Is our culture in a bottomless well, free falling since, well, I don’t know when, exactly?
But the decline sure seemed to accelerate sometime during the decade of the 1980s.
Aptly named album: “The Road to Ruin” — song: “I want to be sedated” — That about sums it up, no?
I think there’s only two lines of lyrics yelled to a monstrous ‘melody’ that gets stuck in your head like a really bad TV ad. Included here for illustration purposes only. Please, don’t listen, unless you have an immediate and effective brainwashing remedy to get the slime out.
What sophisticated music fills my adolescent memories?Bach? Tchaikovsky? Dvorak?
Well, I was enamored with the ballet for a while, so I’m luckier than many. And, of course there was Bugs Bunny. I fear the kids today don’t even have good cartoons anymore!
In more ways than I can currently count, I think Crrow777 is spot on when he repeats the old adage: “All roads lead to Rome.” Unfortunately it seems to mirror the lame cliche: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”
For those in the rest of the world trying to figure out what kind of insanity is happening in this country, let me assure y’all, we have only a few clues, and please do understand, Americans are the most propagandized population in the world, I’d be willing to bet.
George Carlin had it as close to right as I’ve heard so far: American Bullshit. Brilliant.
Nonsense.So many of these old adages should be read as the exact opposite.
The Truth will burden you mercilessly.It will chain you down.It will promise to crush you.
That’s why most folks can’t handle the truth, don’t seek it out even momentarily, and change the subject if you try to broach it, even when it’s coated in marzipan.
But it rarely comes candy-coated.
If you’re an animal lover it will come in the form of a video clip from Siberia of a mink being skinned alive and shrieking in tones that will haunt you for a lifetime.
If children are your greatest weakness it will come in the form of the decades of elite pedophiles and abusers regularly affronting you in the news, with nothing of consequence ever being done about it.
If nature is your refuge you will see, over and over, images of its destruction, forests burning, waters poisoned, skies sprayed with toxins, atmosphere altered in horrid alien ways.
If you are a foodie, an aesthetic, a lover of beauty, a Dionysian even, you will watch it all destroyed to make way for concrete and cardboard, and synthetic, tasteless, lifeless, gaudy goo.
If you’ve been cursed with the trait called ‘sensitivity’ you’ll be harpooned with each of these in turn, flashing in neon, at all hours of the day and night.
The truth is, you can’t handle the truth.
I can’t handle the truth.
I work at it, constantly.
It promises to break me, daily.
One aligns with Truth, not because it will set you free, but because it conquers all.
Here’s one I point a finger at men, primarily. I know that sounds illogical on the surface, but consider this please. She was a smart, very attractive young woman, who rose in a man’s game.
And she used that her entire career, even when she got vicious and ugly, to manipulate men in power. She might be a woman, and I call a woman down as easily as I will a man, but this shyte’s mostly on the man, imo, for promoting a wolf in sheep’s clothing just because she seduced y’all.
Of course now, because of her rise to power, she’s popular with (amoral) women based primarily on the fact that she f**ked the f*cker.
When will a true hero come and take the high ground?
The kabuki theater stunts between the two-pronged hydra-head of the one-party political class in America knows no bounds. After Mueller was shot down for his lame and easily disprovable case against Trump, the tide turned against the Democrats. Now it’s Hillary’s turn in the hot seat, not that it really matters. As I noted on…
If you plan to join the growing number of hobby beekeepers the very first step should be to define your goals.I learned that the hard way.
It’s a wonderful thing to see the popularity of beekeeping keeps increasing.I love beekeeping for many reasons, but when I was first starting out the learning curve was very intimidating. And that’s coming from someone who usually adores learning.
Not only was there loads to learn about the bees themselves, but also about how to manage their colonies, which changes depending on your hive type, which is dependent on what your goals are as a beekeeper.
The first question to answer for yourself as a newbie is if you are interested in beekeeping as livestock or as habitat provider, or maybe both.
I had several mishaps in my first years because I hadn’t asked myself this most fundamental question.I hadn’t asked myself this because in all the books, forums, courses and club meetings I’d attended, no one asked this question.The general assumption is always that the beekeeper is interested in bees as livestock, because that’s what most want.
In this case, follow the commercial standards, using their Langstroth hives and peripheral equipment, their treatment schedules for pests and diseases, and their feeding programs and supplies, and you should be good to go.You can buy nucs (nucleus colonies) in the spring, and if all goes well you’ll have some honey before winter.This is by far the most popular route to take in beekeeping.
Our only Langstroth hive on the homestead, bedazzled with old jewelry.
But it’s not for everyone, including me, which took me a few years to figure out.Honey, pollen, wax, propolis, royal jelly, queen rearing, and other processes and products from beekeeping are the main goals of this style of beekeeping and there’s lots to learn from the commercial operators who have mastered many of these skills for maximum efficiency and profit.
However, if you are interested more in providing habitat and learning from the bees, and creating truly sustainable, long-term, self-sufficient colonies in your space, following commercial practices is really not the way to go, and can lead to a lot of expense, confusion and frustration.
In the hopes of encouraging more beekeepers to become honeybee habitat providers rather than livestock managers only, here are a few tips and resources.
The bee yard of Dennis Kenney of Jackson-area Beekeepers Club, with his preferred horizontal hive style. Horizontal hives differ from Top-bar hives in that they have full frames with foundation. Benefits of full frames is ease of management and stability of comb. Drawbacks would be the added expense and the artificial, manufactured foundation and its potential contaminants.
The conventional practice is to keep all your hives in a ‘bee yard’ for reasons of convenience and space.This is antithetical to bee colonies’ natural proclivity to nest far from one another. It creates problems of diseases and pests that spread rapidly in conditions of overpopulation, which is why so many treatments are needed, and then feeding when nectar/pollen flow is scarce, as well as being hyper-vigilant in your regular hive inspections to find issues immediately before they spread.Now that I have spaced my 6 hives out around a very large area I’m having far more success. But, only time will tell!
What else I’ve learned:
The typical Langstroth hive is made for easy transport and standardization purposes for the industry mainly, but they are not ideal for the honeybee habitat provider, because they are made with thin walls in order to be lightweight. This means they are poorly insulated and so not suitable for the long-term stability of the hive—getting too hot in summer in southern climates and too cold in winter in northern climates. Our top-bar hives and nucs have thick walls and insulated roofs.
If you want your bees adapted to your area and climate you don’t want to do the conventional practice of buying new queens every couple of years.Ideally, you’ll want your colonies to produce their own queens.Queen-rearing will remain an essential skill for a more advanced beekeeper, because occassionally you may still want to make splits to increase your numbers or to replace weak colonies, or to re-queen another hive displaying poor genetic traits.
When the colonies are weak, depending on the issue, they may need to be culled. This is rarely suggested by professional beekeepers who promote regular treatments on which the weak colonies then become dependent, while still spreading their weak genes on to subsequent generations and their diseases and pests to other colonies.
Just like the faulty logic of ‘herd immunity’ in the vaccine debate among human populations, many commercial beekeepers use the same complaint about those of us who want go au naturel,that is, treatment-free, with our bees.
Many scientists and researchers are trying to raise public awareness that this is not how herd-immunity works, not in livestock or in humans, and I applaud their efforts. I personally find referring to populations of people as a herd to be insulting. I think it actually trains individuals through neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) to think of themselves and each other not as unique and separate individuals, but rather as cattle to be managed.
You’ll also want to mostly forgo the conventional practice of swarm prevention.The goal is for the bees to become self-sufficient, as in the wild, where colonies can live for decades with no hand from man to aid or to disturb.Some of these colonies are enormous, like one we found in an old oil barrel, there for over 15 years and thriving with multiple queens in the same colony, which most likely swarmed annually.
Swarming is a natural, bio-dynamic process performing many different functions for the colony, hygiene being an essential one. Everything the beekeeper takes away from their natural processes is a stress on them which must then be alleviated by other, most likely artificial, means.
Plant perennial and annual crops the bees like for your area and climate.Here in the south there are plenty of plants that bloom at different times most of the year, giving free bee buffets from early spring to late fall, like: bluebonnet, white clover, hairy vetch, wild mustard, vitek, morning glory, trumpet vine, yaupon, and lots of garden herbs and crops, too.It is my greatest pleasure to harvest cucumbers, peas, beans and arugula surrounded by forging bees—they love them as much as we do!
Experimenting and observing is the most fabulous feature of the honeybee habitat provider!
I know a homeschooling homesteader with an observation hive in their house that the children treasure.Not only do they learn from these fascinating creatures about how they operate in the hive, but how they are connected to the seasons and to their environment.They’re learning constantly from the colonies’ successes as much as from their failures.
I practice slightly different techniques with each hive to discover which methods work best here on the wee homestead: one hive has a screened bottom board, one I keep with a reduced entrance all year, one’s in full-sun and another partial shade, and so on.Not that this will necessarily solve the mystery of colony failure, but every bit of data helps!
Some unconventional resources:
Books
The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters by Simon Buxton (2004)
The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Beeby Karl von Frisch (1953)
Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health by Les Crowder & Heather Harrell (2012)
Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture by Ross Conrad (2013)
Our biggest long-time favorite here on the wee homestead at his finest—funny, musical, ethical, caring, clever, creative, stellar researcher—a true rock-star journalist and boundlessly inspiring man.
Thank you for raising the bar, James, and inspiring millions young and old.
I will start sharing more about Individuals I find who heed principles over politics, in their own words, condensed.
John D. Whitehead
“Disagree all you want about healthcare, abortion and immigration—hot-button issues that are guaranteed to stir up the masses, secure campaign contributions and turn political discourse into a circus free-for-all—but never forget that our power as a citizenry comes from our ability to agree and stand united on certain principles that should be non-negotiable.
“No matter how we might differ about the role of the U.S. military in foreign affairs, surely we can agree that America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin.
“For too long now, the American people have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.
“Yet the unavoidable truth is that the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentationsor some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
“It’s time for good men and women to do something. And soon.
“Wake up and take a good, hard look around you. Start by recognizing evil and injustice and tyranny for what they are. Stop being apathetic. Stop being neutral. Stop being accomplices. Stop being distracted by the political theater staged by the Deep State: they wantyou watching the show while they manipulate things behind the scenes. Refuse to play politics with your principles. Don’t settle for the lesser of two evils.”
Please read this monumental article in its entirety and take a moment to deeply consider how you can be a force for positive action, because each one of us can be, just the way we are.We still have marvelous power right at our fingertips in this country, let’s use it for good, before it’s too late!
I did some travel writing during a decade of constant travel and my favorite part was having an excuse to talk to elderly ladies. Someday I will dig up more of these photos and interviews. It was sheer enjoyment and curiosity that drove me to them.
I really had no agenda and I’d been advised to steer clear of politics, but sometimes I’d ask about the ‘communist’ takeover, quickly followed by the Soviet occupation, though it was probably still too early to discuss such recent wounds in polite company in the 1990s. So, sometimes I’d seek out un-polite company.
It always stuck with me how often I hear a lady say some version of: “We had no idea what they were capable of!” I believed them. “Of course, how could you possibly have known, so tragic,” is what I’d be thinking.
Now that I’ve grown I’ve gotten a different take on this well-worn phrase. Now I think, well, why the hell not?Had you not gotten the news of their atrocities in Poland and Hungary and East Germany and so on? These are your neighbors, after all.
But, of course they had, these were not peasants in the countryside usually, they were worldly elderly women living in Prague, most of them still working into their 70s, because that’s what happens when the government ‘collectivizes’ all your family properties, businesses and homes. That’s what they called it, collectivized, because it sounds so much nicer than confiscated.
They had a suspicion of ‘volunteers’ that was completely unknown to me previously and was actually the hardest thing for me to overcome in the beginning, since part of the time I was living there I was a Peace Corps volunteer.Now I get it. It’s the ‘Trojan Horse’ thing, and the fact that volunteering was forced on them by the government as part of their ‘civic duties’ along with voting in sham elections and showing up for cheesy government-sponsored parades and celebrations.
I would do dumb touristy things without a second thought, like photograph folks’ houses I found lovely.One time a horrified middle-aged lady ran out of her front door in her robe to scream at me: “No taking pictures here!Are you healthy?!”
Me in Slovakia 1995
That line stuck with me for years.“Are you healthy?”What in the world did she mean by that, like, I looked sick or something?I was very healthy indeed, her house was so beautiful and I so admired it I was doing what was completely natural for me to do, take a picture, duh!
Belarus 1999
Then many years later I realized she must have meant ‘healthy in the head’ because the paranoia in these folks ran really deep.Though apparently they adopted it too late to save themselves from the real enemy.
The Soviet tanks rolling into other major Eastern European cities was in the papers.They knew.They just thought, “Oh, but that could never happen here!”
I would not have pressed further back then and I took these ladies at face value.Now I would press, because what I think was really at play was what I see all around me today in this country: denial, suppression, wishful thinking, neglect, misdirected hostility, and so on.
They are showing you what they are capable of, right now, Americans: police state, mass surveillance, technocratic overlords, end of private property, mandatory vaccinations, end of free speech, and the very long list goes on.
Thanks very much to Decker, Dispatches from the Asylum for this brief sampling of the day on the capabilities and intentions of our current overlords:
“Check out the latest of these shitards and their latest, choicest f**kery:” First wireless insect-size robot takes flight – via roboticsnews.com
That Sign Telling You How Fast You’re Driving May Be Spying – via technocracy.news
Your Volvo Will Soon Call The Cops On You If It Thinks You’ve Been Drinking – via zerohedge.com
Finger Vein Vending Machines And A Global Biometric Police Database – via activistpost.com
NYC subway denies using ‘real-time face recognition screens’ in Times Square – via theverge.com
Police in Canada Are Tracking People’s ‘Negative’ Behavior In a ‘Risk’ Database– via vice.com
MAIN CORE: GOVT “THREAT LIST” NAMES AT LEAST 8 MILLION AMERICANS WHO WILL BE DETAINED WHEN MARTIAL LAW IS IMPOSED – via amg-news.com
DARPA Seeks FAA Approval For Military Drones Over American Cities – via technocracy.news
AT&T Creates FirstNet For Law Enforcement Surveillance – viatechnocracy.news
Homeland Security To Scan Your Face At 20 Top Airports – via technocracy.news
In response to Caitlin Johnstone’s article, I’d like to offer this rebuttal. I have loads of respect for this journalist, I agree with her on most of her points of view, except this and the fact she’s clearly not researched weather modification/geoengineering, but that’s another post.
I know the arguments and I’ve lived them in post-Soviet countries. Being the simpleton I’ve been called I do find it valuable to make the complicated simple, whittle it down to the essential. Socialism is unethical. That’s all that matters to me.
I don’t like to be bullied, most folks don’t.Whether that bully is another individual or a group, it’s wrong.What happens in practicality with collectivism, after the niceties of fairness and group-think wear off, is manipulation, a constant shifting of the goal post, gaslighting, dehumanizing, celebrating mediocrity.
Imagine this as it often happens within a typical master/slave dynamic, like with parents toward their children. When Mom wants her teenager to think for herself she’ll say: “So, if all your friends jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you do it too?”
Yet the very same mom will insist her daughter does not elope and wears white to her wedding, and invites the right people, and all sorts of other group-think behavior if it suits her fancy. You might chalk this up to that’s just how the world works, but clearly upon deeper reflection it’s obvious this is not ethical: It’s not based on consistent and universal principles, it’s based on the whims of what the mother finds ‘right’ in the moment.
We are naturally collective, that’s why we need the balancing power of strong individuation.‘Rugged individuals’ don’t go off to conquer new territory, whether in land, mind or sea, in order to be alone, alienated with their creation beyond kin or company.They do it in service to something, and that something is often called ego, but in fact ego alone doesn’t get one very far, unless there’s a crowd there serving that ego.
To see what collectivism, or socialism as it’s currently named, will look like as a worldwide system, one needs only consider it in a practical confined context.In healthy families it works brilliantly.But what happens in unhealthy ones, or when the tribe gets larger?
What about in a business setting, for example?Someone in that business is taking a bigger risk, someone is more competent, more popular, more trusted, more diligent, more something.That’s just how we are wired, we follow the weak at our peril.
Organizing around the weakest links is what’s required of socialism, for ‘equity’s’ sake, but in nature this creates the same predator/prey situation as in any work environment.We must collaborate, we must cooperate, but not at the expense of the will of the strong, the natural leaders.
“It is precisely these generalities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed the normal of individuals of a race in much the same degree—it is precisely these qualities I say that in crowds become common property. In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individual, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper-hand.” Gustav LeBon’s The Crowd
I don’t believe in free will.I think will is very expensive indeed.What will the strong do if they are constantly undermined, manipulated, bullied by the crowd?
The incompetent will pull too much on the competent to the point they quit, or to the point their mojo is reduced to such a level as to become ineffectual.This is why Ayn Rand’s work is so relevant and poignant on the political level.How does power work?Well, above all, it’s an aphrodisiac for those who seek it.
But, is that what the ‘rugged individualist’ is seeking, necessarily?This is an assumption that’s often brandied about as fact by collectivist types.
”In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. It is not all the world, as is so often repeated, that has more wit than Voltaire, but assuredly Voltaire that has more wit than all the world, if by ‘all the world’ crowds are to be understood.” LeBon
We need more rugged individuals, not fewer.We squash them, even in this supposedly most free country and beacon of individualism, we force them from the earliest age to conform and comply.
This feeds tyranny, no doubt, but not for the reasons collectivists think. It’s not because a few rogue elements get past the socialization and rise up to rule the roost out of sheer force of individual will. The tough skin the individual acquires by fighting group-think his entire childhood and adolescence becomes armor for some, but more often the individual succumbs to the pressure.Only the toughest survive not because they are beaten down by the competition, but because their potential rivals are beaten down by the crowd.That works really well for the ruthless.
”Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? . . . I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.” Henry David Thoreau ‘Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
The rugged individualists I know are more interested in adventure than in conquering; more interested in creating than in destroying, more interested in ethics than power.
The technocracy is ruled by the ‘law of large numbers’ that is — “BIG DATA” — that is, the crowd.
I wonder if the average person were to be presented with a simple and straight-forward question whether the answer would come out in favor of the ‘rugged individual’:
“If you were forced to have someone rule over you, would you rather it were a great individual or a machine of collective consensus?”
I don’t think I need a ruler at all, but if there were no other choice, I know my answer.
But then, I consider myself to be a rugged individualist.
“What do you do when things go from bad to worse?”
I was asked that question a couple months ago after the “tornado” hit our property by a man whose work I follow, Jason Lindgren.I consider the work he does with Crrow777 to be very inspiring.
So, pray tell, wise man, what do I do with a dozen fallen trees?
It’s not at all inspiring in the vein of Ram Dass quotes and vision boards and self-help mantras.You might even argue it’s the opposite, more often than not.Not that it’s nihilistic ‘slash and burn’ either, but more like, ‘tastefully deconstruct and reconsider.’
These guys have heard it all, I’m sure. Nut jobs, shills, conspiracy theorists would be on the mild side.
I see something quite different, typical. They’ve recently filmed a documentary called “Shoot the Moon” — about the lunar wave — quite à propos, no?
I see determination, resilience, fortitude, creativity—all qualities I consider to be deliciously rare. Others see ‘crazy’ where I see ‘courageous.’
Most of all, I see care. Authentic care.
“What a good question,” I replied at the time.
I really had not a clue at that moment and was still in a state of mental and emotional chaos, which had my conscious thoughts and unconscious feelings ALL over the place.
Of course, when I’m all over the place I drag Hubby all over the place with me, which surely isn’t the reason why he’s been working so much overtime, right?? 🙂
“Let’s sell it all and move to Mexico!” was at the top of my list at the time of that astute question.Folks don’t ask a lot of good questions, even the well-meaning ones.Mostly I hear useless platitudes, like these Ram Dass quotes, and even actual arguments about how they think I should be feeling.
To be absolutely frank in a ‘too much information’ sort of way I’m sure to regret at some point, I think what happened to my psyche right after the latest weather disaster was what the shrinks would call ‘complex PTSD’.
Yes, I’m self-diagnosing from the Internet.But, the symptoms fit, and the worst of it came out in flooding of somatic memories that were totally overpowering and illogical and unwelcome, along with intense anxiety, nightmares and terrors, paranoia, depression, loss of sense of stability and control, and so on.
These weren’t overpowering memories just from the previous two disasters, Hurricanes Katrina and Ike, they went much further back.They wen’t so far back sometimes that I couldn’t really tell if they were ‘all mine’ alone, but that doesn’t matter one bit, because they were terrifying and I was feeling them as if they were currently happening to me, alone.
I mostly isolate in such times, because I feel if nothing else, I don’t want to take others down with me. But also because I know from experience how badly the average person handles disaster, or grief, or anything remotely unpleasant or unsavory, so I feel I have little other choice.
I want to say now what I think really helped, now that I feel on the upswing once again.It’s not because I think what helps me will help others necessarily, but you never know how adding to the reservoir of our individual coping and healing techniques could work for someone, somewhere, and I’ve got a great big hunch more folks are going to need more such resources for the coming decades.
What’s working for me, what have been my buoys in the darkness?
Not those typically espoused by those who think they know, like ‘get out and socialize’ or ‘join a club’ or ‘try these meds’ or even meditate or try a new hobby.
Jason’s simple question—spontaneous, honest, rhetorical—gave me a point of focus I expect he never intended, but was able to offer to a virtual stranger, out of . . . I don’t really know . . . empathy, curiosity, tact?
I decided (again) my first responsibility is to my own well-being, which should be obvious, but I often forget it.
This blog helped, the folks who support me in this blog helped. I got to send my chaotic feelings into the ether, to be read or ignored as the reader saw fit, no obligation, but no expectations from me either. That’s truly cathartic for me.
I’m taking herbal hormones and eating an even healthier diet than I typically do, just loading up more on the veggies and herbs and lightening up on the chips and fries.That part has been pretty painless.
Isolating for me dramatically reduces stress, yet this is what all the experts say to never do.I think that’s because they want the vulnerable to join cults and be in an even greater position of weakness to group-think and consensus trance and taking bad popular advice, like anti-depressants, for starters.
I’m not saying I’ve figured it all out or it’s all downhill from here, but I’ve added a few more tools to the box.
So, to answer your question, Jason, “What do you do when things go from bad to worse?”
I re-balance and re-tune, and if that goes well, I re-commit.
I might still be down, but I’m not yet out. And there’s no power, be it technocratic, dogmatic, omnipotent or otherwise, who’s going to force me from our land in this lifetime. If it comes to push and shove, I go down with the ship. Period.
The geoengineering/weather modification is destroying lives, property and our environment. This is now clear to millions of folks around the world who are getting educated, standing up, and speaking out.
But millions will not be enough to change this course, we have the biggest multinational corporations, governments and militaries around the globe against us, and against the entire web of life.
Like this landowner, who goes by Swamp Boss, we have also been losing trees at an astonishing rate these last several years. This is absolutely not normal by any stretch of the imagination and any landowner paying attention knows this. Our forests are being poisoned.
I try to talk about this with folks—friends, neighbors, family—I even hand out flyers, and I get blank stares and eye rolls for my efforts, and rarely do I get a single question or look of concern. It’s baffling and upsetting and I’m really peeved at the lack of care of those around me. That’s why I spend so much time alone gathering evidence from folks I’ve never met, simply because it’s too painful to not find like-minded individuals, so I seek them out, even if only in cyberspace.
There is plenty of information out there and if more folks don’t take an interest in the actual world around them, the natural world, we don’t stand a chance.
I really wish I knew what the magic formula would be to get folks to look up from their games and fiddlesticks for long enough to realize all our lives and livelihoods are in danger, and we are at war.
Folks need to stop saying, “Calm down!” And start rising up.
What will make folks care? Who do you think your grandchildren are going to blame when they inherit a dead planet, while you eye-rolled yourself back into a zombified stupor bowed before your handheld radiation fondle slab?
Or said, “No problem, calm down, God will solve it.”
Or said, “Technology landed us on the moon and will solve this too, so stop bothering me with your negativity.”
”But look . . ,” you will try to explain at your grandchildren’s accusations of carelessness and irresponsibility . . . “You don’t have food, but you have Facebook! We did that! You’re welcome!”
What kind of trade off have you made on their behalves, and who gave you such a right?
