What is it about the middle of the night? The middle of the night is when lots of folks feel the weight of reality crashing in on them. Last night, I had the 'holy fucking shit, the environment is going straight to hell and here I am in my office reading John Zerzan and acting like what I am doing is at all meaningful.'
I do not deny that my role as educator is meaningful. It's probably my most important contribution. But if money didn't matter. If weren't worried about how to buy cat food today, I would most certainly be standing on the top of a mountain in West Virginia and letting Massey Energy know that they'd have to blow me up first.* The environmental crisis is THAT REAL. It's THAT PRESSING. Seriously intense actions must happen and while mitigation is impossible at this point, adaptation is completely and utterly necessary in the most just and humane way possible. I want to be part of those efforts. I am morally compelled to act and while I feel busy and engaged, it's not *exactly* in the way I want to be.
The juxtaposition of the intact mountain compared to the one behind it strikes me.
From a piece in Orion magazine: (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/166/)
"Near Pine Mountain, Kentucky, you’d see an unfolding series of staggered green hills quickly give way to a wide expanse of gray plateaus pocked with dark craters and huge black ponds filled with a toxic byproduct called coal slurry. The desolation stretches like a long scar up the Kentucky-Virginia line, before eating its way across southern West Virginia."
And for what? Most of what we do with this energy is useless. I'm not a primitivist. But I think when the facts are in your face, the conclusion is clear. We, in high-energy intensive economies, must vastly retool our production methods. Moreover, our priorities as a collective must change. The challenge is: epochal social change is slow but the change we need must happen, like, tomorrow (or yesterday for that matter). Institutions, as Max Weber remarked, take on the qualities of a "steel hard casing", or otherwise translated as the "iron cage." In this, he is referring to the "efficiency" and rational calculation that underscores capitalist societies. As an analytic category, he's not talking about this exact thing. That said, I think the notion is useful here because it's about crystallized logic that, when scrutinized, no longer makes sense. I think that this is a defining characteristic of our social order. We've become slaves to its logic, even at the expense of all humanity. (We must grow the economy, we must employ people in useless jobs to trade their labor for a wage so that they can prove themselves to be worthy of a meal and some health care, and so on...)
The fact that change is slow and what we need is immediate scares the ever loving mother fucking shit out of me. Okay, that's all.
*I do realize that that's naive from a social movements standpoint, but I'm making a point here.
