I address this editorial to my fellow U.S. citizens. Not the consumers of the U.S., but my fellow citizens. Hey you! YOU! How do you personally see yourself: CITIZEN? OR CONSUMER.
I focus on the occupants of this beautiful land that we are so blessed to inhabit because it’s true, we do lead, or we did, and we could continue to lead the way if we would just wake up from the shock of recognizing that the so called American Century is exploding the way that privatized American rocket did a few days ago. And then had to be bailed out by the Russian rocket the next day. (How embarrassing!) And now, of course, the “investigation” points to the (supposed) culprit: an old “Russian-built” rocket engine. Whew! Yeah! Blame the Russkies (again)! The symbolism of the entire imbroglio is acute. Especially when you look at the near identity between the words ISS (International Space Station, where the rocket was pointed) and ISIS? Huh? What’s that about?
Oh wait, and get this! The rocket was named “Antares.” A red star, Antares or Anti-Ares, the rival of Mars, and equal in intensity, ferocity, fury, and explosiveness. From darkstarastrology: “Generally in mythology then, Antares represents that difficult transition from life to death, and then death to life again and the burning off of karma.”
Wow, really? Wouldn’t that be cool?
Oops! But I digress. My very first exopermaculture editorial and already I digress. But really, how can anyone keep a focus in a constantly fragmentating world? Well, amazingly enough, we do. We Amurricans do. Perhaps better than any other country in the world. We KNOW HOW.
Case in point: This morning I was reading a recent New Yorker piece, called Floating Feasts, about food on cruise ships, and was struck, as usual, by the extraordinary capacity of western civilization to organize whatever it decides to organize, in this case, always fresh food 24/7 in over 20 different venus on an ocean liner with 6000 paying guests and around 2000 workers. That’s 8000 people, 6000 of whom, I imagine, are feeding themselves continuously —at least that’s what I remember about the only cruise I ever took on one of these behemoths, with my siblings and parents for their 50th wedding anniversary. (I’ll never forget that three foot high statue, impeccably carved and iced, of real butter!) Our cruise, from LA to Catalina and one Mexican port, was only four days long, but even so, we were all beyond engorged when we finally waddled ashore. The amount of multilevel planning that goes into the quintessential gustatory opulence of voyaging cruise ships in a world where millions are starving is extraordinary. And we pull it off. Routinely.
Likewise, the sheer magnitude of meticulous detailed planning that goes into the construction of, say a very large academic building, such as the one I’m watching go up this year, at Indiana University, the new Global and International Studies building (which will, I presume integrate (seamlessly?) in various ways with people and projects at nearby Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center). Layered both vertically and horizontally to the nth detail, all the specific parts methodically piece by piece hoisted by giant cranes in a set order by hundreds of workers organized into teams, the plans for this project encapsulated in computer-generated drawings expertly read by project planners and engineers . . .
Or how about the extraordinary complexity of organization it takes to keep any regional airport humming, serving thousands of flights per day, none of them grazing or bumping or crashing into each other. Or the organization it takes to build an Interstate, like I69, now connecting Canada to Mexico through this U.S.A heartland. Locals here remember how INDOT spent years pulling the wool over our eyes as to what was going to happen and when and whether. All such “delays” built into the project. No problem. We Amurricans pull it off, every time. And yes, we may do shoddy work, but that’s not because we don’t know how to do good work, but because there’s corruption and greed and waste and arrogance and denial and lack of oversight built into the system as well. Always, something could and usually does, go wrong, undermine, at least at some level, all of our strong intentions. We don’t plan for that. But we do experience it.
And even so, despite predictable peccadillos, both intentional and not, the interstate does get built, the airport continues to run, the gigantic academic building gets completed, the cruise ship continues to deliver an immense variety of fresh food to each stuffed patron’s table every morning, noon and night.
Oh yeah, and then there’s the MIC (Military Industrial Complex). Can you imagine the levels of organization built into this unregulated, in your face and outta sight behemoth with thousands of bases (above earth, on earth, and below earth) and cyber sites and soldiers and weapons and planes and aircraft carriers and faceless, multistory, edge city buildings filled with cyber stuff and “operators” all compartmentalized into one massive, internally competing, invisible corporate/military hierarchy that spies on everybody and ignites and manages continuous tiny, small, or invisible wars (“operations”) that . . . oh phooey! Basically, let’s face it, the MIC runs the planet, poisoning as it goes, destroying people and ecosystems, all in the name of what? Yep! “MONEY” for the .00001%. Huh? Say wha? Really?
And it’s all Amurrican made, or at least sourced, outsourced, privatized to thousands upon thousands of international corporations that bleed the beleagured, hardworking (if, that is, he or she can “get a job,” or two or three) American taxpayer dry for “national defense,” “national security,” while drying up schools, infrastructure, libraries, other public commons. It’s no accident that “pragmatism” was an American philosophical movement. We are the ultimate pragmatic pioneers and the MIC is our proudest achievement. Right?
Okay. Yes. American “know-how” is justly celebrated. We are also a nation full of young (and older) hungry inventors, just itching to figure out “the next big thing” that will both make the inventor famous as well as change our way of life. A few “make it,” most don’t. But because of those few, like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson or Elon Musk (or my late father-in-law, Amos Joel, who invented the cell phone), the world does morph beyond recognition as a result of ideas that sometimes a single person ignites into manifestation.
So what are we waiting for? We know how to organize, and we are shock full of people with ideas. It’s way past time that we set our nation’s sights on a really big problem and activate our collective will to figure out how to solve it, or at least to meet it half way, or otherwise adjust to it. I’m speaking, of course, about the converging crises of climate change and the economic free fall that capitalism guarantees when we run up against planetary limits of continuous, expanding nonrenewable “resource” extraction.
And that’s already happening. NOW. There is no going back to “progress,” or “growth.” That’s over. What we can do is grow as a people, grow in consciousness. Expand our awareness beyond pragmatism to a higher ethical sense of what is in the best interests of all, including our still beautiful planetary home.
And then — and this, to me, is the most perplexing thing, how absent it’s been — is it just because we’re mind-controlled, psy-oped, chemtrailed, entertrained by our techno, drug, alcoholic, workaholic and other distractions? — we must activate our collective will.
Do read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything. Because it does. Hopefully it will help ignite us. I haven’t read it yet either. But I bet I already know what it’s about: the changes I and countless, still invisible, others are beginning to make in response to the magnitude of what’s happening to our world. It’s about the changes a certain number of us must make (what is that percentage? 3%? 10%? .05%?) in order to catalyze a shift in the atmosphere that all 7 billion of us will then surrender to, automatically, in realignment with the new template set by collective, planetary and interplanetary will.
Let’s hook up to our unique, multdimensional divine selves and celebrate the ignition of our collective imagination that can — YES! — rise up to meet whatever challenge we face, no matter how enormous and perhaps impossible. For either we will or we won’t “pull it off.” Either we will or we won’t lift our heads out of the sand, ground our feet into dear Mother Earth and gaze into the infinite sky, let the vastness of the quantum field inspire us, fill us with the fire that creates something out of nothing, regularly, routinely, radically. We are the ones, as they say, that we have been waiting for. And the time for action is this present moment.
Hey YOU! I dare you! Show up! Meet me here. Meet us! The U.S. is US! Do that one thing you’ve been dreaming of, that one thing you thought you’d never dare to do. No matter how small or large, that’s the match that will light YOUR fire.
