Industrial Collapse

Photo credit: KWAB

It is Thanksgiving morning, 2010. As I sit on my bed writing this entry I ponder over the collapse of the Industrial Age.

Two cats are keeping my feet warm at the foot of the bed. My wife is in the kitchen making a yummy side dish for our Thanksgiving feast. Life is good.

Garbage
Yes, count me in for some of that liberal guilt. I'll take a round, baby. A waste management engineer once told me that landfills are made in giant bowls, with some sort of lining. When they are full, they are vented, covered with dirt, and all that fast food plastic has a 1,000 years to decay. The waste from the Happy Meals I bought my children 15 years ago are now rotting in some landfill. Tons of methane is rising from the heated pile of crap. Some of this methane is piped and used for "green" energy, but most goes into the atmosphere, where it becomes the worst type of global warming gas.

So, think for a moment, if it takes 1,000 years for all the landfill crap to decay, just how many more landfills will we need in 1,000 years? If we continue at our current pace, there will be hundreds of capped landfills all over the place, emitting tons of methane gas. Is this sustainable?

Chemicals
The average person uses dozens of chemicals, all designed for one purpose -- to make us happy. Some chemicals make us feel better while others make us look better. Much of this crap either ends up in a septic tank or in a sewage system. Since the Industrial Age began, we've created several thousand chemicals, and we don't know exactly how they interact with one another, or how they affect our health and environment over the long-term. Most of the chemicals we buy have long names that we can't even pronounce, yet we have no problem pouring the shit down the drain.

Air/Water Pollution
From cigarette smokers to nasty factories, we are belching tons of crap into our oceans, rivers, lakes, and air. Again, we don't know how all of the waste products interact with one another, and we don't know exactly what are are doing to our long-term health. Again, all this crap is emitted for a single purpose -- to make us happy, and to make our lives more comfortable.

So....
Excuse me, but am I the only one missing the insanity of our situation? We are poisoning the Planet and jeopardizing our health, and the health of all living creatures, just so that WE CAN HAVE SHORT TERM COMFORT. Is that absolutely stupid or what?

The Way We Am
Admittedly, not much has changed since the 1950s. If you look around, you just see people doing what they've ALWAYS done, and what their parents did. No one gives a second thought about jumping into their massive SUV, idling 10 minutes in a McDonald's drive-thru, and then rotting their insides out with a McNasty burger. Why? Because everyone is doing it, and it's ALWAYS been done that way.

Conservative Backlash
Right now we have the Tea Party and other conservative groups rabidly screaming that they DON'T WANT CHANGE. They say they want to get back to the "old ways," and then they start rambling about value concepts, like family, God, and country. They want to be comforted with their illusions as they cuddle by the fireplace with Sarah Palin's latest book. Their delusional values give them comfort, while their Prozac infested poop is flushed into the water system and absorbed by some innocent fish. And, it's for the better because now the fish is no longer depressed about the fouling of its water. And meanwhile, church people hold hands around a bond fire, sing songs, and discuss how Glenn Beck is still their leader, even though he's a Mormon.

Selfish Gene
I half think that people AREN'T inherently selfish. It's just that we have to be selfish because everyone else is selfish. We all have to fight for our own survival. This creates a vicious circle where everyone has to be more selfish to out-compete other selfish people. In the end, our health, environment, sanity, and the well-being of other wildlife are forgotten. But the important thing is that we have tons of chemicals in our bathroom cabinet to make us smell better, look better, and, ultimately, feel better. And, meanwhile, our society collapses under the weight of our own indifference.