Mondays call for a harsh dose of potential reality
Reading Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation might never be a great way to start the work week, but I clicked on the feed in my google reader anyway.
A graph from this week’s installment of Jim’s wake-up call-bitch-slap for a nation of blind sheep (of which I am often one):
Reality is trying to tell us that we can’t run an economy based on nothing more than investment schemes without directing investment into activities that produce things of value. Reality is telling us to be very worried about living arrangements that can only function with copious imports of oil from people who are disgusted with us. Reality is telling us that we can’t divert our food crops into making motor fuels without people becoming unable to afford either fuel or food. Reality is telling us to redirect our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people and less toward things-we-do-with-new-things [emphasis mine]. Reality is telling us to shift from avoidance behavior and denial to engaging with reality in order to lead lives that are consistent with reality.
It’s got me thinking.
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
September 25th, 2007 at 7:11 am
After reading Jimmy’s essay yesterday I kept thinking about that next and final paragraph about ’shock and awe’. My husband’s nephew was here for the weekend, up from Philly where he’s an engineer working on display screens, a 30-year old who grew up there in Hudson and went to Kent State, and I’d already been thinking about how unprepared Erik is for the changes that are likely to define his adult life when I read Kunstler’s comments. I can’t imagine what it will be like, should things change suddenly, for people who have never contemplated life without cheap oil. Or cheap everything else.
And I know and love so many of them, SUV liberals most without the SUVs, happily flying all over the globe but buying lots of ‘offsets’, driving their hybrids but not even thinking about actually reducing the NUMBER OF MILES they log every month or, god forbid, TAKING A BUS!
Sorry. They don’t read Jimmy Kunstler either so I don’t have much opportunity to rant a bit…
September 25th, 2007 at 8:00 am
Amen. The shift is coming…let’s make it good. Small is beautiful and so much easier.
September 25th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Thank you for the link and the quote. Seriously good material.
September 26th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I might have to check this guy’s writing out, but only when properly fortified. That is all stuff I’ve been thinking about a lot. Trying to work out how to make change for myself. Maybe in preparation for what might be coming. But mostly trying to make changes that just make sense.
What a way to wake up.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:35 am
[…] to get dinner started. And this fact gives me a bit of a tummy ache. This makes me think about what Jim Kunstler said about redirecting our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people. How are we, the average […]