- A few moments ago I posted on my site the MSNBC version
of "The Coming Consumer Crunch" which forecasts severe and painful
belt- tightening for American families in 2008. Then when I checked my
inbox, a Truthout bulletin listing Kelpie Wilson's latest article "Give
Thanks For Oil" appeared. One paragraph leapt out at me:
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- Why should we give thanks that the future holds no cheap
oil? There are several reasons, but the first is that cheap oil has fueled
a 50- year-long party in the industrialized West that has left us with
an unsustainable economy that is wrecking the planet. The recent awareness
of global warming is beginning to put a damper on our out- of-control binge,
but not fast enough to slow the heating of the planet. Rising oil prices
will force a cutback in consumption. Rising oil prices will also chill
the fantasy of endless growth and force us to confront the reality of
planetary limits.
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- I have no crystal ball, nor do I claim to have well-developed
psychic powers, but I'd be willing to bet almost anything that next Thanksgiving
season will be dramatically different from this one. A dark curtain of
despair has descended, along with $100 oil, on Wall Street, and the amount
of debt that the American working and middle classes are trying to juggle
is, as Stan Goff so eloquently stated in his article on my site, "Middle
Class Angst", nothing less than "pre- volcanic."
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- Cheap oil will allow us to travel "over the river
and through the woods" to grandmother's or someone else's house,
or we may prepare our food orgy at home using gas or electric ranges,
savoring the turkey and trimmings made possible by low-cost hydrocarbon
energy. While the feast will be more expensive than it was last year,
its cost may pale by comparison with the price of next year's gastronomical
adventure-if indeed we can afford one. The after-dinner experience is
likely to consist of television or movie viewing at home or another car
trek to the local cine-plex for a new Thanksgiving Day release or two.
A walk or bike ride requiring no use of hydrocarbon energy would be ideal,
but it will take much more energy depletion than we are now experiencing
to make that option viable for most Americans.
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- On Friday, millions of shoppers will descend on malls
and box stores where the bells and whistles of credit card transactions
will reverberate every few seconds, non-stop for perhaps seventy-two
hours. Those bills will come due for those shoppers in a post-holiday
hangover of dollar plummeting hysteria, monumental levels of debt, foreclosure,
bankruptcy, unemployment, energy depletion, skyrocketing gas and food
prices, illnesses treated without health insurance coverage-or just not
treated, unprecedented levels of homelessness, and by all indications,
within a few months into 2008, America will be well on the road to a re-run
of 1929-or something inconceivably worse.
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- None of this, of course, includes the likelihood of an
attack on or invasion by the U.S. of yet another country in one of its
serial oil- addiction binges, nor does it include another terrorist attack
orchestrated by the U.S. government, nor does it include a natural disaster
or two where Blackwater troops storm into the homes of innocent American
citizens followed by another fraudulent election engineered by the Democratic
Party or the cancellation of an election entirely.
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- As I continue to write and talk about collapse, the "tell-me-what-to-
do" supplications escalate, and when I speak my truth in reply, my
words are met with responses only slightly less hostile than eye- rolling.
Americans not only refuse to accept the limits the earth is pounding them
with, but demand that their response to those limits be effortless, cheery,
hopeful, and above all not require them to change anything about their
lives. Any suggestion that introspection, dramatically altering one's
lifestyle, and pondering one's values, priorities, and life's work are
as important, if not more important, than voting for Green Party candidates,
consuming less energy, or purchasing environmentally-friendly products
is met with blank stares or my favorite response, the accusation of "fear-mongering."
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- Two hundred species or more of life forms died today
on planet earth, and two hundred will die tomorrow, but I'm not supposed
to remind you because that wouldn't be "hopeful"?
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- Today, Gerald Celente, Director of Trends Research Institute
stated that "We are going to see economic times the likes of which
no living person has seen", as he forecasted a "Panic of 2008."
Celente continued to say very non-hopeful things like:
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- "I would not be surprised if giants tumble to their
deaths" and "The 'Panic of 2008' will lead to a lower U.S. standard
of living."
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- "A result will be a drop in holiday spending a year
from now, followed by a permanent end of the 'retail holiday frenzy' that
has driven the U.S. economy since the 1940s," says Celente.
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- On this Thanksgiving Day I will shudder as I do every
day for those clueless individuals and families who in a few years or
even months may be daily visiting food banks which are already experiencing
shortages. I will feel deep grief as I contemplate the teeming masses
of innocent humans who will die because of Peak Oil, climate change,
global pandemics, and species die-off and who because they didn't want
to have their bubble of hope burst, called people like me a fear- monger
while continuing their suicidal courses of action. I will be painfully
aware that the food I eat for Thanksgiving dinner is on my plate because
of cheap oil, and as I settle into a comfortable seat at the movie theater,
I will be acutely aware that my two-and-a-half hour escape from reality
is only possible because of the natural gas that powers the digital video
and sound systems that dazzle me with what is unquestionably my favorite
art form of all. What will I do in a post-collapse world when I don't
have it? Make my own art perhaps?
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- Yet another part of me-a different part of my physiology
experiences a bit of relief-perhaps a release and expansion in my cells
as I realize that empire is reaching the end of the line, that the slogan
my friend Matt Savinar has at the top of his website is not only true,
but unfolding faster than I or anyone else could have imagined:
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- Deal with reality, or reality will deal with you.
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- So on this Thanksgiving week as stomachs are stuffed
and the cacophony of credit card transactions deafens and defies the reality
of global economic meltdown, I will celebrate that we are now closer
to the total collapse of civilization than we have ever been, and that
for all the rampant suffering it will evoke around the world, the soul-murdering,
mind-numbing, body obliterating culture of empire is terminally ill and
on life-support. I know not how many, if any of us, will survive its collapse,
but I do know that until it has fallen fatally silent, no life form on
earth will ever experience freedom or fullness of life.
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- These are the "good ole days" to be remembered
when we have almost nothing that we now take for granted or feel entitled
to. And at the same time, these are dark new days that begin and end amid
the sea change occurring all around us. That darkness signals and end
to holidays as we have known them. This year, like all those other years,
we will lament that despite our best intentions, we ate too much. In what
year will we remember Thanksgivings of the past and weep and salivate
as we search for whatever morsels of food we can find? I am convinced
that absolutely nothing will awaken Americans except starvation, but by
the time they have arrived at that horrifying circumstance, it will be
far too late.
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- In these dark new days when readers email me with questions
or arguments about aliens or engage in nit-picking philosophical posturing,
I refuse to respond with anything other than the following questions:
What will you do when you have no food to eat and no water to drink? How
will you obtain healthcare when it no longer exists? What have you done
to liberate yourself from debt? Where are you living and how sustainable
is it? If you need to relocate, why haven't you done so? I then refer
them to the Survival Acres banner ad at the top of my site and the Preparedness
Store at Matt Savinar's site. In other words, does it really matter what
I or anyone else thinks about aliens or what method of intellectual masturbation
we prefer when we have no food or water?
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- These are the good ole days, my friend, and these are
also the dark new days. Happy Thanksgiving; savor every bite.
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- http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/224/
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