Now, in the 21st century, we can’t afford this tragic spectacle of war and obedience to the power-seekers, anymore. The future cannot be determined by the despots. The stakes are just too damn high. I mean, they always were; the cost of human suffering is incalculable. But now, it’s incalculable to the power of incalculable.
The moral cost of war has now surpassed every meaningful conceptualization, because we are staring into the face of our collective, global, demise. The End of Everything. Not that it’s likely, say, that a current war will escalate to a thermonuclear catastrophe. I mean, it might; that’s the absurd reality we have all accepted as normal…somehow. But even without such a farcical demise to our species, war, right now, is likely to be our end anyway, because it sure as hell means we aren’t going to be focusing on all those other CRISIS-level problems we were already panicking about, knowing the fate of our civilization likely hangs in the balance of what we do, right now, this generation.
Just think, this decade, THIS decade, was supposed to be humanity’s 11th-hour Crisis Response to climate change and mass species extinction. Facing global ecological collapse, facing the escalating ravages of climate change, and facing the societal destabilization that will come from famine and drought and floods of refugees crossing borders, we were SUPPOSED to be figuring shit out on a global scale like never before. Just to SCRAPE through the next century with our civilization intact.
And now, instead of all that, we’re at fucking war?? Seriously?? This is the time that some power-hungry psycho is going to be allowed to direct the actions of millions of his own citizens to crank a giant War Machine into action, snuffing out the lives of their neighbours so…..they can get more power/wealth/security/blahblahblahblahblah???
……
Remember a couple of years ago when the biggest thing on much of society’s mind was zombies and Game of Thrones and the Avengers’ war against Thanos?
Can you imagine how you’d react if, in each of those stories, just as the Enemy is at the gate and the Heroes are gathering for their courageous final battle, the whole thing just….stops? The heroes decide at the last moment to just say fuck it and go do something else? Like, instead of battling for the Earth, let’s take our IronMan suit and Captain America shield and let’s go fuck something up, take over a country maybe, and make ourselves rich! MWAAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!
Yeah, that movie would suck. Unless it was a comedy maybe. It kind of reminds me of the end of Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail. Although hilarious, the first time I saw it, I remember feeling such a let-down. Like, I was just pissed at the whole movie. Like, seriously? Just, “fuck it”, end of story? ….. It took me a few years, to be honest, and at least another watch-through, before I got the meta-joke and was able to laugh at myself.
But, comedy aside, this shitty story-telling is what we are doing now, except in reality. Teetering on the brink of global destruction, facing a collapsing biosphere of disappearing species, facing a global health pandemic, facing the escalation of weapons between the superpowers and the proliferation of those weapons to more nation-states, facing all the ohmygodterriblecrises that we’re already facing, we’ve decided to start wars, argue with each other about wearing masks and taking medicine, amplify the voices of the divisive, throw Reason and Science and Common Sense to the wind and regress to pointing figures at the Others and hunkering down in our bunkers with our allies.
Fuck trying to save the world and evolve humanity to something better so that the whole ship doesn’t go down. Yeah, fuck that. Let’s fight each other instead. PEW PEW….Ha ha, die motherfucker!!
……
I know we live in an age of dark humour and cynical “cool” and edgy memes and Cards Against Humanity, when even movies about planet-destruction are peppered with catchy one-liners. I know I myself just made a cynical joke a couple of sentences ago. And that’s ok, you know. “Taking the edge off” sometimes through humour, is understandable. Humour can also help to uncover the stark reality sometimes, letting us glimpse a horrible truth kind of sideways instead of staring directly into the abyss and scouring our souls to the core. Maybe the dark humour path is better?
But right now, all joking aside, I want to express a desperate plea, a plea I am applying to myself right now and my own life and the ways I spend my time — everybody, please, now, get involved.
Every mother, father, sister, brother, grandpa, grandma, uncle, aunt, friend, and neighbour, of every Follower who is willing to take up arms in service of the Aggressor, stand up. Use the power of friendship and family, and simply put your foot down. No person in your family is going to be a goddamned Nazi, right? So, no person in your family should be a racist, should be a soldier fighting as the Aggressor, should be flying planes to bomb civilians. I don’t know how you reach your loved ones. But reach them. Reach them with all the love in your hearts, and all the commitment to help them say no, step back, put down the weapons, quit their jobs if that’s what it takes. Stop the War Machine by refusing to follow its orders.
Maybe that’s how “we, the people”, can stop war?
Yes, this is naive and simplistic. Which is perhaps what we need when faced with the childlike simplicity of the truth of annihilation.
Yes, this might be offensive to some. But the truth of annihilation through war is more offensive.
Yes, this will cause immense conflict in families. Which is exactly what should happen. If one of your family members was a serial killer, or a mass rapist, or a child abuser, I sure as hell hope you would stand against them.
War is no different. Tyranny is no different. And the foot-soldiers who enable it have friends, family, community leaders they respect, elders…..somebody.
So call your loved ones. Get everybody you know to call them. Talk to them. Listen to them. Get to the heart of things. You will support them, you will stand with them against “the authorities” (who, after all, are people too, and should also be being stood against by their own loved ones). They are not being asked to go alone. In fact, it’s the opposite. They ARE going alone if they continue to choose violence.
We can’t let another generation of humans-at-war go by. Not only is it unconscionable in the first place, we simply cannot afford it any longer.
Humans have incredible weapons of mass destruction, enough to wipe us all out many times over. And we live on a planet whose biosphere, our life support system, is rapidly falling apart. Those are the facts, and yes, as the saying goes “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
IF we are to survive with a reasonable civilization over the coming century, it’s “all hands on deck”. It’s a global awakening. It’s a mass healing. It’s a reinventing of the economy. It’s the Star Trek revolution, whereby humanity finally comes together and collectively evolves. It’s that, or …..???
Every person, if you want descendants, if you want “the future” to be meaningful, Get Involved. Get involved in the most personal way possible, and stand up with your loved ones, in any way you can, to pressure those you know, from officials to foot soldiers, to choose peace.
If we cannot take that first step, we are lost. But if we can, if we can manage just that much, that basic, nonviolent decency towards each other, like how we teach EVERY SINGLE CHILD to treat their peers on the schoolyard, if we can do JUST THAT, then we can, maybe, save everything. We can live in Paradise.
Or, Hell.