the soon to be departed.

don’t get me wrong. i’m not close to committing suicide, and i sure as hell am not surreptitiously crying out for help. much about my life sucks, but there’s still good to be had and much i wish to learn. my survival instinct remains strong, and i hope to get every last drop of quality living in before it’s time to call it a life. i doubt i’ll even commit suicide. like many i’ll probably wait too long and lose control of my own fate, or lack desirable circumstances and/or the fortitude. but simple rational uncensored thought leads me to bring this topic up, just to get acclimated to the idea, and to introduce perhaps a greater element of surreality to the discussion surrounding collapse and die-off.

too many sheople contributing to a culture of myopic idiotic greed and ecocidal mania ensures there’s a collapse and sharp die-off to come. history does not encourage the thought that any of it will be planned or orderly. for many it may come down to a choice of death by one’s own hand vs. continuing a life of unbearable suffering and hardship, followed by death by means not of one’s own choosing. if so, i think the choice is clear, or should be, would be, in a culture with more respect for individual freedom and dignity.

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according to the author, he has led a quite unremarkable life to anyone other than himself. he became alienated and socially isolated early in life as a child-adolescent around the age of 11 in particular, which thereafter had a diminishing/inhibiting effect on his social development. he excelled in school until college, where overwhelmed by loneliness and lack of structure, he quit after completing only one semester at the state university of ny (suny) at buffalo. there he witnessed the great blizzard of 1977 with snowbanks on city sidewalks towering over pedestrians. a year later, searching for direction and security, he joined the u.s. navy, where, due to his relative intelligence, he was encouraged to join the navy’s nuclear power program. he excelled in that school, and spent 4 subsequent years aboard the nuclear powered aircraft carrier the u.s.s. nimitz, then stationed in norfolk, va. the most notable events during his time there were a failed attempt launched from the nimitz in the spring of 1980 to send helicopters to tehran to rescue 52 american hostages being held by the new, virulently anti-american regime of the ayatollah khomeini in the wake of the revolution which deposed the hated shah, who had been instilled in power years ago by an american-inspired coup. the other notable event involved a crash landing on the flight deck that resulted in 14 deaths and a scary aviation fuel fire which took about an hour to extinguish.

he was about to re-enlist for another 6 years with an eye towards becoming a ‘lifer’ in the service to take advantage of the generous retirement pension available immediately to those with at least 20 years of service behind them when his mother rather unexpectedly died from lung cancer in the spring of 1984. this event caused tvt to reconsider staying in a situation he found almost unbearable, so he got out, which surreally put him on his present path of solitary self-education and further extreme separation from conventional thought.

to be continued, perhaps, later.

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Next-day update: Guy McPherson was interviewed by Max Keiser on the Keiser Report. See second half of clip below.

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12 July update: My latest essay for Transition Voice appeared today. It’s here.