Another golden age of humanity has begun the long and slow descent into another dark age. Humanity tries as best she can to get us all together in one big momentous push to make something, I cannot know for sure what it is, happen. By looking back 2 thousand years to the last great epoch of humanity, the Greek and Roman empires, I can begin to get an inkling of just what it is that the collective will of humanity is trying to do with each and every one of us that dares rise above the rim of the drunken glass of ego and peer off into a limitless distance. Each and every one of us who with a long and concerned stare realize how utterly small, fragile, insignificant and supremely special our little blue planet is, teeming with life and striving for some upward continuation. As to what that inkling is, it will take me a while to get around to explaining it, as a lot has happened in those 2 thousand years, and the few billion years preceding. Before I go there, I need to get some more basic stuff out of the way first.
Ages come and Ages go. The Great Petroleum Age is coming to a close. For those of us who have not read
darksyde's diary on the scalars of time, or who have not yet realized how
fast light travels, how far it
goes in a year, and
how many light years there are between us and everything else, might scoff and say in an offhand tone "We still have fifty years before we run out"...Fifty years. Think about it. Fifty years is nothing. It took us 250 years to build the petroleum economy, and we are in the last sixth of the existence of this economy, and it takes a billion years to get anywhere in this universe.
For those of you who are over fifty, those born today will live in a completely different world. The laws of physics will require them to live with much less a standard of living than we do today.The end of this age will be sudden and swift, and will take only a generation to turn out.
Your early twenties will not be their early twenties. Your twenties were spent during the 1970's. A period where the US burnt off all of her oil and also burnt off the last sensible economic policies which fed into the grandest and most ludicrous period the human race has ever had the pleasure of fucking up immeasurably, while making damn sure that any and all traces remained of our hubris.
Your thirties were spent during the 80's. My god, what in the hell where you people thinking? My only guess is that modernity had lost all legitimacy, the 60's were long over, the 70's were a nightmare, and the human race just needed to let loose a little. But my god, did that much excess need to be gotten to? And from there we only seem to waste more wantonly, with less regard up to the present day. Those born today will not have a thirties like you did in the 80's.
It seems like we had a brief glimmer of hope in the early nineties. This is the optimism that I cut my teeth on then, and gnash my teeth on today. I see now it was only a fad, a flavor of the week. Soccer Moms don't care about ecology when it becomes inconvenient to transport it around town on your own time table.
So I say a golden age did I? Fifty years left of it? The modern, in all vanity, stands before the mirror of the age and looks at herself. What does she see? She sees an opportunity wasted, a planet drained, and a bleak, unsustainable future. What does this collective ache and shudder of humanity do? Does she take the lump and vow to change, or does she pull out the credit card and take out another loan against the future collateral of her children that have yet to be born - Children that as of yesterday will now surely be born in South Dakota.
All of you, look at yourself, look at how many miles you drove today, add up how many gallons of gas you used, how many BTU's of NG you used, how many KW of electricity you used and realize that every single cent of it was absolutely precious. There was some intent; I swear to god there was some reason humanity made this resource available to us. The question is, did you do the right thing with it? What did you do with that precious resource that left something for the future ages to look back on with respect and awe? What did we do with this last great chance? We watched the Oscars with it?
To say that I am bitter about the way things are turning out is an understatement. I am damn near close to tears of rage. We have COMPLETELY FUCKED IT on this one, and our chance is over. We blew it. Game over man, Game over.
The common wisdom seems to suggest that the Roman Empire was done in because the lead pipes made them all crazy. I would disagree with that and postulate they overextended themselves beyond thier ability to wisely use thier resources to maintain hold of a such a large geographical region. I often wonder if they simply exhausted their resources, and could not keep the lies going on long enough to maintain thier empire. We look back at some mesoamerican Indians, and how they starved to death as they knowingly reached thier zenith of food production, yet did nothing to find balance. History is full of these one and two act plays, where a society shoots itself in the foot in the effort to maintain the status quo. My assumptions as a child were that this age was different, this was the one where we were gonna make the difference, and finally fulfill that golden dream of an eternal epoch. I dreamed that we all were building an eternal golden age in which we designed a society and a culture worth keeping alive. Instead I got Survivor and American Idol.
I am, as my British coworker says, rightly pissed.
Ages come, Ages go. We have all gotten to participate in the greatest age of the human race, and do you feel proud? Do you feel special? Do you treasure and cherish every moment of your waking life? You do realize how utterly GODDAMN SPECIAL this experience has been? Or do you instead fret your days away complaining about the traffic, and how fucked up everything is, and how the goddamned republicans are fucking it all up? Let me tell you all something: It is way more than just the Republicans that are fucking it all up for everyone. It is everyone that is fucking it up for everyone. There is very little that any of us can do at this point to stop The Golden Engine from seizing. Oil is running out, and nothing will replace it. Our chance was given to us and we ate Pop Tarts and watched Ren And Stempy instead.
Instead of spending the next fifteen or twenty years of your life bitching and moaning about how fucked up everything is, please do the future Ages a favor and write about how wonderful and beautiful everything was. Write about the wondrousness of the internet, the thrill of driving ninety miles per hour down a smooth American highway. Please, record each and every one of these cherished moments of your life, because billions coming after you will never ever get to experience how wonderful these things are.
Tomorrow when you get up and the milk is cold, the shower hot, and the drive to work smooth and the radio loud, please remember how special your circumstance is. Also remember how little you had to work to attain it. You did not have to dig a ditch, or slaughter a tribe, or siege a city, or be born a prince to enjoy a life of leisure. All you had to do was be born and show up to work on time.
That will never happen again past fifty years from now, and I do hope that all of you are capable of realizing what an amazing and wonderful time you were born into.