Take both arms, bend them into an air hug, stick
this place in the middle, and squeeze it good. The same ole' question: "what can I — lonely ole' me — do about
all deez big prahlumbs?" Amateur Seer Justin comes up with the goods (especially for those of you, like me, who are members of the "not terribly opposed to a few more decades of enjoyable life" sector of the population): find your fucking imagination (this will not be easy) and re-skill yo'self... cuz our old skills are, if I had to bet my sturdiest shovel on it, fucking bullshit.
I hush, show you a chicken butt, and point you at the
Domestic Injustice chapter of Big Dada:
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| As if to say... |
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| Quinoa on its way |
The ugly truth about things like the war on drugs is that the problem is not the war on drugs, the problem is that our system needs a permanent underclass of easily exploitable labor to function. As things get tighter, the size of this underclass has to expand, which is why unemployment has doubled, and why elites are attacking our social safety so unmercifully. The conditions of uncertainty, despair, insecurity, hunger and powerlessness are not new, they are just being applied at a broader scale and people who did not think those conditions should apply to them by virtue of their education, intelligence, heritage, or whatever else are finding out that this is not true.
Something will have to give, and that something will have to be everyday people finding ways to engage this system not just destructively, as hacker groups like Anonymous or as acts of civil disobedience, but also by finding constructive alternatives. Most people want to live fulfilling lives, most people have deeply held grievances with the status quo, but the question that plagues them, that they find unanswerable, is what they can do about it, or whether anything can even be done. This is a lack of imagination, and an internalization of a dangerous meme about civilization and industrialism; as Margaret Thatcher once said, there is no alternative. There are obviously alternatives, but they are not going to come wrapped in plastic, or in a hand book. They are not going to be handed down from on high like the Ten Commandments. Its going to be the tiny revolution of every mind, and the follow through of every body, to the best of whatever circumstances they are in. Our system has very deliberately deskilled the laboring American work force, and made the good jobs completely technically specified. It is easy to see why people cannot imagine existing outside of this context, there experience and existence is completely embedded within its premises. To begin extracting ourselves from this mess, we have to begin reskilling ourselves. There is no time to lose, every ecosystem on this planet is in terminal decline, scientists are warning that the ocean is already into an extinction phase owing to our industrial growth paradigm. Weather systems are changing dramatically, and as expected, food shortages have already begun appearing where drought and floods are destroying crops all over the world. The only alternatives offered by our system is more of the same, we have to start finding our own.
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| I hit those cucumbers with something hard and then add gin! |
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| These characters are friendly with lentils |
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| Since this picture was taken, I ate these. And then pooped them back into the garden (serious?) |
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| Almost as delicious as money! |
