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welcome to the machine

2010 Feb 03

I was very aware two nights ago, riding between the ATC complex and our drop-off point, of being in a vast machine. Nothing I could see was natural. The artificial surface of an artificial island. The foundation for buildings and facilities to smooth the passage of some of the most complex machines ever built. My part: to lubricate and regulate the flow of people through this economic engine. This is so much at odds with how I think things should be.

We are beset by bureaucrats and governors, those who are it seems unafraid to tell us how our lives should be. I’m tending to the thought that the planet will itself (though in fact it has no self) regulate the pace of life: and I may see it happen. The closest date for environmental collapse I have read is 2040 - I will be alive then. No way to stop this runaway train. I think that it is very difficult to discern how we should live. We have been so dysfunctional for so long that we have forgotten what we are: animals.

Humans put ourselves over all the rest of nature careless of the consequences. Unaware that when one part of nature dies through our actions that it is just one stage of our own suicide. We cannot survive without our natural environment and we have only a very basic knowledge of how our organism depends on the others. So much is gone already. Will I scramble to hold on to life when the end comes and the middle latitudes become uninhabitable and unproductive? Will I have had the foresight to sense the end and move to a habitable zone in time to dig in and defend my patch from the tsunami of the dispossessed? Lock and load. Time will tell.

Community leaders should not be male: choose Grandmothers only. Then our leaders may have a sense for living for today with an eye on how their decisions will effect their children’s children. We should live in a family, group, structure that fits our basic nature. Not one imposed by a grey haired male despot who hallucinated a religion and imposed it on others. How did we develop the arrogance to seize hold of something and claim that it belongs to us? Religion has a lot to answer for. I will keep looking for the right questions to ask: centered around how to gain an understanding of what it really means to be human.

Rant over; for now.