Ruminations

You have heard of the Darwin Awards, right? The awards that are given for those outrageous events which remove the recipient from the genetic pool, thus ensuring that his genes are NOT passed on.

Here is an unbelievable winner (2010) which actually had his winning event, videotaped.

DARWIN AWARD WINNER OF THE CENTURY!

Angry Wheelchair Man, the rashly rushing rammer who epitomizes the downfall of the human race.

(25 August 2010, Daejon, South Korea) An angry handicapped man, annoyed that an elevator departed without him, thinks it over before ramming his wheelchair into the doors (bam!) once, twice, three times in all. Success and failure combined as he gained access to the elevator

Not to be too sarcastic but you can almost see the embodiment of the current status of western civilization played out in front of us. THIS is the answer to the 2nd WHY in the previous post.

We refuse to act like the laws of nature apply to us, so the same story is told time after time. Country after country, civilizations after civilizations, century after century. Except now, we have run out of new places to go.

Can you see the various elements in the video clip?  The overweight guy (ok, let’s name it… OBESE guy) on his motorized conveyance (because he can no longer move on his own) who is so ticked that he can’t have it “his way”, so he is going to insist, apparently tossing aside the logical consequences of his behavior, he forces the issue.

He forgot “Nature Bats Last” or “you can’t wish the laws of physics away” just ’cause you want to have it YOUR WAY.

Here is the symbolic connection.  We, as a society, have been told repeatedly that we, in our mass numbers (1 billion to 10 billion by 2050) are altering the very systems our survival depends on. The list goes on ad nauseum… and it is too unpleasant to contemplate. Like Scarlett in “Gone With The Wind”… I’ll think about it tomorrow!

Instead we keep ramming that door insisting that we will have it our way until we, as a human community, go over the edge.  Only, we take more than just ourselves, we take our children and grandchildren as well.

What sense does it make to have a population of millions on an island that cannot provide food or water for it’s population. One’s life becomes dependent on outside resources. Yet we expect someone to “provide” those resources. The harsh reality is that support will only be in the short-term, and people will suffer… and die.  And our hearts will bleed because we can’t fix what is already broken.  We need a new path, a new vision.

Overshoot

Every way I turn there is need because we are in massive overshoot. We have lost resilience by becoming too specialized.

Our numbers place us at higher and higher risk as we push the natural world past it’s capacity to support us.

The more of us, the increased likelihood of a “disaster” impacting us. As the disasters increase in intensity & frequency the worse the impacts becomes. Roughly 5 million people in the USA in 1800, now 330 million+.

Of COURSE each disaster (tornado, hurricane, drought, flood, fires) will affect more people.

It is imperative that we think beyond what we want, desire, convenient… if our children are going to have a life.

You have heard the litany before:

• rising temperatures, increased catastrophic weather events,
• more fires, bigger fires,
• droughts, floods,
• rising oceans, acidification of the ocean killing off the organisms that provide the very air we breath,
• contamination of our water, massive overdraw of our aquifers,
• declining nutrient value & increasing pesticide contamination of our food,
• resource depletion.

Research tells us that the more people you pack into a limited space the more dysfunctional their behavior becomes. In an immediate crisis neighbors help neighbors.  But with each ongoing crisis,  competition for available resources begins to increase, our community networks begin to break down. The haves and have nots go to war with each other. In the longer term, nobody wants to go down with the ‘ship’.

I know it sounds cold-blooded; we have done it to ourselves and while it is painful to experience, it is a choice we have collectively made.

We have leaders, real leaders who have named the issues we face; the need to make significant changes in our world.  Question is, will we support them and build a new future or will we be sidelined by “arguing where to put the deck chairs as the Titanic goes down”?

Bernie Sanders: “The time is long overdue for Congress to understand that these recent disasters, and those that will surely follow, are exacerbated by climate change.

How insane is it to pour billions of dollars to rebuild devastated communities while continuing the same policies that led to their destruction? Now is the time to aggressively transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energies like wind and solar.

Now is the time to begin the process of preventing future disasters.”

So what are the practical steps we take CAN take in this impending series of disasters? It’s no longer about us; it’s about our next generations.

• Recognize the problems – look at your situation & analyze what you can affect
• Work on building resilience – LOCAL resilience – support your local community (mom & pop businesses instead of corporations), relocalize your food sources (100,000 acres of grapes/corn/soybeans doesn’t do you much good if real food is not there to keep you alive!)
• Build your skill sets – cooking, plumbing, electrical, gardening, preserving foods, basic construction skills, sewing, chickens, rabbits,
• Reduce reliance on high tech; go low tech as much as possible (what would YOU DO if the grid went down for weeks or months?) At least know how, develop a plan to wean off high tech as your total support
• Learn to ENJOY living real life, wean off being entertained for life by media, build relationships!

NOT DIGITAL

Build a library of all round resource books, in paperback (not digital) in your home. Can you imagine the grid going down and you can’t charge your laptop/kindle/tablet to read the instructions to do ______ (fill in the blank)! As bad as not having a can opener to open your emergency canned foods.

I recommend “The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition: The Original Manual for Living off the Land & Doing It Yourself” by Carla Emery  (Author).

THIS was an excellent all around book. It’s fun to read, as it covers 30 years of her hands-on experiences.

Learn how to work with nature instead of using chemicals to control nature & increase the quality of your products.  Putting the microbiome to work, as it was designed.

The Solar Living Sourcebook is a wonderful layman’s education in the various systems, for sustainable living.

• Take some classes, expand your exposure to learning how to do things instead of paying someone else to do it
• check out books from your library that you may want to consider purchasing as you develop your skills

Then do the obvious:

Support the politicians that advocate core changes. Make your voice heard. Vote with your dollars!

• reduce flying, reduce driving, reduce use of plastics,
• reduce your sugar intake (you body is not built to handle the overload – don’t buy cookies or cakes, try making them),
• eliminate HFCS (high fructose corn syrup from your diet – your body does not know what to do with it and just stores it as fat around the waistline),
• EAT what your body needs (not what you desire)… walk 1/2 hr before a meal whenever possible, wait 20 minutes before taking 2nd’s at the dinner table (takes that long for the brain to recognize that you are full)
• Decrease your body intake of pesticides, hormone disrupters, medications, chemicals you consume via food/water/containers

Purchase a Berkey Water Filter – yes, it took me a while to do it because of the price, but must admit it has been totally worth it. As more info comes out about what is in our water (that is NOT filtered out by commercial water treatment or stuff that is RELEASED by commercial tx) the happier I am. Read the fine print on what the Berkey can do, for yourself. Buy it, or something that does the same thing.

I’m glad we bit the bullet and made the purchase. It’s good to know you could take crappy pond water and have fairly reliable safe drinkable water. I don’t have to depend on FEMA or some outside resource to provide water in an emergency setting.

Why are catastrophic disasters occurring more frequently?

Because there are more of us in “harm’s way”.

We don’t live sustainably… we depend on outside resources which place us at higher risk.

And YES, we have upset the balance in nature to the point that events are bigger, longer lasting, and more intense.

Get over it.  It’s the new reality. Now… how do you deal with the coming future?

Start thinking and acting in ways that will reduce the impact for your children and grandchildren. If there is be any future for them.

Be a victim, or be proactive…. but don’t whine about it. Get moving.

Just don’t keep slamming on those closed doors and drive off the cliff.

I’m being trapped in an ongoing onslaught of disasters… each one pulling me in with the sheer threat and then finally, the reality of it actually happening.  Only it’s not one; it’s one after another.  Hurricane after hurricane. Four in one season hitting and there is a month left to go.  An outlier hurricane hitting Ireland, of all places. The world feels unhinged. Flooding, unheard of depths of flooding, in Houston area. Vegas Mass shooting.

Firestorm outside Santa Rosa, CA Oct 9, 2017

Firestorm & fire tornado hitting outside my door in Sonoma/Napa county.  Porto Rico wiped away with a lackluster ongoing response by emergency responders.  Earthquakes & buildings collapsing. Schools crushed.

My heart bleeds. The catastrophes are never ending, and I’m seduced by the TV screen, the YouTube video clips, the radio reports, the emergency alerts on my iphone and am drowning in the wave after wave of hits.

I tear myself away and ask,”When is it going to end?”

My anxiety level is hitting the danger zone…despite not actually, really being in the middle of true danger. The closest I personally came to real danger, was the toxic smoke from the 200,000 acres that burned beginning 10 miles away from my home held back by 10,000 firefighters who stood the line.

Lost Sense of Control… Why?

Why? There are two parts to that why:

• Why do I keep listening? and
• Why is it happening?

The first is easy to answer. Why do I tune in? It’s part of our genetic makeup that has allowed us to survive the last million years or so. Stay aware of one’s surroundings.

1883 KRAKATOA – first event broadcast around the world

The problem being that one’s surroundings have expanded from a few miles around hunter/gathers, to telegraph network a 150 years ago that allowed intercontinental news to be passed around the world, to today’s virtually instantaneous audio and video portrayal of “news” to impinge on our every waking moment.

Trigger Words

Couple that deluge of information along with the media’s increased use of psychological imperative emotional words geared to trigger an adrenaline response, that trigger that need to know.  News Flash, Breaking News, this just out… the drum beat of  thumping continuously behind the talking head, to alert you to the drama.  Couple that with goal to not only tell you what is going on, but to have you feel like you are there; coercing disaster victims to play out their emotional trauma, for their ratings. “What did you feel, watching your ____ (fill in the blank) burn, flood, washed away?

I’m pretty sure our psyche was not engineered to cope with such a deluge of on-going disasters and yet we’re not setup to turn it off. It takes conscious thought and decisions to do so.

• Yes, this is happening somewhere;
• No, it is NOT happening to me or my family, and
• No, I can’t change it/fix it.
• Yes, I can contribute to relief measures, but
• I can’t live my life and the lives of millions of others.
• Well, not and stay sane for very long.

Repercussions

According to the National Institute of Mental Health:

“The rates of anxiety and depression among teens in the U.S. may be as much as eight times higher than they were 50 years ago – higher than during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the societal turmoil of the 1960s and early ’70s. And teens from all geographic, economic and ethnic demographics are affected.”

“…the kind of hopelessness that young people experience nowadays is unprecedented. Never before have we been so well-informed about the insurmountable threat to our environment or had such constant exposure to the injustices faced by so many around the globe.”

Social psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before,” wraps it up neatly:

“The research tells us that modern life is not good for mental health.”

“In a pre-smartphone age, young people were forced to interact face-to-face with their family, peers and community, and they learned empathy and social responsibility through witnessing the visceral, immediate impact of their actions in real time. In this way, they strengthened their understanding of themselves and their connection with others and the world around them.”

We used to have a world that included community connections through our church, clubs, community centers, etc. In our current world of connecting by social media, we interact on a stage.  Not really connecting with others but just fulfilling our preconceived roles and never knowing if they are valid.  They are just the “face” we put on, thus not grounded in action & consequences.  Never getting past the superficial because absent facial expressions, tonal inflections, reactions,  we never know how the written words will be interpreted.

Teens are not the only ones experiencing difficulty.  CNN reports that an astounding one fourth of U.S. women are now on antidepressants. So many, it has been showing up, across the USA, in our water supply.

Quiet Time

                     One day in the car, I turned the radio off, turned off my Audible book,                                  turned off my GPS map. 

I had an epiphany, “what if I just experienced the now, the quiet?”

If we fill up all our spaces with things, when do we have time for processing, thinking, sorting things out, allowing our imaginations to be active.  When do we have time to connect with the breeze, the smells, the little sounds (birds, crickets, dogs) that are part of the actual world.

We need to take back control of our space… we’ve given it over to the consumer-driven society in exchange for entertainment, non-stop. As they work to increase their “ratings” we suffer the loss of our connections with our family, our friends, our community, in real time.

Important, I think, to create a buffer space between “staying on top of the news” and living in real time.  To actively make choices that protect our psych from overload; especially those of our children.  On advice from my grandson’s pediatric neurologist (a micro preemie born more than 3 months early), once home absolutely NO SCREEN time for the first year, and minimal for two years, to facilitate healthy neurological development.

I suspect this should be true for all of us, “In all things, moderation.”

Ask yourself, is any more information useful or needed… and pull the plug, if the answer is no.   Take some time out and experience the outside world. Breathe, be thankful, smile. Spend quality time with family, with friends, in real time.

It rained last night, the air is cleared of smoke.  I take a deep breath and can see blue skies and the surrounding tree studded hillsides. I hear my chickens in the background and appreciate the absence of sirens & the whir of helicopters, today.

We have been blessed.

It should be savored.

Why is it Happening?

The second part of the why… is the subject of my next post.