Aug 17 2007
“The End Of The World As We Know It: Hope Vs. Mindset”
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By Carolyn Baker
8/17/07
A friend for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration recently challenged me on my incessant hope-bashing stance and gave me some food for thought which has caused me to reframe the concept of “hope” in my own mind in a way that I can live with. What I cannot live with is a definition of “hope” that externalizes it-that fosters denial and a false and naïve anticipation that government, religion, or to quote Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature” will somehow save humanity from slamming with lethal velocity into the brick walls of our own making-climate chaos, global energy catastrophe, planetary economic meltdown, population overshoot, species extinction and die-off–or nuclear holocaust.
The iconoclastic and cynical James Howard Kunstler is fond of mocking people who ask for “hope” and insists that any hope we have in the face of the end of the world as we know it (EOTWAWKI) must come from within. I’m not sure what that means to Kunstler, but I’m getting clearer about what it means to me.
Naïve hope takes myriad forms and from my perspective one example is the hope that impeachment of Cheney and Bush is even possible. And I must add that Bush has not lost his “brain” with the departure of Rove. Who needs a brain when Darth Vader is the real man behind the curtain and has more political and economic power in the United States government than the average American can even imagine? Another example of false hope is faith in the U.S. political system and the possibility that clean elections exist, not to mention the hope that one will even happen in 2008. Other “hopes” include: the hope that the Democrats will finally find their spine, that the economy will improve without the working and middle classes being eviscerated by a financial meltdown as catastrophic or worse than the Great Depression, that technology will solve the energy dilemma, that moving to another country guarantees personal safety and human liberty, that the human race can exist for another century without a nuclear exchange, that a global spiritual awakening will occur in time to transform the human race and avert catastrophe.
As cyncial as mean spirited as this might sound, a financial collapse is what America needs to bring this country back to its senses.
We have appointed ourselves policeman of the world and don’t mind strutting about the planet, like a deranged cop, ominously swinging our nightstick and threatening all who dare cross our path.
Only in this case, the nightstick is the over the top military muscle of the Pentagon.
While thieves, liars and murderers run about in our capitol, looting, pillaging and plundering at will, We the People sit in front of our aptly named “BOOB Tubes” and swill down the latest toxic nonsense from Hollywood and call ourselves informed.
We need a good, solid kick in the rumps to wrest us out of our indolence and apathy.
And maybe the still building mortgage crisis will do what we don’t have the will, intelligence or gumption to do: Put us back in our place.