It was obvious that about now there would be too many people and the fossil fuel rackets would be ending. But I don't think anyone expected that we would be locked in the same dynamics that caused war when I was coming to consciousness in the Forties.
"The Holodomor was a famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine or the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33." (Wikipedia) I don't think anyone understood that the unforeseen consequences would be the peopling of the Canadian prairie with very tough survivors and the remainder who found a way to stay there would fight to the death to keep Ukraine independent.
I don't think anyone thought much about how similar the wheat prairie and the corn midwest are to the Russian Ukraine. Thinkers were preoccupied by the Irish potato famine which also sent a diaspora to North America which was the origin of potatoes in the first place.
Today's tensions are different in some ways. Instead of tanks we have predator drones so that rich nations can kill at will without dying themselves. Even the poor nations can now mail-order small drones that can carry weapons. The Internet and near-universal access to computers means everyone with a smart phone can watch. (Easy to get those gizmos if you just steal instead of buying -- and that also applies to a way to recharge batteries.)
The contraceptive pill makes a huge difference but it turns out that the most effective contraceptive is economic hardship. We've been bombarded with sexual stimulation so much that behavior is more and more extreme, less and less governed, so that recently a survey indicated that most people think kinks and violence are a natural part of "vanilla" sex. Also, to support a family takes two people, neither of which has the energy or time to "raise" kids, much less wonder what heights they are "raising" them to. Without morality, which we don't like because it means nasty stigma for the immoral, blackmail doesn't work very well anymore. So -- he's done time, so he doesn't bother to marry his women, so he's gay. Who cares?
The stigma restraints to some behaviors like taking sexual advantage of children, or swindling to get money, or lying to escape consequences, are weakened to such an extent that only the old-fashioned are vulnerable to blackmail. Very rich people only shrug if the media reveals they are pedophiles, in league with criminals, faking their educations. The rest of us do, too, because we want to be like rich people. Our favorite means is living on credit. Education is so expensive that professionals must be in debt for their whole lives. (And they're obligated to dress well.) People know to not get attached to honor or allegiance. it can provoke attacks, destruction. Evade hostages by not caring about anyone else.
The consequences we can see coming are unbelievable: an extinction of much of life, the sixth one we know about but we weren't part of the others. A climate so different that we may not be able to live in it, though we created it with a zillion little needs and desires. The loss of major ecologically-underlain religions that responded to a world we thought was real, so similarly to the lives we now see are temporary. The losses call into question the very reality of our food, shelter, and water, esp. water.
Science has been our alternative to religion and even in some cases governance, but now that it is a story of limits, esp. human thought limits, we don't like it so much anymore. Nations and their borders have been a source of control and identity, but now they are so often breached or irrelevant that people escape them and leave behind their sense of who they are. Money dominates everything, and yet money is not anything -- it's a pretence, a convention. When they say money is moved to some secret place, nothing really moves. No gold bars, no pieces of silver -- just records. If the records are destroyed, the money goes with the lists and sums, no longer attributed to anyone.
The tension between the group -- the small one that begins with attachment between two people or maybe a small cluster and grows until it is a continental movement -- and the individual whose interests might be served or smashed by the group is not greater or lesser than it used to be, but rather more confused. What justifies terrorism that destroys innocents? What justifies the destruction necessary for finding and killing the terrorist leaders, individuals who claim to stand for their community?
What use are the careful studies of how things work if we don't teach the little kids what they need to know to be effective citizens? If Sesame Street is teaching them to count and be happy, who is teaching them about voting and the Constitution? What use is the Rule of Law if people see that it is easily redefined, evaded and ignored, as kids learn in school when their parents can intimidate superintendents?
If everyone is writing and memorializing their own lives, but no one is reading because it's not about them, what are books for? Print exists under glass because it is ephemeral. A lot of it is about misery anyway.
All this stuff is true. The best reaction is to laugh. All this effort and change, but here we are back again with Putin trying to be Stalin so he can starve the Ukrainians into submission while the real action is quietly on the prairies where coastal people never go, just fly over. The infrastructure was never really completed -- the potholes abide, the electricity has blips, fires are fought by neighbors, and people went to school together. College is for learning to fix diesel engines so the trucks keep rolling.
We know that to build a good fire you need as much air as wood. We know you gotta find a way to survive until the sun comes out and the wind dies down. If you can get to the local café, there will be coffee and neighbors. Don't make fun of small towns.
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