On the Edge of the Millennium

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On the Edge of the Millennium (Written in 1999)

Here we sit on the edge of the Millennium. There are 6 billion of us. The ecosystem is rapidly failing under the onslaught of irrational human behavior. The issues of life and death for millions and millions of people is swept under the carpet of politics, religion, and economics. Cardboard issues and dog and pony shows are created and presented to the population of the world to keep our minds occupied as we do the work we have to do to gain permission to breathe, eat, and not die of exposure from those who are insane in their fear and lust for power and status.

Most people in the world know that millions of years ago something killed off the Great Dinosaurs, that in a very brief period of time Life all over the planet was kicked down from abundance to near extinction. Few people have heard that since that time, Life has been kicked down even closer to total extinction twice, both times by vast increases in the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere caused by unknown forces. Now we are willingly creating a vast extinction, even including the releasing of vast amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in the name of 'economics'.

I sometimes wonder when Humanity will be able to afford to save the planet. As far as I can tell, it is 'economics' which is killing us and 'economics' which is determining our efforts to survive. It is economics which determines what we see, hear, and talk about, where resources go and why, what politicians, "our glorious leaders" do and say, who gets to eat and drink, who lives and who dies, who gets medical help and who does not, and most of all, what is considered 'practical' and 'reasonable'.

We are told that economics is an 'exchange' system, not a 'control' system, yet governments use economics to decide what it can do and what it cannot do, backed up by violence, and corporations use 'economics' to decide what part of the ecosystem is to be sacrificed and what part is not yet economic to sacrifice, backed up by violence.

And yet, 'economics' is a collective invention of the human mind, a conceptual and almost completely arbitrary system of evaluation based upon human opinion. Along with the observably silly concept that the only thing that really exists is human thought, 'economics' decides what humans are going to do, even when faced with horror.

It's like a vast comical self-imposed ordeal where we make up an arbitrary test to determine who lives and who dies, where the test imposes an arbitrary standard for who is 'the best and brightest'... then, in the end, kills everyone off because the inherent values of Nature are so different than the arbitrary values of 'economics' that the world is not livable at the end of the test, which is when the test is forced to be over for lack of test takers.

What a great reward! Get the highest grade and have the honor of being the last of your species dying in a totally destroyed world!

It's not that we don't know the answers that lead to survival amide plenty. We know what we must do to survive, even to live in great prosperity amide an ecologically sound Nature, but even those answers are evaluated in numbers followed by vast fields of zeros, and are not considered 'practical' or 'reasonable' by most people.

Because 'economics' is arbitrarily limited, when we look at the problems and solutions, it appears that there cannot be prosperity and survival at the same time, so Humanity cannot afford to survive. I sometimes wonder how bad it will get before it is 'cost effective' to fix our ways and start doing something about surviving.

Will the air have to be almost unbreathable?

Will naked sunlight have to be deadly from UV before we face our irrationality?

Will most life on the planet have to be extinct before we can 'afford' to start changing our ways despite 'economics'? Or perhaps a few people living in underground cities will continue the game of economics, buying and eating each others bodies, buying air and water, their lives a living hell, until they cannot afford to exist any longer and die off also…

If I thought 'economics' was here to stay, I would not even be trying to save the planet.

But there is more to the world than the arrogance of the tool using species.

It's not like we are an accident, or that there are not forces of synergy to our existance which extends far beyond our egotistical concepts of what is 'practical' and 'reasonable'.

I see no Armageddon in our future, nor wandering tribes of diseased and dying 'scavenger/warriors' living off the rubble of our civilization. And I know one thing for sure, we have all heard the cynics announce 'It will never happen' too many times on major changes and then watched those changes happen anyway in our lives to think human behavior is fixed into irrationality and omnisuicide.

No, I see that what is ubiquitous to us now globally, seemingly so totally powerful as to rival God, which seems total in it's control of every moment of our lives, may well be literally gone in a generation or two, perhaps even sooner.

'Economics' will not survive, and humanity will.


Why do I think that? Because we do know the answers now, and we do want to not only survive but live in an ecologically sound prosperity on a global basis.

We are realizing that war and poverty and social insanity is not 'built in' or here to stay. We are realizing that the old 'solutions' are the cause of the old 'problems' in insane cycles of misery. We know what needs to be changed now and more and more are having the realization that our past systems do not work, are not 'practical' nor 'reasonable', that the real basis of survival is ecology and community, and not force and 'economics'.

It is evident that those conceptual systems which do not reflect the reality of our common world and it's ecosystem's survival will be swept away by the simple expression of billions of people giving those unsurvivable conceptual systems up on their own, out of individual choice, resulting in those people joining others in living free.

Our institutions will not do it.

Our governments will not do it.

Our religious establishments will not do it.

Our militaries will not do it.

Only the people, individually and together, will do it despite the intransigence of all our social entities. And that is as it should be.

We need no loud and bloody revolution, just a quiet and peaceful evolution of mind and the change in behavior that brings in our lives.

We need no fixed philosophy or theology or traditions that all must agree upon, we just need people to realize they have the power to make the choice, so they can dedicate themselves to living together as mutually caring, compassionate equals.

We need no leaders or pundits or gurus, just individuals looking through and past the existing systems which promise much and deliver little to the prosperity and health beyond. It won't be done because of edict or pronouncement, but from the individual's love for their children and their concern for the energy and beauty of Nature, our Outer Self.

The time is coming to end the 'economic' drain, and live the beauty of our Natural existence. We will make it or break it together, omniprosperity or omnisuicide, as we individually decide and from that decision, what we collectively do. I am not a utopian, nor even an optimist... I am a rational pragmatist, looking at the world without bias, and seeing that the answers are known and widespread, and that people are seeing through the insanity, and looking for answers.