Public Service Announcement: If reading my links of the month is unbearably depressing for you, just skip down to the very bottom of this post and at least read Lyz Lenz’s little story on Mothering. Everything else here will probably be the same next month, anyway.
cartoon by Michael Leunig
No, I’m not making fun of protesters. Given the ever-increasing risks that protesters face everywhere in the west, protesters, and especially young ones, are seemingly the only ones brave and sane enough to challenge the increasing repression by our so-called “liberal”, “democratic” and “freedom-loving” governments.
What I take Michael Leunig’s cartoon to be referring to is that it seems to be in the nature of our species that people with power will always move to suppress dissent. Or as has often been observed, no one gives up power voluntarily. As collapse worsens, the ruling caste will either fight with every means at their disposal to hold onto their power, and try to commandeer all the lifeboats for themselves, or they will have power wrenched from them.
At another level, though, I think this cartoon points to the futility of us getting angry at our essential human nature. The atrocities, destruction, oppression and desolation of our planet are all the result of our individual and collective conditioned (and traumatized) behaviour, over which we have no control. We can and will of course be justifiably outraged at this behaviour and its ghastly consequences, but beyond it being outrageous, it is essentially just tragic.
As EO Wilson famously put it “Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth”; the emergence of a species that always wants more, and is capable of endlessly producing more (until it can’t) seems an unlikely and tragic evolutionary turn.
So, thank you, protesters — please keep forcing us to face the truth, and stay safe.
COLLAPSE WATCH
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
