I often expect people to pay attention to things that might affect them--like climate change. If the scientific consensus is that climate change is real shouldn't we at least consider the possibilities involved and accept that maybe, beings scientists and all, they might be on the right track? If they are then what about our children and grandchildren--what kind of world are we leaving them? Do we even care? I will actually attempt to answer that question.
The answer is that we don't care about the collective "we" very much if at all--but we do care about our own individual progeny but only as separate beings unconnected from the collective. To be precise, we care about their schooling, their relationships, their meals, their future jobs, their general happiness but I know very, very few people that worry about their children as possible victims of climate change or nuclear war or even financial collapse as a result of, say, and overwhelmingly large national debt. Any of these public or larger scale problems are almost completely ignored by parents and act as if those problems don't exist. Of course, people know these problems exist but they feel they are powerless to do anything about these things but even more importantly, they don't feel they have the ability to understand what is going on because it all seems so complex.
I believe the following: most parents don't care enough to make efforts to deal with or understand what is going on around them. As much danger as war or climate change may be the lack of confidence in being able to deal with these "big" issues is a deeper tragedy. We seem to lack the education and culture that would help us understand the world around us. To put it another way, our culture from childhood to old age is based on promoting fantasies rather than knowledge, science, reason, and information about how our bodies and psyches actually function. We are largely ignorant of almost everything truly important unless we are professionals in the field of medicine or psychology--and all this despite the fact we are living in a time of maximum information where incredible amounts of information and data are available yet seem distant because so few people are interested in presenting the information and their implications of that information to the masses and without that close connection to this material people feel adrift in paradoxes and puzzles.
At some point a culture needs to define itself and start asking questions like what do we want? The answer is usually money but is that enough. Or the answer is "freedom" which, as we are moving solidly into a police state, is a joke. We have freedom, if we have money, to buy goods and services but why? Is life about just having a few beers and watching sports? Is life about just "hanging out"? Is that as deep as we want to go? Of course, so far, the answer seems to be yes but the result of all this is that we are rapidly becoming a highly belligerent and dysfunctional country with a rising death rate, an explosion of drug addictions (legal and illegal) and increases in poverty despite an expanding job market and money flowing only to the top earners. We have to realize that this leads to a new sort of feudalism. If the trends continue as they have since the late 1970s we will have a few oligarchs with retinues and servants a "middle class" of professionals like doctors, lawyers, mind-control experts (used to be called Madison Avenue), fashionistas, celebrities and Hollywood riff-raff, bought politicians, accountants and so on and the rest will be drug dealers, prostitutes, bartenders, wait staff, nurses, retail staff, all who are surviving day to day by whatever hustle they can find servicing the privileged with ever increasing desperation. Do we really want a future like that? We need to decide. In fact, even that arrangements sounds good compared to the climate going into a positive feedback loop or world-politics becoming even more dominated by war and even nuclear war.
So--do we really care about our children? Or are they merely markers on a board for our egos? I say, as a culture, we are acting both publicly and privately as if nothing else matters than our ego, our status, our ability to live as hedonistic a lifestyle as possible and indulging in endless fantasies the further remove us from our families, our society, and our Mother Earth. Each of us has to decide the direction they want to go in--and not deciding is a decision to go along to get along. Once we were called the land of the free and home of the brave and we have been heading, for decades, in precisely the opposite direction. We have become decadent and corrupt in almost every sphere and that's why we hungrily yearn for whatever addiction will numb that awareness including the love of militant ignorance that allows the authorities to load us up with more bullshit than Herr Goebbels ever dreamt of.
The answer is that we don't care about the collective "we" very much if at all--but we do care about our own individual progeny but only as separate beings unconnected from the collective. To be precise, we care about their schooling, their relationships, their meals, their future jobs, their general happiness but I know very, very few people that worry about their children as possible victims of climate change or nuclear war or even financial collapse as a result of, say, and overwhelmingly large national debt. Any of these public or larger scale problems are almost completely ignored by parents and act as if those problems don't exist. Of course, people know these problems exist but they feel they are powerless to do anything about these things but even more importantly, they don't feel they have the ability to understand what is going on because it all seems so complex.
I believe the following: most parents don't care enough to make efforts to deal with or understand what is going on around them. As much danger as war or climate change may be the lack of confidence in being able to deal with these "big" issues is a deeper tragedy. We seem to lack the education and culture that would help us understand the world around us. To put it another way, our culture from childhood to old age is based on promoting fantasies rather than knowledge, science, reason, and information about how our bodies and psyches actually function. We are largely ignorant of almost everything truly important unless we are professionals in the field of medicine or psychology--and all this despite the fact we are living in a time of maximum information where incredible amounts of information and data are available yet seem distant because so few people are interested in presenting the information and their implications of that information to the masses and without that close connection to this material people feel adrift in paradoxes and puzzles.
At some point a culture needs to define itself and start asking questions like what do we want? The answer is usually money but is that enough. Or the answer is "freedom" which, as we are moving solidly into a police state, is a joke. We have freedom, if we have money, to buy goods and services but why? Is life about just having a few beers and watching sports? Is life about just "hanging out"? Is that as deep as we want to go? Of course, so far, the answer seems to be yes but the result of all this is that we are rapidly becoming a highly belligerent and dysfunctional country with a rising death rate, an explosion of drug addictions (legal and illegal) and increases in poverty despite an expanding job market and money flowing only to the top earners. We have to realize that this leads to a new sort of feudalism. If the trends continue as they have since the late 1970s we will have a few oligarchs with retinues and servants a "middle class" of professionals like doctors, lawyers, mind-control experts (used to be called Madison Avenue), fashionistas, celebrities and Hollywood riff-raff, bought politicians, accountants and so on and the rest will be drug dealers, prostitutes, bartenders, wait staff, nurses, retail staff, all who are surviving day to day by whatever hustle they can find servicing the privileged with ever increasing desperation. Do we really want a future like that? We need to decide. In fact, even that arrangements sounds good compared to the climate going into a positive feedback loop or world-politics becoming even more dominated by war and even nuclear war.
So--do we really care about our children? Or are they merely markers on a board for our egos? I say, as a culture, we are acting both publicly and privately as if nothing else matters than our ego, our status, our ability to live as hedonistic a lifestyle as possible and indulging in endless fantasies the further remove us from our families, our society, and our Mother Earth. Each of us has to decide the direction they want to go in--and not deciding is a decision to go along to get along. Once we were called the land of the free and home of the brave and we have been heading, for decades, in precisely the opposite direction. We have become decadent and corrupt in almost every sphere and that's why we hungrily yearn for whatever addiction will numb that awareness including the love of militant ignorance that allows the authorities to load us up with more bullshit than Herr Goebbels ever dreamt of.
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