Why has Paul Simon’s Slip Slidin’ Away come to haunt me? It’s an old song of sad futility. The closer we get to our destination, the more we are slip, sliding away.
For the majority who have watched the understanding of what overshoot means and how our planetary climate has been changed away from what we need, we thought things were as good as gone. But despite everything Biden handed off to Kamala, who has proven to be an excellent politician.
The song is worth a listen. In the wake of Kamala’s burst of hope, with the limits of what she is allowed to be, and the insistence of as many people as they say to stick with Trump, we seem to be lying in bed and thinking of things that might have been. Our cultural disease is well advanced.
We know the end of this is more than sad, even at its best. An aging and decaying nation that is a failed remnant of another age cannot imagine a future that is not one of the massive overconsumption that has destroyed our world.
The majority of our population either does not care at all or can only see greed as our future. Asking how it came to this does not help. It has come to this, and we are unable even to imagine an exit from this long, slippery descent to our end.
I know we must keep up our hope, but our language, as languages do, gives our game away. The new words we live with now are ‘hopium’ and ‘sanewashing.’ We all know it is a lie because the names we give to these things show that they are lies.
Hopium is an imitation of hope, and sanewashing is a coverup of functional insanity, both of which are forms of addiction. The corporate media are owned by the worst of us and won’t let us leave the path to destruction.
Returning to Paul Simon’s song, we lost our destination a generation ago, but it took a long time to realize it was gone. Biden’s acceptance of reality and the joy of having an option at regaining a future shocked us a month ago.
Maintaining an image of something beyond more of the same was dangerously close to self-delusion. The rising insanity in our population makes a rational future possible only with an acceptance of the lies that somehow our joyful politicians will not do what they say but what we know they must for us to survive.
We desperately need them to be lying to us as they stay on the script for destruction.
But needing to believe a lie to gain a chance at a future requires faith in people who have never been other than what they now say they are. How many times in our nation's history has that faith failed? The odds are not good, but we have no choice but to bet our lives.
The alternative is a mentally ill and dysfunctional criminal surrounded by stooges that are stunningly stupid or amazingly evil. But no one left in the ranks of national power is far removed from either of those conditions.
We must accept the genocide of a population in Palestine to maintain this illusion. We must accept war as the only remaining national agenda to keep our collapsing economic delusion alive.
Again, we are surrounded by delusions. What looks like prosperity for a small part of our population is sold as a dream for the rest. The slippery reality is that it is probably as good as we will ever get in the overshoot reality we have created. Why not accept it and prepare for the worst?
Many of us are doing that, but it takes the discipline of a Buddha to smile and let go of the guilt that is our cultural inheritance. We cannot make it better. We can only work with what it is and save what we can while we can.
There is the budding notion of ‘collapse acceptance’ and going forward from there. I went through the deep grief process after reading Jem Bendell’s “Breaking Together”, (twice) and have come out the other side. I’m not sure where I’ve landed, other than in some sort of state of serenity that I am doing what I can on my corner, and accepting I cannot do more than what I can do. The planet will be fine carrying on … ultimately … and I needed a break from pushing the boulder up the hill. One young man I heard about decided to go into nursing so he could be helpful if/when needed, and that was going to be his contribution to the greater good. We each need to take responsibility for our choices and make them consciously.
Thank you for the good work you do - wide awake.
You do a fine job describing our interlocking predicaments. From my perspective, one phrase is the sum of all things: “It’s the economy stupid”. Our entire political structure is built around continuous growth, expansive consumption, and building wealth as the highest goal for human achievement. A political candidate to be successful must tap into the American Dream. The policies of the governing party will always be predicated on expansion of economic opportunity. The policies may or may not work, but the initial justification is presented as being friendly to economic growth. Nothing will change about our economic mindset until growth can’t continue because of hard natural limits.