Honor wants us to Do Things — Levitate Disney world, Resuscitate the Twin Towers, start a campaign of strongly worded letters addressed to the CIA. Shout “Pepe!” at a Hillary rally. The Jan 6 insurrectionists may have been LARPing at a government takeover but the real takeover was a shut and dried case finished years ago. The government’s been bought and paid for many times over, and the dysfunction is evidenced in every shit meal we eat with smiling dull faces. Mitch McConell has been in office since 1984 - almost forty fucking years, with no end in sight, unless someone slips him a cyanide pill. The last two presidents - tasked with transitioning a failing country into a digital era that keeps speeding up before our eyes - have been over 70 years old and have less of an understanding of the internet than most 16 year olds. The Supreme court got heinously packed to the right. Forty years of global climate conferences produced a litany of promises that governments and industry would change their ways and stop profiting off burning cheap fossil fuels, dooming the world to mass extinctions and scorching the planet forever — and then has been promptly forgotten in the name of profits.
The Boomers were afraid of nuclear energy because — God, what will we do with the waste? Did you know there were anthropological studies done on nuclear waste repositories — the question was: how do we indicate to people 100,000 years from now not to unbury this waste?
The proposition falters under total hubris. We don’t have to communicate to people 100,000 years in the future. We just need to communicate with one generation at a time, and make the world a slightly more liveable place as we go. By the way — the answer to what do we do with the nuclear waste is — you seal it in large containers with thick lead walls, and you bury it deep underground. Then you go have a beer because your problem is, for all intents and purposes, fucking solved.
Forty years ago Ronald Reagan supported a vast buildup of nuclear power plants in the US. Partisan politics being what they were then, the Left revolted and Nuclear became a dirty word in energy. If we’d built out a nuclear power grid at the time, we could have completely decarbonized electricity production.
Between 100,000 and 500,000 people per year die from fossil-fuel-related particles in the air and environment, and the US continues to heat the globe with the largest per capita carbon emmissions of any people on earth. I hate Reagan as much as any other well-bred liberal, but come on. It’s the same story as it is with Trump and the partisan fault-lines today. Our failure to see past our bifurcated parties designed to gridlock; and into a forceful, timely Oneness of engineering the world we want to live in despite our differences.
There’s a real chance — a real, viable, feasible chance (call it somewhere between 5 and 50%), that in 100 years the world will be uninhabitable for billions of people to the point of mass starvation, die-offs and burn-ups. That would be a Holocaust x50 for the brown, black, indigenous, and otherwise unlucky people on Earth, orchestrated by the Western goliath, a machine built on the back of capital and efficiency.
Wealthiest country on earth. I can’t stop thinking about it. This is wealth? This is richness? Go to dinner and listen to the laughs. They’re laughs that come up from way up high in the squeeker, squeezed out of throats like little yelps from choked up seagulls. We’ve lost touch with our guts. We’re choking on our own burnt-out spirits. Technology keeps us guilded, sweaty and calm as the world heats up.
Gods, Angels, Demons — I’m calling on all of you — Do it now, Spend All Your Money, Post-Post, Say Every Bad Word you can think of — quickly and in succession — Wake (the fuck) Up from this stupor.