We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming. And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction.
As Gandhi did years before, we must rebel by marching to the sea to make salt, and by striking. The entire country of India was shut down all at once. By organizing, we can accomplish the same thing. A day, a week, a month without spending any money or paying bills or going to work would send a clear message. There are simply more of us than them. We need to be willing to take the risk needed in order to create change. We may fail, but we cannot afford to not at least try.
I’ve been saying this for years. It seems clear to me now that it would have to happen at the same scale as the global Covid response to have any potential to be effective. Even then... complex systems are both resilient and self protecting. This beast should have dropped with the Covid lockdowns. It didn’t. Many reasons. Also financial collapses is still collapse. Beheading the ruling class doesn’t solve the problem. We will be going through a massive adaptive crisis no matter what we do collectively. Time to get to know our neighbors if we don’t already!
General Strikes are good, but require strike funds. If you are a worker, join a union (the IWW takes all), so you can help find the strikes of others and build the power to do as you suggest.
How do you justify the claim that "there are simply more of us than them"? How many people are there who are not only intellectually but also emotionally convinced and thus ready to personal sacrifice? I personally am not ready to sacrifice anything above the comfortable, even though at 65 it should be easier for me. Conversely is it possible to stop humanity's sleepwalking towards extinction level disaster without actual sacrifice? Succeeding in, as you suggest, having a majority stop working or spending money or paying bills for a week would help, but would it actually make a difference? I mean just because of the stupid sanctions decided after the very much provoked war in Ukraine I read that Germany is importing 150 million tons of coal from Indonesia.
Enough ranting. I suppose what is needed is not really a "rebellion" but an actual scientific plan that describes a *pragmatic* way out. One based not primarily on government action never mind political ideology, but on a social movement based on changing one's personal way of life. I wonder if there is anything like this around.
During the time of Gandhi, there wee 350 million people in India with 100,000 British in the ruling class. Similar numbers to America today. Everything stopped in India during the strike and it broke the back of the British.
I gave up a comfortable life and career to become an activist. It was the best choice I ever made. At least I know I am awake and alive and working with others.
Currently, I am working on the return of the artifacts and remains stolen from the massacred bodies of those slaughtered at Wounded Knee. These sacred treasures will most likely be returned before the anniversary of the slaughter this coming December. Their return will do a great deal to help heal historic trauma for the Lakota people. Maintaining a certain lifestyle cannot compare with being of service to others.
At this critical time, we cannot afford, in my opinion, to think only of our own comfort. We need to ask ourselves what it is that we can do to make a positive difference for future generations. Clearly, we have a lot to make up for and beginning with what we see around us is the place to start.
And in terms of your use of the word "rebellion," our complacency has allowed the world to reach this point. We have not said "no" time and time again when it needed to be said. So here we are. What will you do about it? This is personal.
Also, I wanted to add that consciousness is the only way out of this mess. From 2018 till 2021 I organized an annual conference on consciousness and contact. Three were held in South Dakota and included time on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Attendees at all four conferences returned home with heightened spiritual and psychic gifts which remain for most of them till this day. An autonomous soul cannot be controlled. Like Chris, I was kicked off of YouTube way back in September of 2019 because I encouraged people to stand up in my comments and during an interview regarding the conference that summer. I received no warning and to this day am not allowed to post comments. I do not post videos and never have but was perceived as a threat.
Chris is an ordained minister. He understands full-well the importance of the spiritual dimension of activism. It cannot be separated if the moral strength of one's position is to be maintained.
I think brave souls like you or Chris Hedges are very rare, perhaps one in ten thousand. I'd say the work of people like you is necessary but not sufficient to bring about the changes needed to avoid disaster. What is missing, I think, is a scientific plan that will map in demonstrably convincing way what the entire world should do. There are some efforts, such as the UN group around Jeffrey Sachs, but I think a much more dynamic and less official vehicle is needed.
Incidentally I agree with you that if humanity is to have a future it will have a spiritual future. A world with the power that technology provides but populated with non-spiritual people is simply not possible. Actually I happen to believe that religion is necessary, for only it provides the meaning and order of community.
Spirituality and religion are different things. I have no problem with people participating in a religious community as long as they maintain their own personal connection to the Divine. When we are living our lives as authentic souls, those standing around us will feel that energy and be lifted up as well. It is our responsibility for those of us who know that to share the information with others.
In the days to come, we will be called more and more to make a stand for what is morally and spiritually correct.
This bit of writing should be dispersed far and wide. Hedges has finally written to the very core of the matter. And that illustration by Mr. Fish… well what can one say about that. And for those who come and criticize Hedges for not having any solutions, he said it as simply as one can: Massive Civil Disobedience is all there is left. I for one am blessed to have someone to read as honest as one can be named Chris Hedges. Kudos to you Chris.
This is my feeling as well. It appears that even Chris Hedges, way out ahead of most political writers, prior to writing this piece, had been a bit naive. Even though his news articles and essays and are beautifully, concisely written, most people can't bear to read him because the truth he provides is too objective, too stark, too frightening. It's easier to look away. This 10-minute read, "The Dawn of the Apocalypse", was quite scary, sad, and mind-blowing for me to read. Hedges has finally pushed himself to look right into the Devil's eyes, and he's bringing us along with him. Hedges finally makes the point that he's been building up to for several years now. Anybody who has read this this piece (or listened to the free podcast of it, beautifully read by Hedges' wife, actress Eunice Wong), will understand why I've included the great 1819 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias", in this response to your good comment:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
Thank you for this pointed and searing piece Chris. Long time lover of your work.
Joining the folks who see collapse as inevitable at this stage. Preparing means accepting, deeply, first the futility of struggle. Resistance to cancer doesn’t cure cancer... it delays death by a bit. Often at a terrible cost. At scale this resistance will be astonishing and mostly wrongly deployed. There will be much resistance and gnashing of teeth as systems continue to a) fail and b) tighten their grip on the people in response to this failure.
My working brothers and sisters, grounded in the material world (and wary of the trans humanist garbage heap we are being sold), would do well to stop focusing on the ruling class and start supporting one another. There will be no rescue from above. No more in the coming years than there was in New Orleans. We are one other’s keepers.
Good time to start community building and ark building for the challenging years ahead. Once you accept death -- our own and the system’s -- the work becomes joyful. Especially when done with others. Be the seed of what comes next as the long winter arrives.
Tangentially related, I do wish there was more suspicion of the pharmaceutical industrial complex in your work. Why people are so quick to spare that utterly corrupted system the scrutiny rightly aimed at the rest of the world destroying machine continues to astound me. Our faith in the germ warfare story (and of our supposed mastery in that forever war against life itself) is laughable in reality but very deep among the global monied class. But then again so is our fear of death.
The covid vaccine has saved about 20 million lives worldwide. The pharmaceutical industry is corrupt and insane, but I hope you aren't trying to share some anti-vax mentality here. This is definitely not the place for conspiracy theories that defy logic.
I am sharing a mentality that does not see death as failure or lives saved as inherently heroic. Chris is making a call to resistance in service to all life and beauty on earth. I join him in service to this.
And yet I can’t help but wonder if the war on germs (of which we are entirely made, and upon which we and all life are entirely dependent) is really the answer any more than the war on the ruling class is likely to be.
I guess we each have to decide what a good death looks like. For many it may be a noble battle (against cancer or the ruling class... who may actually be fallible and human like us). Battle s fine I suppose... and ...death still comes.
For me, it is more attitude of peace and connection to community. When my time comes... from illness or over class... I will leave this earth to do her work without me. Which she will. 🙏
I already have, and now have two granddaughters as well; it is for them that I lay awake at night, wondering what kind of world awaits them. And if they can forgive me for not getting off my ass and doing more...
So, if one understands correctly, we must drastically reduce global population in order to save the world and it's really just a matter of the means of this reduction. Is this human culling to be the result of the presumed negative environmental impact of 'global warming' (or the new, preferred moniker of 'global climate change') of the more purposeful plan to withdraw/withhold energy and food resources to mostly poor people.
It seems the 'global elite' are very much on board with this line of reasoning and are fully prepared to implement policies that withhold the food and energy needed to support the soon to be ~8 Billion people on the planet and we should expect to see a stealth campaign of widespread, rapid depopulation in the global south starting right about now.
Typically, starving, freezing, baking populations with little left to lose rise up against their governments and all hell breaks loose. We are very close to this precipice now. If we don't collectively manage food, energy and enlightened democratic governance soon, we will massively depopulate. The trigger for this is 1000X more likely due to wide scale nuclear exchange than 'Global Warming'.
Extinction Rebellion are self righteous exhibitionists and poseurs merely proposing genocide by different means with the goal of saving the planet for right thinking, low carbon using vegans.
So you completely disagree with Hedges, who specifically mentions following in the footsteps of Extinction Rebellion? Not sure I understand your point--you're in favor of doing nothing?
The warnings actually go back to the early/mid-seventies. Wally Broecker at the Columbia Univ. Earth Institute coined "global warming" in '75. "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Wallace S. Broecker. Science. 8 Aug 1975. Vol 189, Issue 4201. pp. 460-463. But it really doesn't matter how long the warnings have been around because as Roger Hallam frames it, "Our culture is in massive denial." An outgrowth of the Disney-fication of reality -- an arena in which the USA has led the way for many decades.
Every year 10 times more people die from cold than heat. The 1920s were the hottest years, and yet they are ignored from the data because they are inconvenient to the politics and religion of global warming. The global warming faithful continue their speaking in tongues of the coming apocalypse and yet their predictions are always wrong, their magic climate models have to be calibrated every year.
And most importantly, they claim that their mission is to save humanity from the crisis of global warming, and thus they justify forced scarcity that would kill billions if allowed to take place.
There is a bunch of energy today that is created by option-A. It is relatively affordable and covers 85% of the energy needs of humanity today. There is no option-B to replace it. If the global warming fanatics really wanted to save humanity by eliminating C02 emissions, they would be focused on increasing the option-B alternatives (like nuclear) instead of attempting to destroy all option-A before those B options are ready.
Meanwhile all this fear-based hand-wringing about hot temperatures isn't helping. By the way, people need inexpensive electricity to run their air conditioners you dopes.
Sure Tommy. Funny... why do you want to cancel people you disagree with? Seems a rather weak person response. And given what I wrote, it is really telling that it triggers you so.
You would think that rulers would at least take steps to adapt to this new world--abandon Miami and other cities soon to be under water, abandon cities that will bake in a lifeless environment, enable all people to secure birth control, or reform food distribution methods to minimize mass starvation--but they do nothing, pretending everything will be all right (as soon as everyone drives electric cars!). Is their inaction due to greed or to contrived ignorance about the true state of affairs? In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter.
The lessons of being given a terminal diagnosis are clear: it is only when the diagnosis is given, the emotional grappling with the finality of it completed so that it can be truly accepted, that the important questions can be asked. It starts with "what now?" Only then will responsible actions occur, actions that are oriented around the truth, the terminal diagnosis. It necessitates giving up what the Australian activist Margi Prideaux calls "Hopium," the addictive substance known as "But wait! There's good news, too. If we only [insert techno or political solution you have heard of here] then all will be well." It means looking at the present and the near future with clear eyes. THIS article is what a clear eyed account reveals to the courageous gaze. It is a hard truth to accept. I was born at the beginning of one of the best of times in the United States, I am living through its collapse now. It will be just as bad as Hedges predicts. And I immediately face the tremendous helpless grief that comes with an unavoidable terminal diagnosis. This grief will be with us on the journey now, it is not something that can be dealt with and moved on. And as Adrienne Rich once put it, "There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors." And then, as with all terminal diagnoses, we roll up our sleeves and begin to deal with what has been set before us.
"And I immediately face the tremendous helpless grief that comes with an unavoidable terminal diagnosis." Nice writing and a good point. I usually don't read comments to Hedges' articles, but I'm trying to deal with this one, his masterpiece. This piece is like Darwin's Origin of the Species. It draws the line. We cannot go back to thinking like we thought before.
And yet, clueless politicians keep getting elected who will work mightily to accelerate our path toward catastrophe (ex.# 1: dirtbag trump). Do so few people have the imagination to extrapolate these heat waves intensifying, you know, like they have been for years, to the point where people start dying by the thousands, with no place to go? What do you do when the temperature continues to climb over hundreds of square miles? This looks like a natural progression to me. This process was announced to the public by Dr. James Hansen in the US Congress in 1988. I remember. Don't get me started on large scale crop failures, which are not out of the question either. In the end we seem to be merely stupid animals, and that will be our end.
The pathology of cultural suicide which led to global the climate crisis is linked to the recent Supreme Court decisions on reproductive rights for women, as well as their views on gun control.
Rational people must look upon these forces, from Pelosi to Manchin to McConell, and Shell, Chevron, and Reyethon, et al, as we would the mentally ill. I don’t even know if that tiny minority of oligarchs which are threatening our (and their) species can be held responsible. We must take responsibility and action, and stop blaming these sick fools. Isn’t that what it means to be rational?
"The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined."
Why leave out the millions upon millions dead from European colonialism and the genocides in the Americas Indonesia, and Africa? Why leave out the ongoing mass murder campaign of the American death cult and its statelite states in multiple countries? Also the millions attributed to Mao are from anti-communist western sources and political foes of the Great Leap Forward. Anyone who believes numbers from the CIA or their cut outs... or from the capitalists and war criminals of the west is gullible in the extreme. There were millions of deaths... however, many were caused by famine.. of course Mao was responsible for some or a lot of this, but we can never be sure just how many because of the lies and propaganda narratives of the west. I suspect Stalin's numbers are also massively inflated. Quote below from: https://mronline.org/author/josephball/
"U.S. state agencies have provided assistance to those with a negative attitude to Maoism (and communism in general) throughout the post-war period. For example, the veteran historian of Maoism Roderick MacFarquhar edited The China Quarterly in the 1960s. This magazine published allegations about massive famine deaths that have been quoted ever since. It later emerged that this journal received money from a CIA front organisation, as MacFarquhar admitted in a recent letter to The London Review of Books. (Roderick MacFarquhar states that he did not know the money was coming from the CIA while he was editing The China Quarterly.)
Those who have provided qualitative evidence, such as eyewitness accounts cited by Jasper Becker in his famous account of the period Hungry Ghosts, have not provided enough accompanying evidence to authenticate these accounts. Important documentary evidence quoted by Chang and Halliday concerning the Great Leap Forward is presented in a demonstrably misleading way.
Evidence from the Deng Xiaoping regime Mao that millions died during the Great Leap Forward is not reliable. Evidence from peasants contradicts the claim that Mao was mainly to blame for the deaths that did occur during the Great Leap Forward period."
Really? I condemn war criminals, and not just those we are directed towards by western narrative managers. My point (whoosh, right over your head) is that western narratives, which have been proven false over and over again, should always be questioned... especially by leftists who should know better... and narrowly focused condemnations are a form of manipulative American exceptionalist propaganda. Sorry you missed that, dear ankle-biter. I would also add Churchill to the list of genocidal monsters for his role in the Bengal famine. Plenty of monsters to choose from. Hedges knows all this, of course. We should clean our own filthy house before daring comment on those of others.
The same can certainly be said of Cuba, who despite a 50 year embargo exceeds U.S. quality of life in every category, including being the only modern industrial country rated by the WWF as 'sustainable'. Unfortunately, Chris' article points out that all other discussions, aside from those related to survival, are being rendered, moot.
Thing is you picked really the worst tree out of the forest that is Hedges’ piece. I suspect he invoked the mass murders of communism’s heyday in order to make it clear how rough or a ride we’re all in.
But instead of addressing the core of the piece, you cherry pick and take exception on behalf of someone like Mao.
Never mind the huge dump Hedge is already taking on the West and does so on the regular anyway.
Also, “ankle-biter”? Fuck off cunt, get some real insults.
Oh, that hurts! It was an accurate description of your pathetic responses, not an insult. If you choose to take it that way, be my guest. I explained in plain english why I excerpted that bit, but you are so busy nipping away that you choose to ignore that. I did nothing on behalf of Mao. I merely pointed out the hypocrisy of Hedges' selective examples of evil. I have no disagreements with the core of the piece, therefore felt no need to comment on it, and I'm very sorry that your little barking chimp brain-box is so filled with steamed cheeze-whiz that you felt a need to chime in and are now flailing. Carry on, or fuck all the way off... your choice.
"It is not as if we were not warned. It is not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It is not as if we could not see the steady ecological degeneration and species extinction."
Yes, but it IS as if humans don't want to give up their unnatural lifestyles and conveniences, even to save life on Earth. Human attitudes toward the natural world, along with lust for material things and unnaturally comfortable lifestyles, are the problems, not lack of knowledge or information. Humans have known since the late 19th century that unnaturally emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases would warm the atmosphere, they just don't want to give up anything in order to do anything about it. Instead, people fantasize about a Green New Deal or other types of phony nonsense that won't fix global warming or any other environmental or ecological problems. The only thing that will fix global warming is to eliminate industrial living, because that's what's causing it.
"The ruling oligarchs will retreat to protected compounds where they will have access to services and amenities, including food, water and medical care ..."
No, the ruling class will suffer just like everyone else. They may be able to save things like food and water for a short period of time, but if the Earth becomes unlivable, they won't be able to live either. This is one of the problems when leftists attempt to analyze and comment on environmental issues. While the ruling class and other rich people are a huge problem, they're not the only problem. Anyone who has more than 2 kids and anyone who consumes more than they need -- basically, all of us in modern society -- is part of the problem too. "Voting, lobbying, petitioning, donating to environmental lobby groups, divestment campaigns and protesting to force the global ruling class to address the climate catastrophe proved no more effective than scrofula victims’ superstitious appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch." Yes, because those aren't the solutions. The solution is to quit consuming all this stuff, starting with petroleum and petroleum products, and including beef. If people did those things, they could eliminate or virtually eliminate the ruling class as a side benefit to fixing global warming.*
"There are three mathematical models for the future: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere. This third scenario is dependent on an immediate halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to end the animal agriculture industry – almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gasses as the fossil fuel industry – greening the deserts and restoring rainforests."
Tropical rainforests cannot be "restored." They have been evolving for 200 million years, because the tropics don't experience ice ages. The trees and plants in tropical rainforests have been growing there for so long that the soil is depleted of nutrients, and at this point the trees and other plants grow out of each other, not out of the ground. Once you cut a portion of a tropical rainforest, it's gone forever. Natural (i.e, native) deserts, as opposed to the ones caused by humans (which began thousands of years ago in the Middle East because of killing trees and destroying forests) should not be "greened." They should be left in their natural state. Human-caused deserts, on the other hand, should be restored to whatever ecosystems they were before humans destroyed them.
"We knew for decades what harnessing a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum would do to the climate."
In 1896, Swedish scientists Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Hogbom discovered that humans were adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a great rate, and it had been known for decades that CO2 was a greenhouse gas that trapped heat in the atmosphere. Therefore, humans have known for over 100 years about this problem (though these scientists didn't realize how bad the problem was, because humans were not emitting anywhere near the amount of greenhouse gases then that they are now).
"Civilizations, as Tainter writes, are 'fragile, impermanent things.' Collapse, he writes, 'is a recurrent feature of human societies.'"
Yes, because civilization is not the proper way to live on this planet; living in small groups as hunter-gatherers is. The last portion of Tainter's comment is inaccurate: hunter-gatherer societies don't collapse, only agricultural civilizations do.
"The global ruling class has forfeited its legitimacy and credibility. It must be replaced. This will require sustained mass civil disobedience ..."
The only "civil disobedience" that will work is a major reduction in human consumption of fossil fuels and anything directly or indirectly created from them. Hypocritical street demonstrations and even civil disobedience will not have any effect on those in power without relevant corresponding actions on the part of the protesters, and we should have learned that lesson long ago.
* To be clear, I think that it was too late years or maybe even decades ago to stop human-caused global warming, and it seems pretty obvious that we've been in a feedback loop for a while, where the results of global warming are causing more global warming. I never give up hope because we can't know for certain and you never know what might happen if you keep trying, but the realistic outlook couldn't be more grim.
You and they are fools if you think that you can live underground like that. They will end up suffering both physically and psychologically, and will die out shortly if they can't live above ground.
I suggest you learn how to read and comprehend, and until then YOU should stop commenting. I said "the ruling class and other rich people are a huge problem" and advocated elimination of the ruling class by greatly lowered consumption. You're a perfect example of your ideologies blinding you to reality.
The hand strangling the baby reminds me of Grover Norquest's wish to he and others:
"Who famously said he wanted to shrink government to a size where he could drown it in a bathtub."
But my wish, as well, which I am quite certain that; you Chris, Earl Shorris, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Cornel West, and particularly William Robinson would share in his forth-coming August 2022 book, "Can Global Capitalism Endure?" --- goes all the way back to the triplet of Empire's modern development:
1. Dumping 'Negative Externality Cost' on "others" in order to deceive and make massive faux-profits.
2. Employ the pyramidal scam of "Accumulation by Dispossession" to become, as we are now, "We're #1", "We're #1", "We're #1" in having the highest/worst GINI Coefficient of Wealth INEQUALITY in the world.
3. And finally, to employ that massive trove of stolen Wealth to feed this: Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal Child-Killing & War-Starting EMPIRE, controlled by the ‘Ruling-Elite’, UHNWI, <0.003%ers, TCCers, arrogantly self-appointed "Masters of the Universe", and "Evil (not-so) Geniuses" [Kurt Andersen] — which hides Empire behind their totally corrupted dual-party Vichy-facade of faux-democracy.
The sum of which is this pyramid of Empire:
There has been over a century of dumping fossil fuel “Negative Externality Costs” on our planet that made trillions in faux-profits, which should be ‘clawed-Back” from those UHNWI and ruling-elites who gorged on those looted, hoarded, and unproductive phony profits.
This is now the major way that the ultra-rich and their global corporations and banks loot the entire world, which is now just one fully integrated but well camouflaged and Disguised Global Crony Capitalist EMPIRE, as Prof. Robinson first and most accurately diagnosed and described as early as he did:
“The U.S. state is a key point of condensation for pressures from dominant
groups around the world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to
secure the legitimacy of the system overall. In this regard, “U.S.”
imperialism refers to the use by transnational elites of the U.S. state
apparatus (hard & soft powers) to continue to attempt to expand,
defend, and stabilize the global capitalist system. We are witness less
to a “U.S.” imperialism per se than to a global capitalist imperialism.
We face an EMPIRE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL, headquartered, for evident
historical reasons, in Washington.”
[Caps added]
Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 2014 Robinson, William
Chris, Earlier. In 1908 Heidegger begged humanity not to harness the energy of the sun. Once done, Feynman saw only ignorance of the deed. He said "It's over." I joined honeybees in 1977, my cries met "They sting." I made a movie of the vacant-eyed in 1982. Today they swarm, cry and buy, under my windows. Our junkie empire strikes bottom and nods. We are not change if we are chumps. ever S
I can agree with parts of this editorial! But when is the last time That You and Your government stopped an earthquake, or changed the ocean currents ,or stopped the sun rays? I do believe "never" . So I will put it to You and others, Who controls the climate? Not You or I! As I believe in Our Maker, God , it is He who controls this environment. Not Man. What man can control are His or Her emotions, for lack of a better word, and understand that it is God calling us back to Him. Not our man made ideals. I suspect that many will poke holes in My comments. To be expected. Faith is a big word!
Ignorance is bliss. Good for you to keep that faith but I hope our policy makers know more about science and try to avert the collapse. For my part, I refuse to open my eyes and perhaps see a sadist god that is condemning mankind to perish in such a cruel way.
As Gandhi did years before, we must rebel by marching to the sea to make salt, and by striking. The entire country of India was shut down all at once. By organizing, we can accomplish the same thing. A day, a week, a month without spending any money or paying bills or going to work would send a clear message. There are simply more of us than them. We need to be willing to take the risk needed in order to create change. We may fail, but we cannot afford to not at least try.
I’ve been saying this for years. It seems clear to me now that it would have to happen at the same scale as the global Covid response to have any potential to be effective. Even then... complex systems are both resilient and self protecting. This beast should have dropped with the Covid lockdowns. It didn’t. Many reasons. Also financial collapses is still collapse. Beheading the ruling class doesn’t solve the problem. We will be going through a massive adaptive crisis no matter what we do collectively. Time to get to know our neighbors if we don’t already!
General Strikes are good, but require strike funds. If you are a worker, join a union (the IWW takes all), so you can help find the strikes of others and build the power to do as you suggest.
How do you justify the claim that "there are simply more of us than them"? How many people are there who are not only intellectually but also emotionally convinced and thus ready to personal sacrifice? I personally am not ready to sacrifice anything above the comfortable, even though at 65 it should be easier for me. Conversely is it possible to stop humanity's sleepwalking towards extinction level disaster without actual sacrifice? Succeeding in, as you suggest, having a majority stop working or spending money or paying bills for a week would help, but would it actually make a difference? I mean just because of the stupid sanctions decided after the very much provoked war in Ukraine I read that Germany is importing 150 million tons of coal from Indonesia.
Enough ranting. I suppose what is needed is not really a "rebellion" but an actual scientific plan that describes a *pragmatic* way out. One based not primarily on government action never mind political ideology, but on a social movement based on changing one's personal way of life. I wonder if there is anything like this around.
During the time of Gandhi, there wee 350 million people in India with 100,000 British in the ruling class. Similar numbers to America today. Everything stopped in India during the strike and it broke the back of the British.
I gave up a comfortable life and career to become an activist. It was the best choice I ever made. At least I know I am awake and alive and working with others.
Currently, I am working on the return of the artifacts and remains stolen from the massacred bodies of those slaughtered at Wounded Knee. These sacred treasures will most likely be returned before the anniversary of the slaughter this coming December. Their return will do a great deal to help heal historic trauma for the Lakota people. Maintaining a certain lifestyle cannot compare with being of service to others.
At this critical time, we cannot afford, in my opinion, to think only of our own comfort. We need to ask ourselves what it is that we can do to make a positive difference for future generations. Clearly, we have a lot to make up for and beginning with what we see around us is the place to start.
And in terms of your use of the word "rebellion," our complacency has allowed the world to reach this point. We have not said "no" time and time again when it needed to be said. So here we are. What will you do about it? This is personal.
Also, I wanted to add that consciousness is the only way out of this mess. From 2018 till 2021 I organized an annual conference on consciousness and contact. Three were held in South Dakota and included time on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Attendees at all four conferences returned home with heightened spiritual and psychic gifts which remain for most of them till this day. An autonomous soul cannot be controlled. Like Chris, I was kicked off of YouTube way back in September of 2019 because I encouraged people to stand up in my comments and during an interview regarding the conference that summer. I received no warning and to this day am not allowed to post comments. I do not post videos and never have but was perceived as a threat.
Chris is an ordained minister. He understands full-well the importance of the spiritual dimension of activism. It cannot be separated if the moral strength of one's position is to be maintained.
I think brave souls like you or Chris Hedges are very rare, perhaps one in ten thousand. I'd say the work of people like you is necessary but not sufficient to bring about the changes needed to avoid disaster. What is missing, I think, is a scientific plan that will map in demonstrably convincing way what the entire world should do. There are some efforts, such as the UN group around Jeffrey Sachs, but I think a much more dynamic and less official vehicle is needed.
Incidentally I agree with you that if humanity is to have a future it will have a spiritual future. A world with the power that technology provides but populated with non-spiritual people is simply not possible. Actually I happen to believe that religion is necessary, for only it provides the meaning and order of community.
Thank you Dianelos,
Spirituality and religion are different things. I have no problem with people participating in a religious community as long as they maintain their own personal connection to the Divine. When we are living our lives as authentic souls, those standing around us will feel that energy and be lifted up as well. It is our responsibility for those of us who know that to share the information with others.
In the days to come, we will be called more and more to make a stand for what is morally and spiritually correct.
Stay safe!
In the U.S., it's 300 million people and 350 elites. Their bunkers under Martha's Vineyard have A/C.
This bit of writing should be dispersed far and wide. Hedges has finally written to the very core of the matter. And that illustration by Mr. Fish… well what can one say about that. And for those who come and criticize Hedges for not having any solutions, he said it as simply as one can: Massive Civil Disobedience is all there is left. I for one am blessed to have someone to read as honest as one can be named Chris Hedges. Kudos to you Chris.
This is my feeling as well. It appears that even Chris Hedges, way out ahead of most political writers, prior to writing this piece, had been a bit naive. Even though his news articles and essays and are beautifully, concisely written, most people can't bear to read him because the truth he provides is too objective, too stark, too frightening. It's easier to look away. This 10-minute read, "The Dawn of the Apocalypse", was quite scary, sad, and mind-blowing for me to read. Hedges has finally pushed himself to look right into the Devil's eyes, and he's bringing us along with him. Hedges finally makes the point that he's been building up to for several years now. Anybody who has read this this piece (or listened to the free podcast of it, beautifully read by Hedges' wife, actress Eunice Wong), will understand why I've included the great 1819 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias", in this response to your good comment:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
Thank you for this pointed and searing piece Chris. Long time lover of your work.
Joining the folks who see collapse as inevitable at this stage. Preparing means accepting, deeply, first the futility of struggle. Resistance to cancer doesn’t cure cancer... it delays death by a bit. Often at a terrible cost. At scale this resistance will be astonishing and mostly wrongly deployed. There will be much resistance and gnashing of teeth as systems continue to a) fail and b) tighten their grip on the people in response to this failure.
My working brothers and sisters, grounded in the material world (and wary of the trans humanist garbage heap we are being sold), would do well to stop focusing on the ruling class and start supporting one another. There will be no rescue from above. No more in the coming years than there was in New Orleans. We are one other’s keepers.
Good time to start community building and ark building for the challenging years ahead. Once you accept death -- our own and the system’s -- the work becomes joyful. Especially when done with others. Be the seed of what comes next as the long winter arrives.
Tangentially related, I do wish there was more suspicion of the pharmaceutical industrial complex in your work. Why people are so quick to spare that utterly corrupted system the scrutiny rightly aimed at the rest of the world destroying machine continues to astound me. Our faith in the germ warfare story (and of our supposed mastery in that forever war against life itself) is laughable in reality but very deep among the global monied class. But then again so is our fear of death.
Deeply grateful for your voice and your work🙏
The covid vaccine has saved about 20 million lives worldwide. The pharmaceutical industry is corrupt and insane, but I hope you aren't trying to share some anti-vax mentality here. This is definitely not the place for conspiracy theories that defy logic.
I am sharing a mentality that does not see death as failure or lives saved as inherently heroic. Chris is making a call to resistance in service to all life and beauty on earth. I join him in service to this.
And yet I can’t help but wonder if the war on germs (of which we are entirely made, and upon which we and all life are entirely dependent) is really the answer any more than the war on the ruling class is likely to be.
I guess we each have to decide what a good death looks like. For many it may be a noble battle (against cancer or the ruling class... who may actually be fallible and human like us). Battle s fine I suppose... and ...death still comes.
For me, it is more attitude of peace and connection to community. When my time comes... from illness or over class... I will leave this earth to do her work without me. Which she will. 🙏
Thanks for this good comment. On my Mac, using Safari, I couldn't "like" it, but I like it!
With such hell awaiting us, it would seem to me that to bring children into this world is absolute child abuse.
I already have, and now have two granddaughters as well; it is for them that I lay awake at night, wondering what kind of world awaits them. And if they can forgive me for not getting off my ass and doing more...
So, if one understands correctly, we must drastically reduce global population in order to save the world and it's really just a matter of the means of this reduction. Is this human culling to be the result of the presumed negative environmental impact of 'global warming' (or the new, preferred moniker of 'global climate change') of the more purposeful plan to withdraw/withhold energy and food resources to mostly poor people.
It seems the 'global elite' are very much on board with this line of reasoning and are fully prepared to implement policies that withhold the food and energy needed to support the soon to be ~8 Billion people on the planet and we should expect to see a stealth campaign of widespread, rapid depopulation in the global south starting right about now.
Typically, starving, freezing, baking populations with little left to lose rise up against their governments and all hell breaks loose. We are very close to this precipice now. If we don't collectively manage food, energy and enlightened democratic governance soon, we will massively depopulate. The trigger for this is 1000X more likely due to wide scale nuclear exchange than 'Global Warming'.
Extinction Rebellion are self righteous exhibitionists and poseurs merely proposing genocide by different means with the goal of saving the planet for right thinking, low carbon using vegans.
So you completely disagree with Hedges, who specifically mentions following in the footsteps of Extinction Rebellion? Not sure I understand your point--you're in favor of doing nothing?
The warnings actually go back to the early/mid-seventies. Wally Broecker at the Columbia Univ. Earth Institute coined "global warming" in '75. "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Wallace S. Broecker. Science. 8 Aug 1975. Vol 189, Issue 4201. pp. 460-463. But it really doesn't matter how long the warnings have been around because as Roger Hallam frames it, "Our culture is in massive denial." An outgrowth of the Disney-fication of reality -- an arena in which the USA has led the way for many decades.
Every year 10 times more people die from cold than heat. The 1920s were the hottest years, and yet they are ignored from the data because they are inconvenient to the politics and religion of global warming. The global warming faithful continue their speaking in tongues of the coming apocalypse and yet their predictions are always wrong, their magic climate models have to be calibrated every year.
And most importantly, they claim that their mission is to save humanity from the crisis of global warming, and thus they justify forced scarcity that would kill billions if allowed to take place.
There is a bunch of energy today that is created by option-A. It is relatively affordable and covers 85% of the energy needs of humanity today. There is no option-B to replace it. If the global warming fanatics really wanted to save humanity by eliminating C02 emissions, they would be focused on increasing the option-B alternatives (like nuclear) instead of attempting to destroy all option-A before those B options are ready.
Meanwhile all this fear-based hand-wringing about hot temperatures isn't helping. By the way, people need inexpensive electricity to run their air conditioners you dopes.
Uh, nope. You've got it completely back-asswards. Very troll-like indeed.
Sure Tommy. Funny... why do you want to cancel people you disagree with? Seems a rather weak person response. And given what I wrote, it is really telling that it triggers you so.
You would think that rulers would at least take steps to adapt to this new world--abandon Miami and other cities soon to be under water, abandon cities that will bake in a lifeless environment, enable all people to secure birth control, or reform food distribution methods to minimize mass starvation--but they do nothing, pretending everything will be all right (as soon as everyone drives electric cars!). Is their inaction due to greed or to contrived ignorance about the true state of affairs? In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter.
The lessons of being given a terminal diagnosis are clear: it is only when the diagnosis is given, the emotional grappling with the finality of it completed so that it can be truly accepted, that the important questions can be asked. It starts with "what now?" Only then will responsible actions occur, actions that are oriented around the truth, the terminal diagnosis. It necessitates giving up what the Australian activist Margi Prideaux calls "Hopium," the addictive substance known as "But wait! There's good news, too. If we only [insert techno or political solution you have heard of here] then all will be well." It means looking at the present and the near future with clear eyes. THIS article is what a clear eyed account reveals to the courageous gaze. It is a hard truth to accept. I was born at the beginning of one of the best of times in the United States, I am living through its collapse now. It will be just as bad as Hedges predicts. And I immediately face the tremendous helpless grief that comes with an unavoidable terminal diagnosis. This grief will be with us on the journey now, it is not something that can be dealt with and moved on. And as Adrienne Rich once put it, "There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors." And then, as with all terminal diagnoses, we roll up our sleeves and begin to deal with what has been set before us.
"And I immediately face the tremendous helpless grief that comes with an unavoidable terminal diagnosis." Nice writing and a good point. I usually don't read comments to Hedges' articles, but I'm trying to deal with this one, his masterpiece. This piece is like Darwin's Origin of the Species. It draws the line. We cannot go back to thinking like we thought before.
Yes!
And yet, clueless politicians keep getting elected who will work mightily to accelerate our path toward catastrophe (ex.# 1: dirtbag trump). Do so few people have the imagination to extrapolate these heat waves intensifying, you know, like they have been for years, to the point where people start dying by the thousands, with no place to go? What do you do when the temperature continues to climb over hundreds of square miles? This looks like a natural progression to me. This process was announced to the public by Dr. James Hansen in the US Congress in 1988. I remember. Don't get me started on large scale crop failures, which are not out of the question either. In the end we seem to be merely stupid animals, and that will be our end.
Most people are easily distracted. I wish that I could say that most cats are not.
The pathology of cultural suicide which led to global the climate crisis is linked to the recent Supreme Court decisions on reproductive rights for women, as well as their views on gun control.
Rational people must look upon these forces, from Pelosi to Manchin to McConell, and Shell, Chevron, and Reyethon, et al, as we would the mentally ill. I don’t even know if that tiny minority of oligarchs which are threatening our (and their) species can be held responsible. We must take responsibility and action, and stop blaming these sick fools. Isn’t that what it means to be rational?
"The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined."
Why leave out the millions upon millions dead from European colonialism and the genocides in the Americas Indonesia, and Africa? Why leave out the ongoing mass murder campaign of the American death cult and its statelite states in multiple countries? Also the millions attributed to Mao are from anti-communist western sources and political foes of the Great Leap Forward. Anyone who believes numbers from the CIA or their cut outs... or from the capitalists and war criminals of the west is gullible in the extreme. There were millions of deaths... however, many were caused by famine.. of course Mao was responsible for some or a lot of this, but we can never be sure just how many because of the lies and propaganda narratives of the west. I suspect Stalin's numbers are also massively inflated. Quote below from: https://mronline.org/author/josephball/
"U.S. state agencies have provided assistance to those with a negative attitude to Maoism (and communism in general) throughout the post-war period. For example, the veteran historian of Maoism Roderick MacFarquhar edited The China Quarterly in the 1960s. This magazine published allegations about massive famine deaths that have been quoted ever since. It later emerged that this journal received money from a CIA front organisation, as MacFarquhar admitted in a recent letter to The London Review of Books. (Roderick MacFarquhar states that he did not know the money was coming from the CIA while he was editing The China Quarterly.)
Those who have provided qualitative evidence, such as eyewitness accounts cited by Jasper Becker in his famous account of the period Hungry Ghosts, have not provided enough accompanying evidence to authenticate these accounts. Important documentary evidence quoted by Chang and Halliday concerning the Great Leap Forward is presented in a demonstrably misleading way.
Evidence from the Deng Xiaoping regime Mao that millions died during the Great Leap Forward is not reliable. Evidence from peasants contradicts the claim that Mao was mainly to blame for the deaths that did occur during the Great Leap Forward period."
Simping for mass murderers. Weird flex.
Really? I condemn war criminals, and not just those we are directed towards by western narrative managers. My point (whoosh, right over your head) is that western narratives, which have been proven false over and over again, should always be questioned... especially by leftists who should know better... and narrowly focused condemnations are a form of manipulative American exceptionalist propaganda. Sorry you missed that, dear ankle-biter. I would also add Churchill to the list of genocidal monsters for his role in the Bengal famine. Plenty of monsters to choose from. Hedges knows all this, of course. We should clean our own filthy house before daring comment on those of others.
The same can certainly be said of Cuba, who despite a 50 year embargo exceeds U.S. quality of life in every category, including being the only modern industrial country rated by the WWF as 'sustainable'. Unfortunately, Chris' article points out that all other discussions, aside from those related to survival, are being rendered, moot.
Starve me harder, Mao Daddy.
Thanks for confirming your ankle-biter status.
Thing is you picked really the worst tree out of the forest that is Hedges’ piece. I suspect he invoked the mass murders of communism’s heyday in order to make it clear how rough or a ride we’re all in.
But instead of addressing the core of the piece, you cherry pick and take exception on behalf of someone like Mao.
Never mind the huge dump Hedge is already taking on the West and does so on the regular anyway.
Also, “ankle-biter”? Fuck off cunt, get some real insults.
Right on. But why talk to this fool at all?
Oh, that hurts! It was an accurate description of your pathetic responses, not an insult. If you choose to take it that way, be my guest. I explained in plain english why I excerpted that bit, but you are so busy nipping away that you choose to ignore that. I did nothing on behalf of Mao. I merely pointed out the hypocrisy of Hedges' selective examples of evil. I have no disagreements with the core of the piece, therefore felt no need to comment on it, and I'm very sorry that your little barking chimp brain-box is so filled with steamed cheeze-whiz that you felt a need to chime in and are now flailing. Carry on, or fuck all the way off... your choice.
Twat did you say, ankle-biter?
"It is not as if we were not warned. It is not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It is not as if we could not see the steady ecological degeneration and species extinction."
Yes, but it IS as if humans don't want to give up their unnatural lifestyles and conveniences, even to save life on Earth. Human attitudes toward the natural world, along with lust for material things and unnaturally comfortable lifestyles, are the problems, not lack of knowledge or information. Humans have known since the late 19th century that unnaturally emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases would warm the atmosphere, they just don't want to give up anything in order to do anything about it. Instead, people fantasize about a Green New Deal or other types of phony nonsense that won't fix global warming or any other environmental or ecological problems. The only thing that will fix global warming is to eliminate industrial living, because that's what's causing it.
"The ruling oligarchs will retreat to protected compounds where they will have access to services and amenities, including food, water and medical care ..."
No, the ruling class will suffer just like everyone else. They may be able to save things like food and water for a short period of time, but if the Earth becomes unlivable, they won't be able to live either. This is one of the problems when leftists attempt to analyze and comment on environmental issues. While the ruling class and other rich people are a huge problem, they're not the only problem. Anyone who has more than 2 kids and anyone who consumes more than they need -- basically, all of us in modern society -- is part of the problem too. "Voting, lobbying, petitioning, donating to environmental lobby groups, divestment campaigns and protesting to force the global ruling class to address the climate catastrophe proved no more effective than scrofula victims’ superstitious appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch." Yes, because those aren't the solutions. The solution is to quit consuming all this stuff, starting with petroleum and petroleum products, and including beef. If people did those things, they could eliminate or virtually eliminate the ruling class as a side benefit to fixing global warming.*
"There are three mathematical models for the future: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere. This third scenario is dependent on an immediate halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to end the animal agriculture industry – almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gasses as the fossil fuel industry – greening the deserts and restoring rainforests."
Tropical rainforests cannot be "restored." They have been evolving for 200 million years, because the tropics don't experience ice ages. The trees and plants in tropical rainforests have been growing there for so long that the soil is depleted of nutrients, and at this point the trees and other plants grow out of each other, not out of the ground. Once you cut a portion of a tropical rainforest, it's gone forever. Natural (i.e, native) deserts, as opposed to the ones caused by humans (which began thousands of years ago in the Middle East because of killing trees and destroying forests) should not be "greened." They should be left in their natural state. Human-caused deserts, on the other hand, should be restored to whatever ecosystems they were before humans destroyed them.
"We knew for decades what harnessing a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum would do to the climate."
In 1896, Swedish scientists Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Hogbom discovered that humans were adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a great rate, and it had been known for decades that CO2 was a greenhouse gas that trapped heat in the atmosphere. Therefore, humans have known for over 100 years about this problem (though these scientists didn't realize how bad the problem was, because humans were not emitting anywhere near the amount of greenhouse gases then that they are now).
"Civilizations, as Tainter writes, are 'fragile, impermanent things.' Collapse, he writes, 'is a recurrent feature of human societies.'"
Yes, because civilization is not the proper way to live on this planet; living in small groups as hunter-gatherers is. The last portion of Tainter's comment is inaccurate: hunter-gatherer societies don't collapse, only agricultural civilizations do.
"The global ruling class has forfeited its legitimacy and credibility. It must be replaced. This will require sustained mass civil disobedience ..."
The only "civil disobedience" that will work is a major reduction in human consumption of fossil fuels and anything directly or indirectly created from them. Hypocritical street demonstrations and even civil disobedience will not have any effect on those in power without relevant corresponding actions on the part of the protesters, and we should have learned that lesson long ago.
* To be clear, I think that it was too late years or maybe even decades ago to stop human-caused global warming, and it seems pretty obvious that we've been in a feedback loop for a while, where the results of global warming are causing more global warming. I never give up hope because we can't know for certain and you never know what might happen if you keep trying, but the realistic outlook couldn't be more grim.
You and they are fools if you think that you can live underground like that. They will end up suffering both physically and psychologically, and will die out shortly if they can't live above ground.
I suggest you learn how to read and comprehend, and until then YOU should stop commenting. I said "the ruling class and other rich people are a huge problem" and advocated elimination of the ruling class by greatly lowered consumption. You're a perfect example of your ideologies blinding you to reality.
The hand strangling the baby reminds me of Grover Norquest's wish to he and others:
"Who famously said he wanted to shrink government to a size where he could drown it in a bathtub."
But my wish, as well, which I am quite certain that; you Chris, Earl Shorris, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Cornel West, and particularly William Robinson would share in his forth-coming August 2022 book, "Can Global Capitalism Endure?" --- goes all the way back to the triplet of Empire's modern development:
1. Dumping 'Negative Externality Cost' on "others" in order to deceive and make massive faux-profits.
2. Employ the pyramidal scam of "Accumulation by Dispossession" to become, as we are now, "We're #1", "We're #1", "We're #1" in having the highest/worst GINI Coefficient of Wealth INEQUALITY in the world.
3. And finally, to employ that massive trove of stolen Wealth to feed this: Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal Child-Killing & War-Starting EMPIRE, controlled by the ‘Ruling-Elite’, UHNWI, <0.003%ers, TCCers, arrogantly self-appointed "Masters of the Universe", and "Evil (not-so) Geniuses" [Kurt Andersen] — which hides Empire behind their totally corrupted dual-party Vichy-facade of faux-democracy.
The sum of which is this pyramid of Empire:
There has been over a century of dumping fossil fuel “Negative Externality Costs” on our planet that made trillions in faux-profits, which should be ‘clawed-Back” from those UHNWI and ruling-elites who gorged on those looted, hoarded, and unproductive phony profits.
This is now the major way that the ultra-rich and their global corporations and banks loot the entire world, which is now just one fully integrated but well camouflaged and Disguised Global Crony Capitalist EMPIRE, as Prof. Robinson first and most accurately diagnosed and described as early as he did:
“The U.S. state is a key point of condensation for pressures from dominant
groups around the world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to
secure the legitimacy of the system overall. In this regard, “U.S.”
imperialism refers to the use by transnational elites of the U.S. state
apparatus (hard & soft powers) to continue to attempt to expand,
defend, and stabilize the global capitalist system. We are witness less
to a “U.S.” imperialism per se than to a global capitalist imperialism.
We face an EMPIRE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL, headquartered, for evident
historical reasons, in Washington.”
[Caps added]
Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 2014 Robinson, William
Cambridge University Press.
Chris, Earlier. In 1908 Heidegger begged humanity not to harness the energy of the sun. Once done, Feynman saw only ignorance of the deed. He said "It's over." I joined honeybees in 1977, my cries met "They sting." I made a movie of the vacant-eyed in 1982. Today they swarm, cry and buy, under my windows. Our junkie empire strikes bottom and nods. We are not change if we are chumps. ever S
I can agree with parts of this editorial! But when is the last time That You and Your government stopped an earthquake, or changed the ocean currents ,or stopped the sun rays? I do believe "never" . So I will put it to You and others, Who controls the climate? Not You or I! As I believe in Our Maker, God , it is He who controls this environment. Not Man. What man can control are His or Her emotions, for lack of a better word, and understand that it is God calling us back to Him. Not our man made ideals. I suspect that many will poke holes in My comments. To be expected. Faith is a big word!
You know that adage, "All praise to Allah, but keep your camel tied!"....?
I will not get into a war of words or try to convince. This is My view and It is there to open eyes to another view.
Ignorance is bliss. Good for you to keep that faith but I hope our policy makers know more about science and try to avert the collapse. For my part, I refuse to open my eyes and perhaps see a sadist god that is condemning mankind to perish in such a cruel way.