I’m on Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation monday morning posts like flies on half composted chickens. He has a particularly good one this week, but I gotta chime in on one of the comments that appeared there:
Yes, we are moving closer to the edge. And I do think people are feeling the “eerie vibe” you speak of. But most of the talk these days seems to be of raising awareness and changing policy…. oh, and increasing our consumption of all those shiny new green products.
Truth is, even people who care and are fully aware of what is happening get up in the morning, drive the same route to the same job that they afraid to lose since they have no safety net and a ton of debt. So what is this family to do, living as they are, paycheck to paycheck, no healthcare, needy kids, maybe needy parents? What are we asking them to do with all the information and warnings about climate change? Pile everything they own into the aging SUV and head… where exactly?
Posted by:Francesca Johnson | April 28, 2008 at 01:56 AM
Boo Hoo, what to do?
I’m not asking people to do jack shit. Well, I take that back. I’ve asked my brother repeatedly to get his ass down here and start building a cob cottage before economic collapse forces him into a tent down here anyway. I’ve begged the wife’s sister and her husband to chuck the deathburb in Topeka and drag a trailer down here. We’ve offered the guest house to my mother in law a dozen times but she is comfortable in a rental house in a former cow pasture subdivision 5 miles from the nearest grocery store. And maybe the guy who answered the ad for “doomer wanted – free room and board for farm help” will actually come down for the summer.
It’s like pulling fucking teeth, man.
So no, Francesca, there really is no Santa Claus. All is not well enough to just go back to sleep. I saw the writing on the wall and pulled all kinds of financial machinations to get out of the house in town and onto the farm. My arms are sore from shoving potatoes in the ground, only one more 50# sack of seed spuds to go. Then I get to start in on the beans and corn. The fruit trees beat the frost this year so if I keep them sprayed I buy myself a couple of hundred hours over a rocket stove canning fruit later in the year right after a couple hundred hours of doing the same with tomatoes and peppers. I’ll squeeze next winter’s woodcutting in there between my blissful state of consciousness raising episodes weeding the garden. Oh yeah, the goat milking, chicken tending, and everybody’s favorite game show, “Fatten the Hog!”
Etc, etc, yeah boo hoo. So to respond to the money shot:
So what is this family to do, living as they are, paycheck to paycheck, no healthcare, needy kids, maybe needy parents? What are we asking them to do with all the information and warnings about climate change? Pile everything they own into the aging SUV and head… where exactly?
WTF are these people holding on to? A shitty job in a shitty town with a shitty mortgage payment or a shitty rental house is nothing to hold dear to your breast. Why not drop back 15 and punt? Sell everything but the clothes, cast iron, tools and dog, load the family jalopy and head out to Dicksville or Cuntlick and knock on doors until you find a farm where there is the old unused house the grandfolks used to live in on the place and trade out some work for a squat? For that matter, beg for barn space. Or a tent site by the spring. There are too many good folks out here in flyover America that would jump at the chance to give a family a new wholesome start for restringing fences and other odd farm labors that have gotten pushed back for too many years.
When you truly swan dive into the wide world of poverty fresh air, food stamps, and the free clinic are all there for the taking. Why work for an asshole sticking tab A into slot B 50 hours a week to buy crap that is given away through church charities? Even deadbeats that are too lazy to work or cut wood get their propane tanks filled via energy assistance programs. If you haven’t got shit but love where you are, no, don’t leave the comfort of Plasticland. But if you’re fucked, like the example above, and it sucks where you are, staying put in the face of economic meltdown is suicidal and homicidal if you have kids in your life. Make sure you know the location of the nearest FEMA camp and don’t waste any time running there as soon as it opens… you’ll get better bunk space that way.
I’ve heard some really idiotic excuses for staying in the wage slave mill over the years. Shit like we’d move to the country but where would the kids go to college? The wife/ husband just got a raise so we should be okay for awhile. When the second car gets paid off. Just put my mom in the nursing home and need to be close to visit. Finally got the yard looking nice. Don’t want to take the penalty cashing in the 401k. And my all time favorite – What will we do with the cats?
Correct, correct, true, true, there aren’t places for the entire population of City of the Dammned dwellers to relocate to. maybe slots are available for only the first half million or so. Act now! Offer expires when the lights flicker…
So I’m just blathering away here, nobody is listening, nobody is moving, no one dooming. Wanna relocate here? Use the comment function. I got plenty of space to park on.
April 28, 2008 at 8:48 pm |
Culture is a powerful, powerful thing. When you are brought up to believe in Jesus, Truth, Justice and the American way, those are hard bonds to break. When you are told that we work hard, go to school, marry our sweetheart, settle down, get a job, contribute to the society and have a good life, you keep on believing it even when the facts state otherwise. I remember the difficult time I had becoming deprogrammed. It was very hard. Now that I know that America isn’t always the good guy, that the church doesn’t have the answers, that our teachers were clueless, that there really is no justice and that good guy don’t always win, well… I’m a bit jaded. Still, having taken the red pill, all bets are off. Don’t be too hard on them, my friend. For every ten people who think I’m a tinfoil hat wearing idiot, there is one who is starting a garden. These people are hanging on to a dream and a mythos that very powerful. To see “The Matrix” as it is would be to accept that their government, their grandparents, their parents and their leaders are complicit in this fabrication. They’d likely rather die than admit to that. Give them time. Some more may come around.
April 28, 2008 at 9:48 pm |
One out of several thousand does not make a revolution. I’m a total cynic, every individual who has had access to whats going on who does nothing except go back to sleep is more gasoline for the engine driving us into killoff/dieoff or slavery. I’m no fucking hippie handing flowers to the pigs.
Humans are lemmings. Societies’ children do as they are told. Bitch about the high price of gas as they are watching a NASCAR race on the wide screen tv. The phrase most uttered in a Wal-Mart is “I hate Wal-Mart”. And so economically clueless they can’t see that if one out of 5 vole mart shoppers would just go to Target instead for 6 months the vole mart would close down. Then target Target. We all love watching the smart bombs take out targets in foreign lands because we have outsourced our own personal power. Did anyone boo hooing at a military funeral stand up to that fallen angel and shout “don’t you fucking get it? You’re gonna die so some fat bitch in a gas guzzler can get her god damn eyebrows waxed? You’re not going to fight a war – you’re going to get shot at pulling garrison duty on some other nation’s natural resource that some suburban asswipe needs to power his riding lawnmower and stainless steel BBQ grill. While the niggers are keeping warm burning pallet lumber in a barrel down around First and Main”.
No, Frank, the gloves have come off. Time. Ran. Out. TPTB are going to keep ratcheting up the pressure until the guns come out. Pre- collapse the guns could do wonders. Post collapse it’s just a mess. All the future horrors we will experience are a direct result of the neighbors playing their last hand holding a pair of threes in a high stakes poker game. Thinking they can win. When the dog is barking like all hell and you hear coyotes yipping you don’t turn up the volume on the tv, you lock up the chickens.
April 30, 2008 at 2:22 am |
I saw your ad at the LATOC forum, and found this blog from your profile. The idea of getting out of the city I live in (DFW,TX) and going to the country and learning to farm is very appealing. I know it is very, VERY hard work. I would like to talk to you more about your ad. Please email me back if you find the time.
May 6, 2008 at 12:40 am |
..
What to do? What to do? Letting the days go by.
Just get a gun so you can blow your brains out before you end up lingering like some half squashed bug on the sidewalk.
“Truth, Justice and the American way,” Just what the hell is that? Doesn’t it change from year to year, generation to generation? Was it the same at the beginning of the ‘Merican century as it was at the end? The Chinese have been at this game for over three thousand years and have shown themselves to be fungible and pliable once again if a little bit behind the curve. We’ve fought our vicious civil war and according to Toynbee’s model of history we’re supposed to be in our collapse trajectory but then, China should be gone by that model.
What the fuck. It seems there’ll be lots of hurt to go around but there’s cross pollination going on like all get out in this society with nut cases heading for the hills and geeks holing up in cities while the nerds spread across the sub urban landscape like a dog vomit slime mold reaching so far before desiccating into a pregnant dust.
My bet is a repeat of the fourteenth century when one third to one half the population is wiped out by some horrid disease and then we start the process again. Every person crawling on the surface of the planet is another incubator of some new virus or bacteria or fungus that’ll take on the hairless rats that dominate the globe. As always, the best and worst will survive.
Same as it always was. Same as it always was.
jB
..
May 6, 2008 at 12:02 pm |
Yes, a die off (or kill off if “they” release CDC built bugs) is in the works. A third of the worlds population is wishful thinking – more like 9/10ths. But even if only third has to go? Is that a third of the US population? Or do we get to play and just delete africa and other zeroes in indochina, asia minor and the asian subcontinent? I’d say if you are dependent on either a U.N. relief truck or the local Safeway having full shelves you are dead.
We flush our shit into the river via sewage treatment plant – the 3rd world just bypasses the middleman. Either way, don’t eat the fish. Not much difference between an affluent suburbanite (or city dweller for that matter) and an inhabitant of a refugee camp in some stricken area when you see that both are dependent upon outside resources flowing in uninterrupted. Not much difference with ol’ comrade simba’s farm and a jungle village on the other hand. It all comes down to can you grow enough to fill your belly?
What the fuck is suburbia going to do when the tap water runs brown? Asphaltic runnoff from the roof as drinking water? What other option would be available? It’s hard to imagine dysentery taking out the former middle class neighborhood like some third world shithole but that’s how it’s going to be. Population centers without food and water all suffer the same fate.
The point of my post was people are playing their hand now. I often feel like it’s not really fair that I have a couple of aces in the hole and the rest of the table is staying on a pair of threes or folding altogether. Most folks are going to curl up in a fetal position and moan as soon as the power goes out. I’ll just go to bed when it’s dark.
May 7, 2008 at 12:10 am |
..
So the rich, who will be utterly useless to a hungry mob, are playing their hand to create hungry mobs? Don’t you think an Orwellian society perpetually at war is more likely if some illuminarti is pulling the strings?
Absent a plague of biblical proportions, a world wide depression is more likely. Fat chance of a ‘prison’ of three squares and a cot. More like a return to the 19th century where labor is a commodity.
Beer and circuses will replace the fool’s gold we have now and a basic, bland meanness will settle in for generations to come as an undercurrent of criminal activity will move throughout the land just enough to make us all fearful and want to run to authority for security.
Sometime after I kick it, or before, nature, not human, will strike back with it’s own check on the population. The best and worst will survive. In the pandemic of 1918 the strongest did not.
Those who study history are condemned to repeat it.
jB
..
May 7, 2008 at 9:17 am |
There are the “rich” and then there are the power elites. You can’t really call the elites rich, for their wealth is so vast as to be irrelevant. How does a person whose empire generates 50 million dollars a day into their “checking account” view money? Money is just a byproduct of their lives.
The “rich” on the other hand are regular old dipshits like us except they are fascinated with money and know to the dollar what their net worth is and play with their investments like it was a video game. Totally absorbed and blind to the rest of the world. These are the dangerous ones – the ones who cause a Walmart to be built and a downtown to disintegrate. Their goal is to make money and don’t even know that Uncle Bob’s Hardware is going to die. Even if Bob is hollering at them over Christmas dinner. Just blind to anything but the portfolio.
The power elite simply capitalize on this trend in a macro sense. They aren’t looking at the economic ramifications of Walmart/downtown Bugtussle, and not even regional shifts but are following the national movements of capital and diverting the profits out of hot shot rich day trader into international corporations. The goal is to maintain a “world macro” portfolio where 98% of the world’s wealth is controlled by the top tenth of the top 1/10 of 1% – the power elite.
Oscillation happens, at 99% the center quits holding, mayhem ensues, and to paint a picture, the bank account explodes and dollar bills scatter out to be picked up by the regular ol’ proletariat. And the concentration begins anew. First the middle class arises then the rich get richer and they get played until the beginning 30% of the world’s wealth that was scattered on the wind comes to rest at the top of the shitheap again. There is a destruction of another 30% of “paper”wealth, leaving the power elites with 40% of the salt. If that was cool with them there would be no problem. But they are looking for a reason to exist, and concentrating wealth is their Nintendo.
So if you depend upon, or play the money game, you are in the system. Every walmart purchase by the poor man builds another ghetto somewhere. The Rothchilds and the Morgans make a spectator sport out of watching the rats eat each other. Like a super high stakes version of “Bumfights”.
I plant cowpeas – the power elite can go fuck themselves.