3 am Monday morning...
We went to the Portrush airshow. Yesterday. I think it was ok the day before but it was miserable yesterday. The rain barely stopped and there is a horrible tackiness to the feel of these events. Military and paramilitary types were all over the place. Men wearing uniforms and carrying guns gave me a heebee jeebies.
I can admire the engineering and skill that goes into the planes, but i think a bird for instance is so much more elegant, natural and FREE - and doesn't make a big deal about it and is SAFE. And if they put the money and time they spent on airplanes or even this airshow, we'd be better off by a whole lot.
I can't really read or watch the news anymore. I do so because i must, but the whole premise of news, of people's assumptions and reporting is so out of synch with where i am coming from these days that it's a little better than gobeldygook to me. I understand how it all works, but it's like looking and reading a world that has passed. Like i'm standing on the otherside of the glass and watching it all take place.
A journalist i met recently said he didn't see the world of Tesco and big business changing. How can it not change i said? The premise of their existence is unsustainable. People are going to have to adapt to the new world - a kinder, gentler, more reasonable world - or they will be forced to adapt and it will come as a shock to them.
But people love their cheap food...they eat meat everyday, they're used to eat? What meat, i said. You mean the crap they sell in supermarkets? Human beings are not supposed to eat meat everyday. Even in my own lifetime meat was a treat. You ate it during weekends. Getting a single chicken was a real occassion, and now we expect a chicken a day. And the meat - it tastes awful. Much better to buy a cheap cut of good, ethcially, locally and environmentally friendly meat infrequently than have meat every single day. It would do everyone a world of good.
And so it went on. But it astonishes me that people can seriously still think that the 20th century's way of life is a sustainable one.
The statistic that really work me up - and statistics so seldom do- was it takes between 3 and nine planet earths to sustain the Western development model. I heard this over ten years ago and that was my wake up call. Everything that i understood intuitively suddenly made sense. The excesses of consumption and the wars it generated suddenly made sense. It wasn't about who was right and who was wrong any longer, but a straightforward slugfest of defending the indefensible.
The other stat is - the services that nature provides is worth more than the world's economic activity - that's the water from the sky, the pure air that rainforests generate, the sunlight that's turned into energy, the bees pollinating our crops....
Based on these two stats alone i ask you, how can we sustain any sense of coherence in 99 per cent of the debates that go on? We have created for ourselves this Alice in Wonderland world where it only makes sense to us and us alone - the rest of life - which has been so severely impacted by our insanity has been compromised beyond breaking point.
But there is always the balance. It's like we are the first violin and as we begin playing more and more insanely, the dancers begin to go wilder, get more and more unmanageable. We are exhausting whatever we have - and we finally drop dead. And we leave behind chaos in our wake. But life will repair itself again. We just won't be around to see it. Perhaps wealth will shield us then from the worst excesses of our ravages, but it will be a Phyrric victory for the few that remain.
In fact, when this happens, no one wins. No one wins.
And with that knowledge, i'll just have to keep on going. Keep on doing what i need to do - because what else can i do? I cannot simply give up - lie down and join in. There is only so much that lying and diplomacy will let anyone do.
I can admire the engineering and skill that goes into the planes, but i think a bird for instance is so much more elegant, natural and FREE - and doesn't make a big deal about it and is SAFE. And if they put the money and time they spent on airplanes or even this airshow, we'd be better off by a whole lot.
I can't really read or watch the news anymore. I do so because i must, but the whole premise of news, of people's assumptions and reporting is so out of synch with where i am coming from these days that it's a little better than gobeldygook to me. I understand how it all works, but it's like looking and reading a world that has passed. Like i'm standing on the otherside of the glass and watching it all take place.
A journalist i met recently said he didn't see the world of Tesco and big business changing. How can it not change i said? The premise of their existence is unsustainable. People are going to have to adapt to the new world - a kinder, gentler, more reasonable world - or they will be forced to adapt and it will come as a shock to them.
But people love their cheap food...they eat meat everyday, they're used to eat? What meat, i said. You mean the crap they sell in supermarkets? Human beings are not supposed to eat meat everyday. Even in my own lifetime meat was a treat. You ate it during weekends. Getting a single chicken was a real occassion, and now we expect a chicken a day. And the meat - it tastes awful. Much better to buy a cheap cut of good, ethcially, locally and environmentally friendly meat infrequently than have meat every single day. It would do everyone a world of good.
And so it went on. But it astonishes me that people can seriously still think that the 20th century's way of life is a sustainable one.
The statistic that really work me up - and statistics so seldom do- was it takes between 3 and nine planet earths to sustain the Western development model. I heard this over ten years ago and that was my wake up call. Everything that i understood intuitively suddenly made sense. The excesses of consumption and the wars it generated suddenly made sense. It wasn't about who was right and who was wrong any longer, but a straightforward slugfest of defending the indefensible.
The other stat is - the services that nature provides is worth more than the world's economic activity - that's the water from the sky, the pure air that rainforests generate, the sunlight that's turned into energy, the bees pollinating our crops....
Based on these two stats alone i ask you, how can we sustain any sense of coherence in 99 per cent of the debates that go on? We have created for ourselves this Alice in Wonderland world where it only makes sense to us and us alone - the rest of life - which has been so severely impacted by our insanity has been compromised beyond breaking point.
But there is always the balance. It's like we are the first violin and as we begin playing more and more insanely, the dancers begin to go wilder, get more and more unmanageable. We are exhausting whatever we have - and we finally drop dead. And we leave behind chaos in our wake. But life will repair itself again. We just won't be around to see it. Perhaps wealth will shield us then from the worst excesses of our ravages, but it will be a Phyrric victory for the few that remain.
In fact, when this happens, no one wins. No one wins.
And with that knowledge, i'll just have to keep on going. Keep on doing what i need to do - because what else can i do? I cannot simply give up - lie down and join in. There is only so much that lying and diplomacy will let anyone do.
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