Tuesday, June 27: Wake up and lose world war III

WORLD WAR THREE
While the idiots of the power people push away at hating and belittling and occasionally getting the suckers to go kill other common folk, there is another war that is being waged. And won. Won by humanity. Sound good?

Unfortunately the war is against nature, and so people winning by destroying the atmosphere and the soil and the trees and the forests and the land is not such a good idea. The world is on automatic and it’s set up to please what? Automobiles, which makes a fit, but a sad and awful fit.

So called Western “civilization” is about roads and gasoline and cars and orienting our whole lives around getting far places (far in terms of a walk or a horse ride) quickly and with no apparent cost. Need a road? It just happens to be paid for. Need gasoline? Even though it seems expensive, about half the cost or more is absorbed by the government. The war costs, the cancer costs, the pollution costs, the asthma costs, the heart disease costs, the ruined soil costs, the nervous lives costs: all hidden in the three dollars a gallon, which if it were eight or seven, might show us what we are really paying and encourage people to pull back a little of their daily war on the planet.

What can we do, what can we do?

Use air conditioning less.

Turn off lights in rooms we leave.

Hang up clothes outside or around the house inside.

Drive less, drive less, drive less. See if we can go two or three days a week without getting in an automobile. That would be a huge shock to our robot lives. Oh, well. The alternative is an Earth unlivable for our grandchildren. Do we care? Most don’t, and the trick is to not get bummed or depressed, and to happily use less.

Plant a garden. Grow food indoors. Stop buying stuff in packages, we don’t need the packages, and the stuff that comes in packages is usually unhealthy. Eat a potato not a potato chip and grow the potato. Eat a strawberry or dry a cherry, and skip the jelly. Sugar robs vitamin C and makes people jumpy and stupid. Really, they’ve given intelligence tests after big sugared breakfasts. The scores go way down.

This means waking up to ways of getting around that are slower and less automatic, eating in ways that are slower and less automatic. Walk more. It's wonderful for the nervous system and the soul. Cultivate the soul and the soil. Make change not war.

World War III is in full swing: sleeping humanity against a wonderful earth. Are we willing to wake up and switch sides?