THE WORLD AS IT IS, based on facts, is a pretty scary place. A way to help wrap your brain around that one, so it’s less encumbered by one’s own relative biases, or comforts and discomforts, is to imagine yourself on a spaceship from a civilization with a similar ethnography as the one Gene Roddenberry purposely infused Star Trek with. The ship approaches the Earth of today, and accurately analyzes its entire mechanics on all scales, as well as highly probable outcomes in the near future relative to geologic history. From the ship you analyze everything, from the molecular... to oceans suffocating from floating plastic continents... stockpiled WMDs that can kill most of the planet’s life in a few hours... right down to a police shooting in America, a Trump who is deified by so many... to the collapse of a stable biosphere, wars, tortures, extreme mass brutality everywhere, and mostly sleeping population groups enjoying a very short term bit of pseudo-democratic entertainment.
Would you want to take a one-way plunge down to Earth?
All this shit in the world has been repeating itself in history, in ever greater scales as ever more habitats grow populated by the “cutting edge” of our species. This world is a tough one even for me to warp my brain around. The planet is challenged by so many threat-vectors, and on so many scales. Local stuff of ancient and classical histories, through the Middle Ages and closer to our times, have now grown exponentially onto the global platform... the platform of the biosphere.
We have an oligarchy that essentially is only concerned with short-term gathering of wealth and power. It interacts with whatever human-forces lets Climate Change go on the backburner, and whatever forces that will consume rather than preserve, and that includes weapons to whomever is the latest, one-minute enemy of our enemy. It also interacts with religions that help suppress critical thinking at voting time, and that includes public educations that fast track kids into willing consumers and players.
And in all that, for we surely do support both Israel and the near-caliphates on the Arabian Peninsula, nationalistic movements are springing up into political power all over Europe in response to economic pressures and the xenophobia-Racism that seeks the common suspect, any enemy except oneself . Emotional, irrational empathies and antipathies are enculturated into the brains of children in a group-specific manner. KKK good old boys hanging parties sure is an example of this.
Islamic State, in an odd axis with Saudi Arabia, is the elephant in the room. They are like Jehovah’s Witnesses on crack cocaine, of a type that ferments for a while until the insanity becomes so violent that its sword slices off the heads of everyone on the planet who won’t submit to the poison.
Thankfully, Canada just kicked 3-term Harper out. Which means that NATO may behave a bit more rational now.
But mass media journalism is now nothing more than entertainment... but taken so seriously by too many people.
With all these vectors of tough stuff hitting us below the belt, what do we do? Where do we focus our intelligence so that the result is the necessary adaptation to this immensely complicated anthropogenic pressure that is forcing us to either survive and thrive, or to explosively and then slowly go extinct. Extinction of our species would likely not occur overnight. It would happen in ever more painful globally spreading scenarios of death and destruction. Are we seeing that now? One of the things to remember about an ecosystem’s collapse is that some of the species will spike in population in spite of (actually, to an extent, because of) what could be interpreted as deep and destabilizing trauma attacking that population group from all sides. And that has a lot to do with exponential growth within a closed system... that system being our biosphere.
How will a rational civilization evolve out of that?
And for me personally, there is an additional edge. I am a product of the country which more people in the world hold up on a pedestal for social solutions for a world in crisis than any other: Denmark. Bernie Sanders often states that. But you know what? In the middle of the most civilized nations of the world (Denmark, Canada and the USA) where I lived through all the stages of my childhood brain development, I was intelligently ritually tortured by ALL my primary caretakers, with the name of a religion and its imaginary god as justification for expressing sadistic conformity upon children.
So my words here should be taken in the same way as coal miners from another century would respond to seeing some dead canaries in their underground world. And I see my sister’s suicide also in that light. She died as an expression of the toxicity in her Danish environment, both current and past. She died due to the toxicity of the religions still extant in Denmark that cultivate such conditioning in people who will respond with antipathy to the suffering of someone who’s not quite in the same group. Local politics denied her appropriate help, and through her childhood on two continents, never once did anyone (including whatever most would consider *good* in religions) intervene with a religion’s perverse authority over the bodies and minds of children. And Agnes took her life right after seeking the comforts and advice of the Danish Catholic priest, who then occupied a piece of the land Agnes bought and died on. Dietrich Timmermann, with whom I’ve had dozens of intense conversations on the matter, died in 2013, but I hold the Catholic Church and many other religions egregiously responsible for her lifetime of suffering and premature death. Her life is only a microcosmic view of religion’s toxic impact upon children and adults.
So, if you were on board the USS Enterprise, with Picard at the helm absorbing the analysis of planet Earth, would you ask him for a one-way ticket down to the planet here?
This is my last photo of my beautiful sister, Agnes, our collective and innocent canary, warning of a deadly toxicity in our environment. She commuted to her work as a teacher in Copenhagen, from the farm she'd bought with two ex-nuns. Pay attention to her death, world.
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Agnes Lorentzen
1954 (Roskilde) - 1995 (Haraldsted)
Originally a posted from a Facebook NOTE; a small part written in 2011, and fully in 2015, exactly on the 20th commemoration of her suicide. What is expressed above, which is far bigger than her and the author, is more relevant to today's world than ever. Below are some of the comments from its Facebook posting.
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